There's plenty of CRM applications
.
- Contact Managers
Contact Managers are primarily contact (people) focused. They record the name, company and contact details for each person, together with (usually) some free text notes and a reminder flag for call backs. You can normally export the records for mail- merging. They don't include opportunity management or sales forecasting and have a simple flat file structure. They can be based on single user desktop applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, or multi-user, such as ACT.
- Opportunity Management
As the name implies, these focus on recording sales opportunities (leads and deals), normally with sales forecasting as a reporting option. They have a more sophisticated/complex data structure, with Accounts (companies and organisations) who have multiple Contacts (people) in them, against which you can record multiple Tasks (things to do), Activities (things that have taken place, such as meetings and calls) and Opportunities (possible sales).
They need to come with more sophisticated reporting tools, import and export facilities and a security system.
- Sales Force Automation
This is a name for a suite of software that is given to sales people, normally field (out of office) sales people, to help them sell. It includes either contact management or opportunity management, together sometimes with email and calendaring (diary sharing). They can run on laptops or handheld PDAs, and can be of quite specialist design, such as systems for pharmaceutical sales representatives or for the collection of electricity or gas meter readings. One challenge faced by these systems is synchronisation - updating the laptop/PDA with data from head office and vice versa. Traditionally this has been done using dial-up modems at the end of the day, but with the widespread availability of high speed Internet connectivity, whether from broadband at home, wi-fi in a coffee shop or through the cellular telephone network, synchronisation has been replaced with systems that are permanently connected to the head office system, removing many of the support headaches that always accompany replicating remote databases.
In the past all software was loaded onto the company's servers, desktops and laptops, as either desktop systems or client/server systems. The past few years has also seen the growth in popularity of hosted applications.
Desktop applications run and have all their data on an individual's workstation (their laptop, PC, Mac, telephone or PDA). They don't share that data will other users in the organisation, and they don't have access to other users' data.
Examples are Microsoft Outlook, or a spreadsheet sitting on the workstation.
Desktop applications are loved by sales people as they are easy to use and highly personal, but the company has no sight or ownership of the data.
Client/Server applications have a client application running on the workstation and a server application running on a shared fileserver that hosts the data. The server is a computer owned, managed by and located at the user's office. The client talks to the server over a network. Some processing takes place on the client, some on the server, and both client and server applications need to be installed and maintained. If you have multiple offices then those offices either need to be connected with a high speed WAN (Wide Area Network), or multiple systems are installed which then have to be synchronised. Most traditional CRM systems function this way.
Client/Server applications allow everybody in the organisation to share the data, but can be complicated and time consuming to install and maintain, especially if you want multiple offices to share the data or remote access (VPN is a possible .solution).
