Big CRM on a Small Budget

On this blog we’ve talked about a number of great tips to get the most out of customer management, from the importance of managing customer relationships in a recession to adding personalized value with CRM.  But what many of our posts assume, is that you’re already working with some sort of CRM suite (hopefully, Concursive).

Today’s post is targeted more towards those who haven’t yet

One of the biggest misconceptions about CRM suites is that you need either a big company, or big budget to make best use of customer relationship software.  This is entirely not the case.

InsideCRM had a post a few weeks back on Marketing on a Startup Budget, containing 101 websites to help cost effectively promote a small company.  Seeing as how this article is hosted on the InsideCRM blog, I think it goes without saying that one of the obviously essential tips for marketing on a small budget is good CRM software.

With a small company you might not have as many contacts or sales leads to manage but this only means it is more important than ever to properly manage each one. Keeping track of sales and marketing promotions on any budget is a consuming process, smaller budgets are just as critical to manage as large ones.

Further, with the rise in popularity of open source software, there is now a plethora of affordable CRM solutions that never existed before.  Through a large development community constantly contributing to the code, software can be built much more efficiently and cost-effectively.  This savings is passed on to the customer, who also doesn’t have to pay a premium expensive proprietary software licenses.  Open source CRM delivers the functionality of much more expensive solutions at a much lower total cost of ownership that smaller businesses can afford.

Ideally, I see good CRM software as a tool to help you get and grow customers.  Growing your user base is a significant task for all companies, but for a startup, or small-growing company, it’s more important than ever.

Michael Harvey

Happy Birthday Open Solutions Alliance! Let's all celebrate....

The Open Solutions Alliance recently celebrated its first anniversary. It's been a busy year and as a group we've seen ongoing market traction and expansion.

With every year that passes, the market for open source evolves and matures. There are many market drivers (too many for me to list in a single blog post), but one of the most basic is the benefits that users of all kinds gain from open solutions. Open technology and an open philosophy combined with the cost-effectiveness and simplicity required by SMEs and the collaboration functionality to meet the needs of the enterprise user, mean that open source solutions are rapidly gaining ground at both ends of the market.

Here at Concursive, our customer base has not only grown in size year over year, it's also changed radically in terms of the types of customers we deal with. One of our latest customers, which we are preparing to announce next week, is a financial services company that conducted a year-long evaluation of several key vendors in the CRM and sales lead management markets before deciding that Concursive’s ConcourseSuite 5.0 was the best solution.

This reflects the market opportunity for open source, not only for the vendors, but also for business users everywhere. It's an anniversary for everyone to celebrate - here's to the next year for the OSA and for open source advocates everywhere!

Michael Harvey