Sage CRM

Sandeep Koul

With 63,500 small and mid-size businesses already using Sage solutions worldwide, and nearly 2000 implementations in India, Sage CRM is definitely something you'd want to evaluate for your CRM needs. Like most CRM solutions available today, there are two flavors of Sage CRM--a hosted model or inhouse deployment. The hosted model is good for organizations who don't want to invest in their own IT infrastructure and want to start using a CRM package right away. The in-house model is of course better if you already have an IT infrastructure and want more control over your CRM implementation. For getting a taste of the actual product, a 30-days trial is available online. You simply have to register with www.sagecrm.com and you can start using it. The package offers a wide range of elements for employees from across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Services departments in your organization. Since the package is completely browser based, there's no need to install any special clients on anybody's machine. It can be accessed over the Internet from anywhere.

Inbuilt tutorials

One of the biggest hindrances to the adoption of a CRM package is getting users to use it. Any enterprise application for that matter is completely useless if the end-users don't use it. So if your sales team doesn't fill in their daily sales reports in the CRM package, you'll not be able to understand where your sales is heading, nor would you be able to extract reports or apply any kind of BI to understand the sales situation in your organization. So while top management's involvement is needed here, what also helps is the application itself has features to facilitate the process. Sage CRM provides video tutorials so that your users can self-learn the package at their own pace. If you're on a hosted model, then you would of course need to ensure that you have sufficient Internet bandwidth to play these videos.

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Integration

If your organization is using MS Outlook, then you can rejoice because SageCRM can be fully integrated with it. Moreover, it can even be integrated with computer telephony, and if you decide to go for the ERP package by the same company, then there would be seamless integration between the two.

Customization

Another useful feature to have in SageCRM is that you can customize the interface as per the user's requirements. For instance, users can have their interfaces in the language of their choice. Also, most of this customization doesn't require any kind of coding, making the process simpler.

Bottomline: Worth considering if you are an SMB and want a quick deployment of a CRM package

CRM: http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/enterprise/2010/110043002.asp