WHAT IS A CRM?
CRM which stands for Customer Relationship Management is a technology that manages a company’s relationships and interactions with current customers and even potential ones too – with improving business relationships to grow businesses as its main goal/purpose.
What can a CRM do for a business?
Picture this: Your business is scaling, therefore your clientele grows along with it which could mean that your database may become harder to update, interpret, and keep in sync with all your team members. Valuable customer information may remain hidden away in one of your inboxes and never be properly recorded as it will become harder to track them down as the volume of the emails you receive increases and inconsistencies with the customer communication between team members. A reliable CRM Tool can greatly help avoid these problems.
- Having a CRM means having one easy-to-access location where all your data is consolidated into.
- Repetitive admin tasks are automated so your team can spend more time on things that matter more for your business. It will allow you to create a standardized sales process, shortening the roadmap for closing deals and helping reduce the length of sales cycles.
- You and your team can stay focused on keeping your customers happy.
CRM’s sound helpful, but how much do they cost?
A CRM tool subscription ranges from $25/month to over $1000/month, depending on the package and inclusions you’d like to have and the size of your team.
Short Comparison of an Open-source with a Proprietary Software CRM Tool
We will be looking into SALESFORCE CRM and SUITE CRM
Salesforce unites your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams from anywhere so you can focus your employees on what’s important right now: stabilizing your business, reopening, and getting back to delivering exceptional customer experiences.
SuiteCRM is a free open-source Customer Relationship Management application for servers. It is written in PHP. Open source CRM is often used as an alternative to proprietary CRM software from major corporations such as HubSpot and Salesforce.
They are reliable CRM tools that could greatly help any business scale, both have their advantages and disadvantages which one can workaround to decide depending on what your company is capable of paying and its CRM needs.
If you do not have programming or development knowledge but have enough budget to pay for a reliable CRM tool, Salesforce may be the better choice among the two. With Salesforce, you have access to all types of services you may need that you can put together to achieve the most efficient CRM package for your needs. They have a lot of tutorial videos online and they offer demo’s with a salesforce expert from their end to help you know how to work around their top-notch tool. If your business requires lead generation, Salesforce offers lead generation opportunities – with this, your newly sourced leads can be loaded directly to your CRM tool, removing the risk of losing a viable lead that you would normally keep in a separate database.
But, if you have programming or development knowledge, with or without the budget, and are willing to invest time in coding/creating an open-source CRM tool for your business, SuiteCRM may the better choice. It is free and fully customizable, has unrestrained access to API which means there are almost no limits except your imagination, it also supports SLA with 99%+ compliance and has complete access to code and database.
CONCLUSION
Again, both have their advantages and disadvantages and it wouldn’t be fair to say that the other is better than the other – to put it simply, there is a better option among the two depending on your: Needs, Budget, Development Knowledge, and more. Salesforce is the more costly option but it is more user-friendly, a plug-and-play system that can surely do what you expect of it to accomplish. SuiteCRM on the other hand requires more work in the beginning and some specialized skills that may require you to pay extra but could cost less in the future.
And if you need to make SUITECRM work for you and your business,
we at FULCRUM DYNAMIC can make it happen.
Be it integration, automation, or even creating custom applications tailored to your needs, we make IT possible.