Zoho

Sales and Marketing is a key function for any business. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools developed out of Contact Managers in hardcopy form and software into Customer Management solutions for the entire enterprise, tying together all aspects of customer interface, sales, marketing, customer support, inventory and accounts.

With CRM software management can can track marketing efforts, sales activity and results, as well and your ongoing customer contact to manage your businesses most valuable asset, its customers, all in one complete package. 

CRM was developed primarily for large enterprises using software by Seibel, Salesforce and Oracle but these tools have now scaled down to become useful products for small business, allowing the business owner to have the information on hand to make informed decisions on where to allocate the company's valuable resources, identify problem early for resolution and perhaps highlight burgeoning new areas of business that had previously gone unnoticed.

We have used several different CRM in our time, including custom in-house developed software as well as fully featured OpenSource products like SugarCRM. You can download and install SugarCRM on your computer network for free or buy per-user licenses to have it hosted by SugarCRM themselves with some additional services and ongoing support. Visit the site for free demostration and trials.

As well as being a fan of OpenSource software we are also a fan of hosted solutions. Zoho, who we've mentioned before, is a leader in Cloud Computing Services and competitor/partner with Google has its own ZohoCRM. As a Cloud solution out of the box all users have access from their internet connection, whether they are working from the office or a home office.

Zoho offers a free online CRM solution that you'll be able to start using in minutes - free for the first 3 users. Its basic functionality is pretty powerful out of the box and suitable for a lot of small business though they charge for some add-ons which have some much needed extra functionality, such as integrating email - so you can see the emails sent/received by a customer within the CRM. The good news is that the costs are low, The most expensive option is $25/user/month (from the 4th user) with add-ons from $3-$5/user/month.

As we've a penchant for discovery we are branching out from our trusted SugarCRM and trialing ZohoCRM for Fix Information Technology alongside a separate technical helpdesk and project management product. If we have any useful insights about the product, including on how well the products integrate and how it compares to other solutions, we'll post them on the site later.

There are a wide range of software in this sector with a wide variety of pricing and features so we recommend you have a look at the suggestions above and branch out to the wider market to see what is best for your business.

Fix IT is often asked what do we recommend. Over time we'll be posting articles about products we recommend for our readers.

You can find a growing list of these articles here

As a Computing philosophy our recommendations are based around a few key factors.

Firstly, what is right for your purposes? For example, if you want to learn to manipulate images to a high level requires some sophisticated tools and investing a lot of time as a hobbist and perhaps professional classes. Adobe Photoshop is the go-to choice for this purpose, but as photoshop is expensive, and if price was a strong consideration we'd recommend the free Open Source GIMP which is photoshop level in quality and sophistication as an alternative.

If, on the otherhand you want to reduce the file sizes on the pictures you've taken on your Digital Camera so you can easily email them to family, we'd probably recommend a product like Google's Picasa as an easy to use product, and its features like easy batch processing so you can make file size changes, to 10 pictures or hundreds at a time, are a breeze to use.

If you're already experienced with a software product, working with an upgraded version rather than moving to an alternative makes a lot of sense, unless the other reasons for making a change are compelling. Getting things done fast is our motto and that's easier when you already know the product.

There is a changing paradigm that the computing world is undergoing, moving from software on your computer vs software in the Cloud which could provide some of these compelling reasons.

Cloud Computing: Think of it as the difference between getting your email in your computer email application (for example MS Outlook) versus getting it from logging into Hotmail from your web-browser. Both are email, but the hotmail email application doesn't reside on your PC, and neither does the email you send and receive. Yes, you've been doing 'Cloud Computing' for a decade already and you haven't even know it. 

Now, expand that idea to your other software you use everyday and distribute it via a network, in this case the Internet. Make it faster, reliable and add in extra features so it is equal to, or better than what you're use to and you've got a small but powerful change in the software business that's worth looking into. 
Also add to this the fact that a lot of Cloud Computing software and services are provided to the consumer for free, or at least very cheap, and its hard not to to take the new model seriously.

Fix IT is a big advocate of the Google Applications suite of products, including Gmail, GoogleTalk, Google Calendar and GoogleDocs and use their online products like iGoogle, GoogleReader and Google Finance. We also use Google Voice, but as that is open by invitation only and only for US phone numbers at the time being it may have limited use for European based customers.

We'll be reviewing Google Applications at a later point to provide some ideas on how to set them up to make them even more useful.

An alternative to Google Apps is the Zoho Suite of Online Applications and of course Microsoft Office. Though I am a big advocate of Google Apps, after spending almost 20 years using MS Word and Excel, they are my go-to applications for writing documents and developing spreadsheets. Microsoft have announced that they'll be releasing Cloud versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with limited functionality shortly though the jury on whether the product will be a solid alternative.

One of the key impetuses behind the advent of Cloud Computing (along with fast, cheap and ubiquitous broadband networking and developments in cheap server-farm technology and network scalable distributed software languages) the has been competition from Open Source software on traditional software developers.

Open Source Communities of SW developers contribute their own time to develop software together and provide it and the source code for free, which further allows other people to build on their existing work. Thousands of developers working together means innovation came come fast and at low cost. Today you have many pieces of Open Source software that are equal to and better than traditionally produced software - and its free.

Examples of this are the Firefox browser which we highly recommend alongside Opera and Google Chrome. All are better than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Other examples is the Drupal CMS software which this website is developed in, and Joomla CMS, another alternative.

Add this to high quality Shareware and Freeware available for download on the internet and you've got immense pressure on traditional software makers looking for new ways to sell their product and generate revenue.

We'll provide some future guides on recommended free software that we use or have used.

We hope you enjoy our recommendations and we'll hope to be as clear why you should look at these alternatives or suggestions. We hope you give them a try.