What is Cloud CRM

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CRM software on Cloud Computing Platforms

CIOs debate whether customer relationship management tools belong on the "public cloud" or the "private cloud."

Cloud computing remains a big buzzword in Silicon Valley, because the idea of distributed computing and storage is already revolutionizing the way that companies manage customer relationship management, e-commerce, and business intelligence data. Yet, for many companies early to adopt CRM software, the cloud remains a distant promise.

Feeling locked in to their current vendors, some companies continue to invest in their own hardware while paying software maintenance fees.

Recent announcements by some of the biggest players in the CRM software business may change all that.

CRM Applications: Storage and Networking Strategies

Until recently, large-scale CRM applications required significant amounts of processing power and storage within a company's network. Older CRM installations running on mainframe computers sacrificed depth for speed, especially when running on DOS or UNIX-based platforms.

The next generation of CRM systems ran on more sophisticated operating systems, populating client screens with key information piped from central databases.

Today, CRM software can be served through Web browsers or through virtualization platforms, offering limitless options for company decision makers.

However, the fast pace of change in the CRM application space has required companies to rethink their storage and networking strategies. In an era of "always on" customer service expectations, a simple server rack in the back room of a corporate office might not be the right solution for a growing company.

Instead of simply allowing data to be stored offsite, many companies now choose for their entire CRM applications to be served up from remote processors.

Better still, processing power and bandwidth can scale to match immediate customer demands. A surprise response to a broadcast ad no longer has to bring a call center to its knees, thanks to distributed processing.

cloud-based-crm

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What exactly is CRM software?

Many people have heard the term CRM but some are not sure what it means. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and while CRM does refer to a program to manage customer information the better CRM software does much more than that.

CRM software not only allows the organizing of customer information, but CRM software also provides the means to track sales leads from the time they are obtained until the sales are closed.

The best CRM software provides instant reporting capabilities.

Good CRM allows all of the information obtained to be shared among both the sales force and the entire company. The right CRM software should combine all the elements of Customer Relationship Management, Sales Force Automation (SFA), and Contact Management.

This CRM allows sales managers and company officers to maintain complete control over sales operations and not miss any opportunities.

CRM systems used to be out of reach for any but the largest corporations.

Many business owners believe that while CRM would be good for their business it is something that can only be afforded by large corporations with big sales forces and massive budgets. In fact this used to be the case because a good CRM system could cost millions of dollars.

They were also difficult to set up and required a lot of training in order for people to be able to effectively use them.

That is no longer the case.

There is inexpensive and effective CRM software on the market.

There are inexpensive CRM systems that can be tailored to the needs of all businesses regardless of size.

They have this capability because they designed to fit right into Microsoft Outlook. This makes them very easy to set up and little training needs to be done for members of the sales force and others to effectively use them.

These good CRM systems contains everything busy sales managers need.

These systems combine the best features of CRM, SFA, and Contact Management into one easily used system.

Once a sales lead is found the CRM system will automatically track what is going on with the lead and keep sales personnel informed of what needs to be done to follow up with the sales lead. There are also numerous reports built into the better CRM systems that are available instantly to sales managers and reports can be easily customized.

Sales Trends can be easily determined with the better CRM systems.

With a good CRM the members of a sales force can do more than just access the names, addresses, and other contact information about contacts.

The CRM software will provide data such as related contacts and correspondence. It is easy to see sales trends with the information provided by the CRM system. This allows companies to be more competitive and make sure they are reaching the right markets for their goods or services.

Individual sales force members can benefit greatly from a sophisticated CRM system.

Every member of a sales force should be working a number of sales prospects and this can make it difficult to keep up with everything. With the right CRM system this becomes an easy task. For example, calendaring is automated so there are no missed appointments or follow up contacts. Tasking is easier than ever before because everything is kept up to date with the

CRM system.

Avidian has developed award winning products.

A company called Avidian is setting the standard in the industry with its Prophet CMR software. Prophet has been named the Best Outlook-Based CRM solution.

The Prophet CRM software has received the prestigious Four Star Rating from PC World magazine and business editorial writers are continuously heaping praise on Avidian for the high quality of its Prophet CRM software.

Companies can get a step ahead of their competition with the right CRM software.

In today’s economy every business is looking for something to give them a competitive edge and many are finding what they need with the better and less expensive CRM systems. Sales forces can be brought to a higher level with the right CRM and instead of missed opportunities CRM will quickly allow businesses to dramatically increase their sales.

There are now CRM systems that are affordable and very easy to use available to businesses of all sizes and types.

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Different View Point - CRM Basics

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty.

True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization.

There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology. The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM. A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of, How can this process better serve the customer? Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk.

If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. T

he more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood.

As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behavior and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

This sounds like a panacea, but CRM is not without its challenges. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it.

Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used.

Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated.

This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more.

And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.

WHAT ABOUT SALESFORCE - THE HUGE CRM COMPANY - Why Are They So Pleased With Mr. Big?

Nobody's as good at salesmanship in the world of high tech as Marc Benioff, the nimble and gregarious 6-foot-5, 290-pound co-founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. A few months ago, his burgeoning company -- the San Francisco-based powerhouse in cloud computing for businesses -- was looking to buy Rypple, a startup in Toronto that specializes in human resources apps. The two companies had already had several rounds of discussions.

In late October, the 47-year-old Benioff was in Manhattan to speak before the G100 conference of executives. So were Daniel Debow and David Stein, the 38-year-old co-founders of Rypple. The night before, Benioff took them to San Pietro, the Midtown Italian restaurant where he holds court every time he's in town: "Right over there is where I sent my favorite California Cabernet to King Abdullah of Jordan -- to say thank you for helping to build peace in the Middle East!"

And the king was so impressed he sent his bodyguards back to the hotel "to bring me one of his famous beautiful watches!" Benioff has told the tale so many times at the restaurant that the waiters can recite it. He made sure that Stein, a wine buff, got the same bottle of Dalla Valle as the king.

After attending G100 events the next day, Benioff suggested that he and Debow hit the renowned 2nd Avenue Deli for lunch. (Stein had to go back home.) There weren't any tables, so Benioff got them seats at the corner of the counter. And he ordered up the full array: corned beef, sauerkraut, and melted Swiss on rye, with lots of dressing; matzoh ball soup; chopped liver; chased with warm assorted rugelach. They didn't talk business. "We just kibitzed," Debow says.

Soon thereafter, Rypple took Salesforce's $60 million, turning down a richer offer -- from SuccessFactors, which was just bought by SAP, one of Salesforce's archrivals. "It wasn't only about deal terms, but corporate culture," Debow says. "We barely met the other CEO." Debow says he sensed Benioff was the kind of person "we could deliver our company and employees to … that we entrepreneurs could be part of their family.

Nobody can keep up the artifice over a couple hours of sharing pickles."

It's that kind of episode that has helped make Salesforce (CRM) a remarkable success story in terms of employee contentment, as well as growth. And it illustrates why Salesforce is on Fortune's 2012 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For -- ranking No. 27, up 25 slots from last year.

There are plenty of reasons Salesforce is cool to work for: its downtown San Francisco vibe, its matchless end-of-the-year revelry, its embedded philanthropy, and its idiosyncratic leader. It may not have the élan of a consumer brand like Apple (AAPL) or Facebook -- after all, "enterprise software," despite being a vast industry, is about as sexy a business as aluminum smelting. But Salesforce has reinvented how companies get the software they use to handle ordinary but critical tasks like customer relations, sales, accounting, and internal communications.

Employees love being on the cutting edge. Salesforce gives its more than 100,000 "subscribers" -- including NBCUniversal, Dell (DELL), Bank of America (BAC), Cisco (CSCO), Google (GOOG), and the Japanese government -- access to that proprietary data in the "cloud," over the Internet. In industry parlance, it's "software as a service" rather than "software sold in a box."

That's a radically different, simpler, and cheaper model than what business software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) offer -- where customers keep information offline on their own computers, which in turn requires installation of expensive software, upgrades, maintenance, and a dreaded IT department. Even so, major Salesforce customers can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual subscription fees.

Salesforce employees are messianic in touting their model over the "dinosaurs" of Oracle and SAP, which still have revenue and market capitalizations that dwarf Salesforce's.

The underdog mentality of the 13-year-old company is akin to that of a renegade startup. Last summer a trade publication on its cover proclaimed Benioff America's No. 1 Innovator. "Marc's energy and dedication remind me of the people in my world," says his close friend Neil Young, the nonpareil musician (and sometimes technologist) whom he met as a neighbor in Hawaii. "That's what great artists have in common.

It's about intensity. He has a rock-and-roll attitude -- he's a throwback in his willingness to have fun."

In one notorious guerrilla-marketing stunt early in Salesforce's history, Benioff arranged for "protesters" to picket the users conference of an old-school competitor at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The paid actors brandished no software signs as they chanted, "The Internet is really neat … Software is obsolete!" (Never mind that Salesforce used software too; the difference was its virtual delivery system.)

Benioff also hired a mock TV crew from bogus station KNMS (no more software -- get it?) to cover the "protest."

The competitor was incensed and called police -- who promptly arrived to protect the demonstrators. (With characteristic reserve, Benioff decided against having an armored tank roll by driven by someone dressed as Patton.) The trade press ate the stunt up -- and Salesforce soon won 1,000 new subscribers.

Along with a puffy cloud, the company now includes the Ghostbusters-style logo -- "software" surrounded by a circle, with a line through it.