Larger companies with massive revenues can easily make the decision to spend thousands of dollars on customer relationship management (CRM) applications. For many of these bigger businesses, they may legitimately require the power and capabilities these expensive programs provide. For the small to medium sized business, however, such extravagance may not be an option. If this is the case, what then can they choose to provide affordable CRM solutions?
The power of the Internet and its constant evolution has brought a wide variety of affordable service solutions to many smaller, less wealthy companies. Commonly referred to as cloud computing solutions, the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), has created opportunities for the smaller players in an industry to get the power and benefit of those more expensive applications. While some control may be lost by not having ownership of the service, the cost benefits and maintenance challenges associated with ownership are surpass the losses.
This list will point one in the direction of five of the more popular, effective, and free social CRM applications available right now. Links are provided and will open a new browser window providing the reader with the ability to keep track of the following list while investigating the various CRM solution options.
5 No-Cost Customer Relationship Management Applications
- FreeCRM.com: Free CRM is a web based software solution for customer relationship management and sales force automation. Free CRM is great for contact and lead tracking, sales and contact management, sales pipeline management and forecasting, customer service and business management.
- Relenta: Relenta automatically gathers the pieces of data that are typically scattered across separate applications (such as email clients, group calendars, CRM solutions and to-do lists), and displays them on one single page, as a chronological stream of activity associated with each contact. This gives one at-a-glance knowledge of where things stand.
- Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM offers complete customer relationship life-cycle management software for managing Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Inventory activities in a single system. Simple to use and packed with features for automation, customization, integration, and collaboration to grow ones business and have a complete views of customer interactions.
- SalesPush: Created by sales professionals for sales professionals, SalesPush is a straightforward and immediate way to achieve improvements in sales performance. Real-time, end-to-end visibility into all sales data puts the control of the entire sales process in the CRM professional’s hands. SalesPush is an easy to use and affordable CRM solution.
- Time To Note: Time To Note is a strong, well designed system built using Google’s App Engine and APIs. Their free service is limited to two user accounts, however unlimited plans are very reasonable. Small businesses can easily get by on the free service and enjoy having a complete history of each customer on a single page. Tasks are easily added, edited and monitored on a single page as well. Adding new clients or companies is clean and easy, and happen all on a single page also. No more multi-page click and wait for page refreshing.
The power and elegance these free services provide might make one wonder how the companies are able to afford to give away their services for no charge. Cloud computing is usually the biggest factor allowing for no-cost service offerings. Plus, if the applications provide the small to medium sized businesses with superior CRM capabilities, chances are as the businesses expand they’ll require more user accounts and will happily pay the service provider to continue using those CRM applications.
