Managing your databases

There comes a time in every small business when they need to use a new bit of kit which is invariably technology/software based. Its something that I love to get my teeth into - any thing to make the business work smarter and harder and make a process more efficient.

Recently, we felt it was time to grow up a bit with our CRM and move on from using excel and ACT. Both of these solutions work well but have their limitations. The brief was to find something that was accessible online, didnt cost a fortune (or free!) and would provide a way of categorising leads, creating call lists and storing all of the latest up to date info.

There are plenty of applications that will do this - some are extremely expensive and therefore mainly marketed to large corps and some are far too complicated to use. CRM systems are a bit like an iceberg and invariably you only end up using a small fraction of their potential functionality. This can either be because it is not user friendly or you just dont need it.

We reviewed Salesforce www.salesforce.com and free CRM www.freecrm.com - and ended up going for free CRM and spending far too long getting our data structure right, but its all a wonderful learning curve! It was a bit cantankerous to start with and some of the functionality was clunky (like deleting en masse) but now that we have it, it is fantastic! It makes me wonder why it took so long for us to sort it out... it is saving us so much time!