CRM – Customer Relationship Management
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When I first started my career in sales and marketing, many years ago, on my very first day at my new job I was shown how to use the company’s CRM to manage my customers. It looked very much like this:
The marketing plan was, as I recall, start with the A’s and work your way through to the Z’s, then do it again.
Funnily enough, it worked, but not very well. It was easy to miss opportunities and cards could easily get lost, or damaged, (coffee spills were my speciality).
Fast forward a few years and the CRM was born. Now things got updated much more often and sales opportunities can be flagged for nurturing and development. You could see at a glance when you last contacted a prospect or customer and, if the CRM was integrated with the sales invoicing system, you could see the buying history of the customer.
CRM’s are, of course, essential to most sales orientated businesses. Now, the choice is getting quite big with new CRM’s coming onto the market all the time. Here at the Digital Marketing Directory we are concerned mainly with the role of the CRM in the digital marketing strategy – integration with email marketing, ppc ads and so on being all-important. Here’s our roundup of the CRM systems out there to help you to choose the right one for you.
Kahuna Marketing Automation Platform
Kahuna targets medium and larger corporate organisations with sophisticated cross-channel marketing automation facilitating 1to1 personalisation across marketing channels including email, web, mobile devices, Facebook retargeting, and text messaging. A look at their...
Highrise CRM – Affordable CRM For SMEs
Highrise CRM is an easy to use CRM for smaller businesses and is ideally suited for startups. The tools you need, all in one place Highrise CRM is the just-right, more thoughtful way to keep track of the people, conversations, and tasks that are the lifelines of your...
Pardot – Marketing Automation By Salesforce
Pardot is a marketing automation platform from Salesforce that works in conjunction with their market-leading Salesforce CRM. I've been reviewing quite a few marketing automation platforms recently and, as a Salesforce user for several years, (although not at...
FunnelMaker – Marketing Automation & CRM
FunnelMaker is a name that, you might be forgiven for thinking, describes a platform that offers a complete marketing funnel automation system. It does not. FunnelMaker is a very good, very comprehensive, CRM with limited email marketing capability but it is not a...
Tubular – CRM & Sales Pipeline Management
Tubular is a useful and very affordable CRM and pipeline management system that would be at home in almost any type or size of business. True, it might not quite go far enough for some larger or more complex businesses but in the majority of cases I think it would...
