CRMs, or Customer Relationship Management systems, are programs or sets of programs that help you manage customer data, interact with customers, launch marketing campaigns and examine history of what has and hasn’t worked for both individual customers and your customer base as a whole.

There are several reasons why your business should be using a CRM program:

• It’s the perfect compliment to, and often integral to, your accounting system.
• You can plan your sales and marketing activities with the program and see which has worked easily.
• You can create a clearer view of your customers and their needs.
• You can understand how your customers respond back to you.
• You can manage your work more easily and keep your sales and marketing forces on task.
• Get real time data from your system for most any parameter you’d want.
• Build deeper and more fulfilling customer relationships.
• Launch campaigns quickly and have your information in your customer’s hands within moments instead of weeks, as other marketing methods may take.

Now you simply have to decide on which CRM program works for you. We’ve been using Goldmine for years, and it’s pretty decent. However, as we’ve grown, we’ve found that we need more functionality and reliability. Because of this need, we’re moving to SageCRM in the next month. While I can’t say that SageCRM is right for your business, I can say that you should consider it if your budget and needs both fall within the line of SageCRM.