Popular CRM's

Many versions of CRMs are now available in the CRM market. Open source enables any and every programmer to read, redistribute, and modify existing source codes to evolve a new software. Thus there is scope for rapid development. And thus various open source CRMs too have evolved. Some of the widely used open source CRMs are SugarCRM and vTiger.

SugarCRM

This is a commercial open source CRM suitable for companies of all sizes. The version 3.0 called the Sugar Suite has various functionalities like:

 

• Sales forecasting- The sales manager can calculate potential sales and associated revenues based on projections from sales representatives, thus have a better control over performance, commitment, achieving realistic goals, and planning resources.
• Campaign and Project Management- The campaign management tool allows users to organize marketing activities, manage and track marketing efforts on leads, contacts, and opportunities. The project management tool enables the users to define steps, establish timelines, and assign work to members on any project useful to end users.
• Email marketing- The marketing team creates the email templates, the recipients are listed and they are sent personalized email templates as per the planned schedule.
• Calendaring, call scheduling, planning meetings, note tracking-customizable dashboards for real time tracking of business activities
• New module called Sugar Collaborate added to Sugar Sales, Sugar Marketing and Sugar Support Suites, having specific tools like:
• Document Management capabilities like managing sales documentation, marketing collateral, customer incident reports
• Employee Directory- Customers can be searched by first or last names, roles, departments and basic contact information.
• Calendar Synchronization by project management, tasks and activities reminder

vTiger CRM

vTiger open-source CRM is most suitable for small and medium businesses. Originally built from source code of SugarCRM , it is based on open-source technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The distinct features are:

• Lead Management- This feature creates leads and then converts them to opportunities, it also imports leads from Web downloads, trade shows, seminars and direct mails.
• Opportunity and Contact Management- The user can track all sales opportunities, associate these with accounts, contacts, activities, and other modules. With other spreadsheet software the contacts and sales pipeline are analyzed and bottlenecks identified. The hierarchy of contacts are maintained to help deal with customers in a better way. More contacts are taken in from other applications like ACT, Goldmine etc.
• Account Management- The user can import accounts, export accounts, specify parent-child relationship between accounts, track all accounts, and attach customer specific documents to accounts for quick reference.
• Activity and Inventory management- With this feature the user can add all important customer related e-mails in vtiger CRM and store all the details of customer meetings and calls. This streamlines the sales process.
• Security management- This feature enables the organization to define the role of team members and give them access to modules as per their role. This feature also archives the login history of each user for auditing purposes.
• The Microsoft Outlook Plug-in feature permits adding outbound and forwarding inbound Outlook e-mails to vtiger CRM and synchronizes contacts, tasks, and calendar between the two. Another feature is to filter e-mails in Microsoft Outlook and retain the necessary e-mails to vtiger CRM.

Daffodil CRM

Daffodil CRM is a commercial CRM with features that

enable the software to integrate all aspects of customer life cycle that includes identifying business opportunities to retaining existing customer bank. It helps in automating everyday tasks and has features like:

• •  Printable reports and Export facility- The Daffodil software has Export to Excel and Printable reports facilites . The customizable view facility in the software generates the different views of data. The users are thus able to evaluate performance of their overall business, sales team, and products over a period of time. The users are also able to select fields, apply filters on each field by setting conditions and sort items by all available fields in ascending or descending order.
• •  Automatic mail attachment- This key feature attaches mails to Daffodil CRM automatically without manually selecting and sending each mail from email client. A forwarding rule on the webserver and the email client automatically attaches all email interactions with their corresponding leads.
• Campaign facility- The integrated email campaign facility features enables mass mailings to all or select category of customers. Users can compose mass mails with or without making use of email templates.
• Lead Management- The user can manage and analyze all leads with a single click. User can assign leads and keep a track on the progress made on leads by the executives. A single click will give the entire information related to the lead and also the latest five actions and interactions for quick followup and analysis of the lead.