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| Nov 01, 2005 5:02 pm |
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re: re: Thoughts on Microsoft's Business Contact Manager as SFA tool |
Lydia Sugarman
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Contact managers were initially built to be glorified address books w/ a few bells and whistles...literally in ACT's case. But, they are not designed to be SFA tools or CRM tools, either. You will not get the ability to follow sales forecasting and tracking and that's just a beginning.
I know there are a lot of fans of ACT!, Goldmine, Salesforce.com, etc. There are just as many who've abandoned because of limitations, Byzantine or confusing apps, expense, lack of adoption.
23The same holds true for Siebel CRM OnDemand and others.
You have to ask yourself if you're looking for something that will work for your sales people or will generate the reports that middle and upper management need to the detriment of time spent selling by the sales people. Then, do you want something that works now or will be scalable? Does it include CRM and fully trackable email marketing and communications tools tied to Website activity? Do you want your online presentation/conferencing solution to integrate with these?
Finally, if your ultimate goal is Customer Data Integration to enable informed customer support and upselling, then does the solution do that without a lot of additional programming and software?
I love talking about this. This is what my company does. So, I don't want to turn this into banned self-promotion, so please get in touch directly.
Sincerely,
Lydia Sugarman
lks at pli-inc dot comPrivate Reply to Lydia Sugarman (new win) |
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