There are many options out there for a customer relationship manager (CRM) available. I guess they all have advantages and disadvantages but I have grown accustomed to SalesForce and have no issues with it. Besides using it for work to manage all my accounts and prospects, I also have a personal account that is available to anyone for free. SalesForce has done a good job keeping up with the needs of there corporate customers by adding new features and having a consistent update pattern that they make visible to SalesForce admins. But this is not why I love SalesForce so much. Work anywhere SalesForce as a CRM solution allows a mobile workforce to always be connected. The old school days of field sales people running their business off of spreadsheets should be trashed. Being able to access your company information from any connected device like a computer or mobile phone allows sales people and executives to review and update important data anytime of the day from anywhere in the world. Customizing reports is easy People at the top are always asking for reports. SalesForce makes this fairly simple. You can set reports up to be available to everyone or make ...

A friend passed this article along to me knowing that I stay on top of these types of stories. Little did I know that they mentioned NetSuite as a pioneer of the Sales 2.0 era. Thanks Jake! ------------------- It's a question almost as old as commerce itself: Is selling an art or a science? For years, technology companies have been trying to transform the former into the latter. And for years, the results have largely been disappointing. Think of those days as Sales 1.0. We're now in the era of Sales 2.0. Your bottom line may never be the same. Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on. Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force--with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with ...

If you are a professional and trying to network with other people in your industry or get back in touch with past coworkers, LinkedIn is the tool you need. CNN Money wrote about this earlier in the year talking about the growth of the site and how it is used by some of the 8 million plus users. LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It's not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done. LinkedIn as I have said in earlier posts is an account that everyone in a professional environment should have and more importantly, something everyone should want to look its best. Think of your LinkedIn profile like your personal Hoovers page where people that find you should be given quality data.

If you are a professional with an entrepreneurial spirit, or a self employed maverick and need a better way to manage your contacts other than Outlook, you could use one of these. SalesForce.com is the leader in Enterprise CRM solutions and they offer free accounts to individuals. All of the features available to Enterprises are not available, but all of the basics which is all you really need to manage information is available on demand. The personal edition is customizable so you can add logos, special links and setup email templates for mass communication. The reporting functionality is great. so if you want to get a quick graph of opportunities you are working on, or need to check when the last time you had a conversation with I have been using one for a couple years now and it has been extremely helpful when on the road and I needed to call Steve Jobs and didn't have all of his contact information handy. Get this and the integrated Outlook toolbar and you can automate the syncing of the data so it is always current. Download SalesForce for free here.

Since many of the mods I will be mentioning all have this in common, I'll make it easy and explain this once and link to it as needed.1. Go to your setup screen. The link is located in the upper right corner of your screen. When you get to the page it should look a little like this. 2. On the left section there is a link for App Setup. Click that. 3. Find the Customize your Contacts tab 4. Now go to Create a new custom link

This domain will be use for the development of tweaks and modifications to Salesforce.com that a company can use to customize the Salesforce CRM to help drive sales. These posts will be grow over time and will be primarily focused on the sales person and how to use your CRM to gather better information on your accounts, contacts and leads. Since a CRM is supposed to empower the sales person let's make a few adjustments in your Salesforce CRM that will drive better decisions and make your daily sales grind a bit easier the SOCOM way.Many companies use Salesforce, they are the leader in the CRM market. The most obvious appeal for companies to use a hosted CRM as a sales tool is mainly the on demand nature of the system and the ability to give executives a view into the company with special reports and dashboards.But what about the account manager on inside sales person? Besides having a basic listing of leads, contacts and opportunities, what can they do with such a great tool? How many dashboards are available out of the box for them? How customized are the fields in their records? Chances are like most companies you ...