Contact Manager Software in the Cloud

To start with, salesforce.com gives you a key advantage over conventional contact manager software and small business CRM: Our solutions run entirely in the cloud. With no more than your favorite garden-variety Internet browser, you have full access to your small business CRM anytime and anywhere.

With small business CRM from salesforce.com, you don’t have to buy contact manager software or spend money on special hardware to run it. And you never have to deal with the headache and expense of maintaining and upgrading both. In short, all your small business CRM needs are fulfilled without your having to get into the IT business yourself.

• Unmatched ease of use. Unlike conventional contact manager software and small business CRM, Salesforce CRM works with the ease of a consumer-style Web site. And starting up is equally fast and simple. You can easily import data from systems like Gmail, ACT!, or Outlook, and get going in practically no time.
• Customize without code. With salesforce.com, you don’t have to be a programmer to tailor your small business CRM to your company’s needs and your own preferences. A few mouse-clicks and you’re there.
• Down with upgrades. Because our small business CRM is cloud-based, we handle upgrades at our end, along with every other aspect of IT. Everything happens automatically so you can stay focused on your business. You’re always running on the latest version of our small business CRM, and anything you’ve previously customized is carried forward for you.
• Ironclad security. Your small business CRM data and interactions are kept safe and secure with multiple levels of the industry’s best and most proven safeguards, including firewalls, encryption, authentication, intrusion detection, and much more. This security infrastructure costs many millions of dollars, but its benefits are all included in your very affordable monthly subscription. No other contact manager software or small business CRM gives you the same high-level protection—and at such modest cost.

Contact Manager Edition: Starting Small

Although it doesn’t provide the full capabilities of small business CRM, a contact management system lets you efficiently track and record relationships and interactions with customers and suppliers: emails, documents, jobs, faxes, calendars, and more. The advantage is controlling and viewing all this critical information in a single centralized format, instead of having different proprietary applications, each with its own data collection system.

Small business CRM—and versions for larger enterprises—are oriented more toward accounts as a whole rather than individual contacts. They generally include opportunity management for tracking sales pipelines and often have added functionality for marketing and customer service.

All this functionality may be more than you require. What if easy-to-use but comprehensive contact manager software capabilities are sufficient for your needs, without the extras of full-fledged small business CRM?

Problem solved: Salesforce.com’s Contact Manager Edition is specially tailored for the very small business. CRM bells and whistles aside, it has everything you need—no more, no less—with a very affordable subscription price to match. And as with all our editions, you get salesforce.com’s legendary ease of use plus the cloud-based simplicity you won’t find with any conventional contact manager software or small business CRM.

• Contacts and accounts. Contact Manager consolidates all your contacts and accounts, so you can zero in on the right information exactly when you need it.
• Monitor customer communications. Just as with our small business CRM, Contact Manager can display all your interactions with any given customer, so you have a full history at your fingertips at any time.
• Integration with email and Google Apps. Another feature set Contact Manager shares with our small business CRM: the ability to work seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo!, Gmail, and all other Google Apps. You can access and use any of these systems right inside Contact Manager. In contrast with conventional contact manager software, Contact Manager offers the convenience of having all interactions and contact records in one place, so you don’t need to manually transfer information back and forth between applications.
• Gain insights with real-time reports. As with our small business CRM, Contact Manager lets you run standard and customized reports to drill deeper into your data and gain a fuller understanding of your business.
• Create reminders. Contact Manager’s automated reminders keep you on top of meetings, call-backs, pressing emails, and every other task on your to-do list.
• Customize with mouse-clicks. Unlike conventional contact managers and small business CRM software, you don’t need to hire a programmer to customize Salesforce CRM. All it takes is a mouse to add fields, change workflows, and create sales processes.

These capabilities are also included in our small business CRM and larger CRM editions. They’re part of the reason why salesforce.com is the choice of more than 63,000 companies worldwide—and counting.

Small Business CRM: Salesforce CRM Group Edition and Professional Edition

Small businesses with more users and greater needs will want to go beyond contact management software functionality. For them, we offer two flavors of small business CRM: Group Edition and Professional Edition. Here are some of the capabilities shared by both:

• Customize your sales processes. Tailor your sales workflows to fit your company’s procedures for monitoring and benchmarking deal progress from first call through completion.
• Integrate with Google AdWords. Salesforce.com’s small business CRM works in concert with Google AdWords, making it easy to efficiently execute and track search marketing campaigns, analyze the results, and fine-tune your efforts for even better performance.
• Capture leads from any source. Here’s an important small business CRM capability that goes beyond contact manager software: Bring leads into Salesforce CRM from any source—trade shows, your Web site, direct mail, and seminars. Forget about manual data entry. With our small business CRM, it’s a thing of the past.
• Instant insight with real-time dashboards. See your company’s key performance indicators at a glance, in a graphical format that’s easy to understand. You can personalize the dashboards inside our small business CRM by department, role, or individual. This way, everyone sees exactly what they need.
• Extend your small business CRM through the AppExchange. Check out our one-stop shop for more than 800 cloud-based applications that add capabilities for specific needs and industries and go even beyond CRM. Some are free of charge, and all are preintegrated with salesforce.com’s small business CRM.