Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both of you. It’s very hard to run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM, as well as adding elements of social media and making the transition to a social enterprise to connect with customers in new ways.

Successful CRM involves many different areas of your company, starting with sales and extending to other customer-facing areas like marketing and customer service. Salesforce.com offers a technology solution for all those areas… and more. With Salesforce and our Force.com cloud computing platform, you can mind your customers and your budget at the same time. Get up and running in 30 days with the world’s most proven CRM solution.

CRM solutions help ensure that your sales, marketing, and support efforts are all working toward a common goal, so you can take your business success to a whole new level. Streamline and automate business processes, give everyone in your company a complete view of the customer, provide deeper analysis and insight into critical sales and customer metrics, and keep everyone focused on getting new customers while keeping the ones you already have happy.

• CRM Solutions for Sales & Marketing. Generate more leads, effectively market through multiple channels, optimize lead management, convert leads into customers, view all account-related information and activities, keep sales reps working productively, analyze your sales pipeline, and see what’s working and what’s not. An effective CRM solution helps you keep sales and marketing focused on filling the sales pipeline and generating more revenue rather than manually tracking sales leads.
• CRM Solutions for Activity Management. View all customer transactions, respond confidently to customer calls or emails, capture important information about customer interactions, and manage your tasks and follow-up activities with CRM.
• CRM Solutions for Service & Support. Collect customer support requests from all your channels, assign support cases to the appropriate agent or group of agents, leverage the best solutions to customer problems, escalate support cases when needed, help customers find solutions via your Web site, stick to the service-level agreements you have with your customers, and identify areas for service improvements. All that translates to better service and happier customers.

Cloud computing has the IT world abuzz. But what exactly is it? Traditional client/server CRM software is a dying breed. The CRM software market has shifted from an ownership to a rental model, freeing businesses from the hassle and expense of software purchasing, deployment, and maintenance.

Cloud computing is another way to describe the much more compelling model of delivering business software over the Internet. With the Web, you can cut costs because you only pay to use the software instead of purchasing it. A multitenant platform with a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained makes this model possible.