One of the advantages of using a CRM is the ability to easily manage and organize contacts to maximize leads. Salesforce.com and the many other companies that offer CRMs have well-established contact management systems within their products that can be incredibly useful to businesses both big and small. But what if you want a easy-to-use, but comprehensive contact management system without the bells and whistles of a CRM? Salesforce.com now has the answer: a Contact Manager Edition of its CRM that doesn’t include all the more complicated features of Salesforce’s conventional product.
For $9 per user per month, Contact Manager Edition will store and manage all contacts and accounts in the cloud. The product will integrate with any email system, including Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo. The system will track all emails, keeping a record of customer interactions and will run pre-configured and customized reports on contacts and accounts. Of course, this tracking system can be customized to track data that is most important to an user’s needs.
Interestingly, the Contact Manager Edition will come automatically with integration with Google Apps, the search giant’s cloud based productivity suite that is steadily gaining enterprise customers and already has a foothold among small businesses. community. All applications within Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc, will be integrated with the lightweight CRM. Not only is this an interesting partnership, but the strength of Salesforce’s CRM combined with the steady growth of Google Apps certainly puts pressure on Microsoft.