Soffront Blog

Our customers love our CRM Software because it allows them to meet their critical business needs in an innovative way on an ongoing basis. With Soffront CRM, our customer can dynamically change their system as their business needs change. Our CRM provides users with rich, powerful tools that allow them to make their own modifications in-house. There’s no need to hire expensive consultants or request approval from upper management. There’s also no delay—changes that take months with another CRM are completed in days with Soffront.

CRM software that Grows

Most CRM software—especially the expensive ones—can take anywhere from six months to one year to implement. By the time the system is deployed, the needs of the company have already changed. These systems are also static; making upgrades or changes is a major undertaking. Once it’s up and running, users are afraid to touch it. In fact, they avoid it at any cost! This type of CRM system is unable to adapt with the business and quickly falls behind.

When choosing the right CRM software for your company, it’s important to think about your long-term needs. All successful businesses must be able to adapt to change. This is especially true of businesses using CRM. The wonderful (and sometime frustrating) thing about CRM is that it forces you to become self-aware. You learn new things about your business as you gather intelligence from applications such as sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service, knowledge management, issue tracking, and project management.

Let’s take, for example, a rental car company. Before implementing a CRM solution, this company believed their main focus should be on efficiency—ensuring that cars are cleaned, well-maintained, moved quickly from lot to lot, and so forth. However, while using the CRM they discover that they are actually in the customer service business. Thus enlightened, the company realizes that they must shift the entire operation and focus. If their new goal is to nurture their customers and keep them happy, then the CRM system must be able to accommodate these new parameters without waiting six months or spending a lot of money on consultants.

Company Growth

The Soffront CRM system was built upon the notion that things can change on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. We at Soffront know that your business universe is not fixed; it is constantly changing. Our entire platform was designed with evolution in mind. Other companies may claim to be customizable, but you quickly run into limits of what you can customize with their system. With Soffront CRM the only limit is your imagination. Duplicating the Soffront system would require these companies to rebuild their platforms from the ground up. These CRM systems can’t compete with our ability to grow with your businesses.

Email plays a vital role in professional communication, especially for salespeople like me. It’s a fast and cost effective medium that allows us to maintain relationships with our clients and prospects. This is why so many of us have become dependant on email applications such as Microsoft Outlook. But how efficient is it? With Outlook we spend the majority of our time communicating with and managing contacts or scheduling meetings and follow-ups. Since Outlook is an email client, not CRM software, these communication activities aren’t organized in a concise manner. We often waste time searching and clicking through “Sent Items” and “Inbox Folders” for email history or to locate specific communication with a contact.

Soffront’s CRM solution addresses this concern by automatically organizing all communications with the corresponding contacts, accounts, opportunities and service requests. CRM software allows us to locate a specific communication using a convenient search and see up-to-date communications history.

Communications History in Notes

Although Outlook has a friendly User Interface for composing emails, it’s a “thick client” and must be installed on a computer. This means that we must always carry a computer with us in order to use it. Soffront’s web-based CRM software has an intuitive User Interface that lets us compose full HTML email messages. With a CRM solution we can schedule appointments and reschedule as needed by simply dragging and dropping it into a different time slot.

Compose HTML messages from CRM

Soffront CRM software helps you work smarter not harder. I hope you agree with me that your most valuable asset is your time. Would you spend that time getting frustrated looking through Outlook emails or have CRM software present to you relevant information at the right time and at the right place?

Microsoft outlook makes you work harder but Soffront CRM Software helps to work smarter.

There is a reason why MS Excel is categorized as a spreadsheet product and not a CRM software.

Small businesses tend to rely heavily on them to manage Sales, Marketing and other critical aspects of their functions. Sure you can store Names and Phone numbers and Order details and even aggregate them and chart them but have you ever thought about the risks, the inefficiencies and the shortcomings of this approach?

Dilbert Dilemma

Cost of ownership and the lack of technology to implement a CRM software are things of the past. With a plethora of options in the marketplace, including some versions that are free, bringing a CRM implementation to fruition is easier now than it ever was.

Here are some reasons you need to get away from spreadsheets, from our perspective.

• Unless you are already on Excel 2010, you are on a single user system. This means, data sharing or collaboration is a utopian concept to you. Even if you had Excel 2010, you are still limited in terms of data sharing within the organization (read access levels).
• Managing relationships between your customers and their data is best left to a database driven application. Excel cannot understand dependencies like customers and orders and opportunities and so on. Sort alphabetically by the customer name column and see how the sales order related column is completely out of whack.
• Building processes and workflows, however simple, are really not the forte of MS Excel. This is where a CRM would shine as you inherit the benefits of the best practices for your industry based on the experience of the vendor with companies similar to yours. As you can well imagine, if you don’t follow predefined processes in your organization, you essentially have organized chaos.
• No calendaring features that are critical to alerts, follow ups and scheduling. Even the most basic CRM application will beat MS Excel hands down in this area.

You can program the heck out of Excel to add a lot of things but look at this as sticking in an AMG 5.5 Biturbo V8 in a Geo Metro and expect wonders on the Nurburgring track!

To be fair, a lot of small businesses use MS Access which is surely a much safer bet but our intention here was to jolt the spreadsheet users into realization that technology alone need not be the cause for a stymied business growth or in extremes, a devastating data loss.

Over the years, we have worked with numerous clients who have, for many years, run their core business processes on spreadsheets, flat files and documents. This was mainly due to the fact that they were small, deeply entrenched in the ways of file sharing and manual processing and saw no issues in passing calls around the different departments to try and help the customer. They were impervious to changes as, often, the perception was that they were doing things the perfectly normal way.

Life before CRM Software

 What I am about to share with you is very commonplace from a vantage point on our side of the fence, but thought provoking nevertheless.

Technology companies that are involved in the design, fabrication and manufacture of high tech components like NAND flash, that now power our computers and iPods and digital cameras are always pushing the boundaries of technology and design for faster, cheaper and better products. Yet some of them seem to be hopelessly behind on the technology curve when it comes to running their sales and partner management processes. That’s an incredible paradox. Even today, some still rely on good old spreadsheets, flat files and documents. Sure, they have ERPs but that is not necessarily the right tool for the job.
Years of focus on manufacturing improvements, stole the limelight away from the equally important areas of building great partner and channel relationships and managing them effectively using relevant technology. Well guess what, in spite of all of the above, they have actually done quite well for themselves. This only made them overly cautious in terms of investing in unknown tools called CRMs that seemed to promise the world and so that seemed to justify the deferral.

Sure, there were undercurrents of issues where follow ups fell by the wayside or special needs or requests from partners disappeared in the black hole of a sales cycle but all was well, in general. Processes are designed by humans and it is basic nature to procrastinate until it really starts hurting.

Along came high growth rates, changing market conditions and perceptions about customers and of course, increasing pain in terms of lost opportunities. Pain always drives us to look for resolutions and that is what ultimately drove those skeptics to the possibilities of considering technology as an option. By then, CRM systems had become a lot more affordable and there were some tangible benefits that were now becoming apparent.   

Soffront CRM Software

 Having successfully implemented a Partner Portal for their resellers, the paradox at technology companies is now history. Now they are reaping tangible benefits from the system that has dramatically enhanced communication and collaboration with their most important asset, their partners. It surely helps to know that you can always benefit from the experience and expertise of others and that not all implementations of CRM software are failures.