With so many options it can be hard to decide what software will meet your businesses needs. Here are our top picks for front-office software.
If the back office represents the nuts and bolts of a business-;things like accounting, inventory management, and human resources-;then the front office is where the rubber hits the road.
“I would define front-office software as technology that enables customer-facing personnel to communicate more effectively with customers and prospects and other peers in the front office,” says Brian Vellmure, Focus network adviser and principal and founder of Initium LLC, a California-based strategic consulting firm.
And never have there been more software choices that can help you do that, whether they’re designed specifically for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), automating your marketing efforts, or using the latest social media tools to interact with customers and potential customers.
In fact, tech news site ZDNet’s Paul Greenberg is currently holding a “CRM Idol 2011” contest to try to sift through the thousands of CRM software providers vying for the business community’s attention. “There is definitely an unlimited number of them, with more coming out almost every week,” says Esteban Kolsky, principal of California-based research firm ThinkJar, expert on the Focus network, and one of the contest judges.
While we’ll never be able to cover all of the good front-office software options for small businesses, we we can provide you with a beginning look into the market today, with advice from industry experts about a few of the ones they like, and why. If the front-office software you use and appreciate isn’t on our list, please let us know in the comments section.
The Best Front-Office Software for Running Your Business: Core CRM
A very popular CRM solution on the market today is Salesforce, which offers on the cloud everything from marketing automation, a contact database, customer service, social media monitoring and engagement, analytics and forecasting and more.
While Focus network adviser Chris Selland uses Salesforce as part of his job as Chief Marketing Officer with Massachusetts-based social media monitoring company Terametric, he also likes Landslide, which he says is a good option for companies selling higher-end goods and services and those that have a very process-driven approach to sales. “They're a smaller company with a very responsive team,” he says.
SugarCRM has similar features as Salesforce but offers a free community edition, which businesses can download, or a cloud service which the company says is significantly cheaper than Salesforce.
“Zoho CRM recently gave me a briefing and I was quite surprised to see the plethora of functions it performs, even beyond CRM,” says ThinkJar’s Kolsky. “I would recommend taking a look if you are on the smaller side of the SMB market.”
CDC Pivotal, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, and Sage all have CRM products that industry experts also recommend.
“There are a lot of different vendors for a lot of different needs,” says Kolsky. “I like Zoho because it integrates the front office with the back office. I like Sugar because it’s very flexible. I like Microsoft because it has a nice user interface…I like SAP because it allows you to run your entire business, and Microsoft to a certain extent. There are many different criteria that would go into saying which one is best.”
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The Best Front-Office Software for Running Your Business: Marketing Automation
From anywhere from $200 to $4,000 a month you can use marketing automation software to manage demand generation campaigns and generate quality sales leads - including email marketing, lead nurturing, and lead scoring. It also includes analytics to measure marketing ROI and forecast marketing’s impact on revenue.
“Marketing automation lets you keep in touch with people who don’t buy right away so when they do get around to buying they still remember you. Otherwise they buy from whoever they spoke to yesterday,” says David Raab, principal at Raab Associates, a marketing tech consulting firm based in Chappaqua, New York, who says that keeping in touch with prospects is difficult without automation. “You can set up simple e-mail programs and other kinds of things but unless it’s fully automated you’re not going to do it in a small business. Nobody has the time.”
Like other segments within the front office, marketing automation vendors aren’t in any shortage. So how does a small business pick one?
