By Tom M Chapman

I recently had a stay in a very nice hotel in the country. It was a small affair and its familiarity was part of the charm. The furnishings and decor were old-fashioned which was pretty nice. However their contact management was similarly antiquated, and this could be the difference between only managing to keep a business afloat and having a business that is booming.

When I asked for some local information, they referred to a sheaf of pages on the counter, which contained names and numbers. Their plumber, greengrocer, contact for the advertisement in the local paper, the

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If you need to create a series of Activities automatically at different points when using OpenCRM to manage a process then Action Plans are for you.

Take a look Here to read this Knowledgebase article on what an Action Plan is, how they work and where you set them up.

You have a very valuable resource and that is your customer base. As well as containing name and address details of your customers, your CRM solution is able to link quotes, sales orders and invoices to those records, allowing you to build up a complete history of the business you have conducted with each of your clients.

As well as locating new potentials, following the lead nurturing process and establishing new customers, you also have a list already created of those that are prepared to spend their money with you, meaning there is a good chance they are prepared to do this again.

One of

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The sales cycle can be a long and convoluted journey – both for the customer and for the supplier. The customer expresses an interest in one product, gets passed from the marketing department to the sales department, who then pass the customer onto finances, before the post-sales support team picks up the pieces. The customer may have to re-explain their requirements and order at each of these stages to prevent “no, I didn’t want that one, I want the same one that the marketing brochure showed me”, “why am I being billed for postage when I picked the item up”, to “why haven’t

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I recently followed a number of news reports that revealed how a major player in the automobile industry launched a twitter campaign to coincide with the Superbowl; unfortunately for them the campaign was a thinly disguised form of spam and was quickly exposed as such (OK, as you probably know the company was Toyota, for further reading see: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/04/toyota-takes-to-spamming-twitter-for-camry-super-bowl-promotion/)

This clearly shows that even the biggest companies and multinationals around are in the same starting blocks as everyone else when it comes to

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