Recent news concerning the losses faced by the HMV group came as no surprise to me. Aside from  online buying, downloading and an increasing interest from supermarkets in the music and media market, HMV no longer has any high street competition. I believe this has led to them letting standards slip, offering a poor range of goods at non-competitive prices.

The CRM market couldn’t be more different. It seems each day as we work here we are made aware of more and more companies offering a CRM solution for sale. This makes us ever more conscious that customers out there have a huge choice and with a little research will find the CRM solution that is optimally suited to their needs. Far from being a hindrance to us here, this is the best incentive we could have to keep our product fresh, flexible and competitive.

Just as in the CRM market, I wish there were more companies still vying for space on the high street media market, that way I would no doubt be able to find something to buy on the shelves of the high street stores.

Sales pitch: At OpenCRM we listen to the specific needs of every potential, new and existing client and try and implement as many suggestions as possible into our system. This enables us to provide bespoke options for a particular client whilst adding a further tool which we can incorporate into OpenCRM.

One of the benefits of your CRM system is contact management, giving you the benefit of having all the contacts and contact information you need at your fingertips anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

The first line of customer care will always be satisfaction – ensuring that customer needs and orders are fulfilled as quickly, reliably and professionally as possible. But with advanced use of your CRM system you can build on these foundations and take your customer satisfaction to beyond expected levels and make a real impact on your customer loyalty.

As the name of CRM suggests customer management is also paramount and a useful offshoot of this is customer care. I’m talking about making your customers feel valued and in turn encouraging loyalty as a sense of affiliation to your organisation or product develops. Linking customers to specific product groups means you can inform them of any developments, new product releases or make them special offers.  Using templates you can also easily create and send to specific customer groupings questionnaires or similar marketing tools which serve the dual purpose of making the customer feel a part of the product as well as giving you the required feedback. There is a fine line between “befriending” customers and becoming an intrusive pest, but here common sense should be the guiding line.

As the general concept of what constitutes a “friend” shifts towards describing a virtual relationship as much as anything else, there is no reason why you shouldn’t harness this and use your CRM as a tool to maintain and service your client base and bring them closer into the loop.

Sales pitch: At OpenCRM we strive to develop a close relationship with our clients. We value clients’ input and opinions and these often provide us with inspiration when taking on further development projects.

Imagine your office being filled with filing cabinets – all containing the same files over and over again. The waste of space, time and resources is obvious. If you need to update one file, you need to go round the room, editing each of the identical files you have stored. You simply wouldn’t do it.

Yet when it comes to digital file storage it seems we lack that sense of order and discipline. Can’t find the record you are looking for? Create a new one! Didn’t ask the contact how their name or company is spelt? Create a new one with the name you heard or thought you heard! Search for that record later and can’t find it? Create a new one now you have the correct name!

With precise financing, contact and time management being more relevant than ever before, having clean data has never been more important. De-duplicating your records for use in your CRM software solution streamlines your operation more than you probably think. I recently read this interesting article which made all these points succinctly, particularly as we have been busy with de-dupes for some of our clients ourselves lately.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/24/datacentre_not_deduping

There you have it in black and white – de-duping saves time, money and resources.

Sales pitch: At OpenCRM we recognise the importance of de-duping and our system deals with this in many ways - warning you when you are about to create a duplicate record, giving you the option to merge records should duplicates be present and perhaps most importantly using filters to read and analyse records to prevent duplicates being created when importing larger volumes of information.

An aside: if we performed a de-dupe on the current singles charts would we be left with one song only?!? Signed, a Grumpy Old Man

As my colleague was turning the office upside down looking for a USB lead adapter specific to a particular brand of kit, I asked myself for the millionth time why there aren’t universal standards in such fields. I’m talking camera memory cards, phone chargers and the like. The computer industry has long recognised this and USB has become a standard interface used the world over. I guess I can say goodbye to the rather large cardboard box I have in the garage full of obsolete adapters, leads and cables, not to mention the bag full of mobile phone chargers which I have amassed.

It’s not only separate companies using their own system –in my household we have two Blackberries and the chargers are non-compatible. That simply makes no sense whatsoever.

Whilst initially I am sure each company benefits from the situation by obliging customers to stick to their own products, this has also had adverse results - I as a consumer have avoided certain products as their own accessory range was exclusively unique to them. Mentioning no names, I am of course talking about Sony digital cameras which insist on using their own format SD memory cards thereby rendering any cards you may have from a previous device wholly incompatible unless you have been “Sony for life”.

A quick search for “universal phone chargers” in your favourite search engine shows you that the industry decides to create a universal charger with frightening regularity. It always seems to be lurking on the agenda somewhere but is never actually implemented. Apparently this device is “due for imminent launch” - as it was in an article from 2007 I read recently - so I personally won’t be holding my breath.

How does this relate to us? Well we like to think our hosted CRM solution can be used as a universal adapter to suit your business management requirements. As a web based solution you forego the need to invest in in hardware or software and whether you have 1 user or 1000 using 2 or 25 modules we are able to help you out without the need for any interface or interim solution.

I may be stating the obvious when I say that your CRM software is only going to be as good as the person using it. This may well mean retraining your habits - for example saving documents into OpenCRM rather than to your pc. I know people are generally hostile to change especially when a system appears to be doing fine just as it is, but with a few minor adjustments OpenCRM can help streamline your workload and make your days’ work achieve more results.

Here are 10 suggestions to help you get more out of your daily use of your web based CRM solution:

1. Instead of making notes on post-its, create notifications or activities for yourself.

2. Use the ability to send yourself messages to your OpenCRM system to mail yourself reminders from your smartphone to catch that idea you had just before going to bed.

3. Send colleagues and clients notifications with links to any new interesting or relevant documents you have created.

4. Use the calendar tool to set yourself reminders for tasks that may otherwise go under your radar.

5. Enter any new information relating to leads, companies or contacts immediately rather than saving it for the end of the day or week.

6. Explore additional settings – the chances are that the tool you wish was featured in OpenCRM is already there!

7. Use the contact management and linking tools that are at your disposal – ensure that contacts are linked to appropriate companies, projects and so on. You may know who belongs where but this is invaluable information you can share across your organisation.

8. Enter as much information as possible. There are bound to be details which will prove invaluable at some later stage.

9. Use the custom view tools to set pages to show as much information as possible that is relevant to you. You can set yourself a custom view on each page and with practise you should quickly find views that help you to maximise the efficiency of your working day.

10. Do not delete items when you are finished with them! Changing the status of an Activity, for example, to "Done" will mean it is no longer visible on your “to do” view, but the information – which will no doubt come in handy at some point in the future, is still held in the system to be retrieved at any time.

I read an article from MyCustomer.com that is titled "CRM in 2011 : What do the experts Predict?"

The article is interesting but seems to miss the point in my opinion, every time I read these articles it talks in a grand way about corporate strategy and uses buzz words that no one understands (I guess this is because the people using them are frantically hoping that they will be the ones to uncover a new buzz word so that they can be the experts on this subject - for a limited period - and craft a new niche for themselves).

This is the link to the article - worth a quick look and my response below (in case you were interested).

MyCustomer dot Com article

-- Comment posted 10th January 2010 --

Global Social and what about the Mid Market

This is really interesting stuff and echoes some of the discussion that we have been having as a hosted CRM product provider.

My only comment is that articles like these sometimes focus a little too heavily on the corporate approach to these strategic decisions and I feel that the massive growth potential in the mid-market will be 2011's legacy. Finally, all those companies that have been playing at CRM will step up to the plate and invest in a real CRM strategy, NOT CRM software but a true understanding of how they can level the playing field armed with a deliverable plan.

Its going to be an interesting year for social integration with CRM, first off the market needs to understand what this means... ask 10 people in a room (even if they are not plied with wine) and I suspect you will get 10 different answers.

Here's to a good year and lets analyse these comments this time next year when we can see what actually happened.

Over the years a large number of our clients have asked for a way to integrate their Personnel records into OpenCRM so that they can focus on a single system, helping them when dealing with Personnel activity management, you know the sort of thing, keeping a log of holidays & sickness along with the myriad of other tasks and questions that employees raise and need a swift resolution.

Over and over we have been told that yes, there is a place for a complex dedicated HR application but perhaps not in the mid-market. What we need (they cry) is something very straight forward that's available within our main office application.

We have been listening and one of the new features within OpenCRM being released as part of the V3 roll-out is a dedicated Personnel module. Just like other modules in OpenCRM you can secure the data that you enter and limit access to any of the information based a wide variety of standard security features.

With the ability to hold your employees details in one place with specific features to help track holiday entitlement, system generated supervisor notifications helping you to be reactive 'when it counts', as well as access to all of the standard OpenCRM features including sending emails, holding documents, tracking activities and much much more, the new Personnel module helps you stay organised all in one system.

Following in the footsteps of other major enhancements this Personnel module is standard on ALL subscription levels. Remember at OpenCRM there is only one product and you get access to all of the features all of the time, no compromises requiring a subscription upgrade to get a worthwhile new feature.

If you would like to take a look at what OpenCRM Personnel can do for you just click on the contact link in the top menu to drop us a note and we will be happy to get in touch.

OpenCRM V3 Hosted CRM is on track to be launched on January 24th 2011. The first V3 pilots have been actively using the new version since 4th January.

If you would like to be an early adopter please contact your account manager for further information.

The production release of OpenCRM V3 is only the first of a number of major product updates and add-on components for OpenCRM that are due during 2011

One of the questions that gets asked from time to time, when looking at projects is "Who should take ownership of the CRM project, in particular the roll out phase?" On the surface, surely this should be the CRM Project Consultant, but as I discuss here, this is not entirely true, let me explain.

Of course, having a strong projects team from the CRM supplier is a must, and in our case, at OpenCRM, we put together a team of people, all with specific responsibilities, who interact to deliver the solution (more of what we do and why in a future blog article), with a lead Project Manager who will liaise directly with the client and their key personnel. But, there needs to be a CRM champion on the client side also, and it is this person in a lot of cases, that will determine the success or failure of the overall project.

We keep saying "our job is half technology management and half people management, and the people management half is the most important and usually the largest".

The CRM champion needs to be someone who has the following skills;

• Good communicator


• Respected within the organisation - can help set expectations


• Can champion a cause and follow through - who believes in the CRM project


• Can solicit and communicate at all levels, to understand and help define the procedures that will be implemented


• Can personally, or has access to someone who can, apply pressure when needed to keep the project goals on track

Quite often this is the person who has negotiated the contract and been involved with the supplier selection, although not always. It may be someone delegated this task.

OpenCRM is a great repository for all of your company data, however, its how you use this data and how its use defines and streamlines the processes that get implemented that make the real difference. Users who can see the payback, because life gets easier (agreed, after some initial pain), will become advocates of the new systems and 'sell' the ideals and best practices themselves, so the CRM champions job has a limited shelf life, although, I feel that this persons role transitions through a number of phases as a successful CRM project is delivered. Once the initial delivery is completed, there is still a need for someone to monitor and plan for the future. Having a CRM Vision should be a real goal for all forward thinking businesses, so perhaps the champion remains, its just their focus that changes?

Sales Pitch : At OpenCRM we assign a dedicated team of CRM professionals to your project, commensurate to the type of project being undertaken. Our promise is : There will always be a senior Project Manager and a dedicated Technical Contact, regardless of the size of system being undertaken.

I came across this very interesting post by Ian Hendry and just had to offer a link.

In essence what Ian is saying is 'right on the money' in terms of current trends, LinkedIn has some real value, but the idea that everyone is just back slapping and recommending without any real knowledge of each other is terrible, but what I think is really funny is how Ian posts a product recommendation for a Dell Server that he admits he does not have...

If you are interested in LinkedIn and the new concept of Company pages, this will interest you, take a look here.

It goes without saying that OpenCRM would never elicit this kind of blatant product recommendation just to further our strategic goals.... but there are some that would!

OpenCRM V3 Hosted CRM software is due to be launched during January 2011. This will start with a structured roll out to existing clients and all new clients signing up. This has a host of new features and technology changes and introduces our new identity colours. This is a major release for us and we hope that our clients enjoy the streamlined user experience. If you would like to take part in the first phase of the new release please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

We have launched a new website, in fact, that's what you are looking at right now :-) This ties in with a new identity for OpenCRM as well, not just a change of the logo and some colours, but a whole re appraisal of what we do and reaffirming the ethos and values of the business. We hope you like what you see, please do let us know if you have any comments that would make your site experience better.

OpenCRM has relocated its base. Still located just outside of the historic market town of Richmond, at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales National Park (we might not be Silicon valley, but can claim to be Silicon Dale :-) We now have double the space to expand into. Nothing has changed within the team and products, still supplying web based CRM software as an alternative salesforce, hosted crm solutions are still our speciality. If you are passing we would love to see you and show you our 60 mile view down the valley (really - they say you can see York Minster in the distance on a good day)

If you need to use a meeting room and we can help, just give us a call.

Not for Profit leadership development organisation Common Purpose have selected OpenCRM to deliver their next generation Core Office applications. OpenCRM have been successful against a number of external providers as well as consideration to internal development.

Emmaus, the specialist church school supporter, who provide a wide range of advertising and vacancy filling services, with an openly Christian Ethos, selected to use the OpenCRM hosted CRM software solution to help manage their business processes. For more information on Emmaus look here....

Leading paint manufacturer Britannia paints, established for over 25 years, have adopted OpenCRM as their Hosted CRM Software service provider. Having considered alternatives to Salesforce, OpenCRM proved to be the preferred option.

OpenCRM is a 'real' web CRM solution, offering an online hosted and secure CRM solution at a fraction of salesforce.com. The real salesforce alternative. Take a look at the online demo here...

Not for Profit leadership development organisation Common Purpose have selected OpenCRM to deliver their next generation Core Office applications. OpenCRM have been successful against a number of external providers as well as consideration to internal development. OpenCRM will be used to deliver a hosted CRM software solution which will be used through their international offices. http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk.

During late 2009 and into 2010 more prospective clients have come from China.
With the Chinese version of the interface being developed, perhaps this really is an emerging market for OpenCRM?

ACPA - Association of Certified Public Accountants, have decided to use OpenCRM as their lead management solution, helping bring on more subscriptions and develop the membership base. ACPA are a source of support for Practising Accountants, giving real world solutions to their members. Software Add-ons are keen to support the development of ACPA, working closely with their business development managers across the UK. http://acpa.org.uk

5th May 2010 - OpenCRM V2.8 - Summer 2010 has been released for general production release. For a list of new features and enhancements take a look at the Build History within the OpenCRM Portal.

Greenwood Management - the international timber investment company, based in Palma de Mallorca, have selected OpenCRM as their CRM application of choice. having looked at alternatives such as salesforce.com Greenwoods decided on OpenCRM the UK based hosted CRM provider. Greenwood Management are located in Mallorca with an enviable client list around the world. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Canadian global technology provider Evolutra Corporation select OpenCRM (a real Salesforce.com alternative) to manage its operations for internal personnel. Evolutra are also partnering with Software Add-ons for on-demand solution provision across new geographical and product markets. http://evolutra.com

Vorsprung Group UK have selected OpenCRM to manage their sales and lead generation processes. Vorsrung have a number of financial products, including the Teleinvest portfolio, where leads and agent requests are directed into OpenCRM for their team of financial consultants to offer first class assistance. Web to Lead forms allow multiple sites and different enquiries to be managed through their central OpenCRM system, and channelled to the best skilled team member. http://vorsprunguk.com

Visa Kingdom have selected OpenCRM to run their office Visa and Immigration systems. The first phase of this project is the use of OpenCRM for Visa Kingdom personnel, with a portal (allowing access for clients) due to be built shortly. http://visakingdom.co.uk

OpenCRM now supports document templates created and merged in any Rich Text Format word processor. This includes popular applications such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer and Star Office.

Templates are created using familiar tools, making the formatting of complex documents easier. In many cases new clients can adopt OpenCRM and carry on using the same document library, just by codding the merge variables, making the documents easier to produce, store and also bulk merge.

Documents can be created using custom filters, from grids and also direct from Contact, Company, Leads and Helpdesk tickets.

Merging is managed from within OpenCRM and is very fast, no need to output the data and merge the list manually. Documents that are merged are automatically linked to the relevant records and added to the document manager.

The OpenCRM built in HTML editor is still available, and will remain within OpenCRM as it has its own benefits to assist clients with 'cloud document creation'.

For more information please select this link, we would welcome any comments or feedback.

Working with the Luv2 Group, Software Add-ons are providing OpenCRM as the core CRM and Project Management solution. Luv2 have previously used Salesforce and have been looking for a Salesforce alternative as a replacement, with a view to building a brighter relationship. Covering all of the facets of the business, Asset Maintenance, Cleaning Services, Property Maintenance, Training Consultancy and Credit Control Outsourcing, Luv2 will be using OpenCRM to resolve the challenges of a successful and growing business. http://luv2group.co.uk

MyLocalNews have adopted OpenCRM as their CRM solution aimed at providing a remote workforce with access to a common application, with the ability to share and collaborate on leads easier.

Based in Dublin MyLocalNews are seeing great success. mylocalnews.ie promote free local news for communities across the island of Ireland. They are heavily involved helping community groups to promote their messages locally. http://mylocalnews.ie

I guess two of the huge growth areas are going to be Data Integration and Open Source, as companies are forced to consider these strategies, either due to technology change constraints or budget.

Obviously this begs a question, how are these two areas relevant to each other, is this a particularly strong growth area?

Data Integration tools are becoming indispensable in the Enterprise. As companies merge, acquire and grow, their systems need ways to share data. Cost can be a challenge, budgets do not always stretch to the IT change over, or if they do, it’s a planned migration sometimes over years. Sometime technology just does not have an answer, one product, working well for a business with a user adoption because of the familiarity of the application, needs to be retained, and giving rise to the technology challenge of a data migration solution.

License free CRM Software UK company overwhelmed by response

CRM Software crafters Software Add-ons based in rural North Yorkshire are delighted with the response to their recession busting marketing campaign for OpenCRM.

The company's strong mission statement, "to bring corporate software technology within the reach of small to medium businesses" seems to be the key to their success.

Marketing manager Helen Burton revealed "we knew we had a strong message, offering free software, but our campaign has had the phones ringing off the hook!".

Consumer expectation is driving the mid market business need to get online , OpenCRMs license FREE solutions needed to be internet based with portal capability so customers can place and track orders, see cases and issues, download documents & information. Anytime, Anywhere access is a major boost for the previously disconnected workforce.

John Mabley of ITS describes his software as the glue between the systems. "I employ home teleworkers and need them to be connected to the office, OpenCRM integrated my telephony system, website and SageLine 50 accounts so that I can get a complete picture of my business day-to-day no matter where I am".

Managing Director Graham Anderson speaking for the company said "all businesses whether corporate or mid market have similar core business processes, Sales & Marketing - Sales Order Processing, Invoicing, Document & Project Management, he added that "too many software implementations fail because too much money goes into the purchase and licensing of software, by supplying license free on demand software we remove this cost and our clients can put their investment where it should be: requirement analysis ; staff training; and systems integration".

OpenCRM's advice, based on years of experience, is very clear: Choose a technically sound solution with an open structure (non proprietary database & interface) that will scale and integrate; encourage user uptake, keep IT simple, go for evolution rather than revolution, invest in your people and spend on training; Get rid of as much of the IT headache as you can by having your software systems hosted, managed, updated, secured and backed-up by the professionals.

For information on how to save up to 60% on the costs of your business solution by using license free crm software click here