Sterling Power has been around since 1992, founded on the idea of bringing new technology into the marine market at a reasonable price. Their business is about providing electrical power products and solutions for uses in places where a connection to the mains is unavailable, unreliable or intermittent. We are delighted to announce that Sterling Power has chosen to use OpenCRM for their hosted CRM requirements.

http://www.sterling-power.com

We are pleased to announce that Pneutrol Ireland have selected OpenCRM to be their CRM software solution of choice. Pneutrol Ireland are known throughout the global concrete industry but are active in pioneering solutions for a wide range of industrial sectors.

http://www.pneutrol.com

As well as reporting and resolving problems, the support desk has the means to be a pro-active department that aims not only to solve problems, but to take preventative measures and stop those issues arising in the first place.

Support and Helpdesk tools in OpenCRM offer you the ability to do this and more. With the Helpdesk tied in with the rest of your CRM solution, the support team has a complete picture of customer accounts including order history, previous helpdesk issues, preferences and all other correspondence with the customer.

When a support query arises, the first steps are to establish who the customer is and what the issue is - the tools are there to offer a rapid resolution. Easy cross-referencing within the Helpdesk module means you can search for any similar issues which may have arisen in the past and what measures were taken to resolve them. Also, the details held on the customer record mean you can easily see if there is any history with this particular customer and how any pain points or other issues have previously been dealt with.

The cloud-based connectivity also means that support issues are visible throughout the organisation. Technical staff, sales, marketing, the finance department and development teams can all view the types of issues coming in on the support desk, making any troubleshooting a much easier discussion, as everyone has been put on the same page.

Reports showing analysis of Helpdesk tickets, broken down into the categories you need, can easily be created and scheduled to be mailed out to the relevant members of your organisation, in good time before any weekly or monthly meetings. Of course the creation and sending of these reports can be automated in your OpenCRM solution.

The above examples show how support enquiries and issues permeate all departments of an organisation, and how using a hosted CRM solution such as OpenCRM you can keep the Helpdesk at the heart of the organisation and in doing so keep the customer at the forefront of your business.

Many decisions are made on gut instinct and indeed some have become famous for making their fortune by making some “game changing” gut instinct decisions. But for most this approach is likely to be hit or miss, and place the emphasis on “miss”.

Here is where CRM comes into play. Whilst not wanting to remove any of the creative thought process that might be the life and soul of a business, a CRM solution provides a bit of a safety blanket for the instinctive. By offering insight and analysis on previous decisions that were based on instinct, you are able to compare outcomes, and decide whether your instinctive decision in a given situation is likely to be the right one. Instead of fully reining in the free thinking spirit, this allows you to develop that instinct whilst maintaining a level of balance and security. So instead of pitching instinct against insight, CRM lets you do the free thinking and analyses whether to give the green or red light.

Sales Pitch: Whether it’s to see if you have stayed within budget, worked to the allocated timescale, prioritised your jobs correctly - using OpenCRM you can analyse the success of any given project or group together project statistics in a report to give you an accurate snapshot of your levels of success in project management. Click here for more information

There was a great campaign being run by Microsoft Dynamics Online a little while ago that speaks to a subject that is close to our hearts.

Dont allow yourself to end up being tied into a solution that relies on a 3rd party leveraging, granted, a great development and delivery framework that relies on the high cost partner to maintain. Force.com has got to be one of the best development concepts in modern computing. I am not refering to the technical underbelly which makes or breaks software delivery platforms such as these, I am talking about the 'hard sell' and the power of the support mechanism to get you to buy into what salesforce have to offer.

What makes Force.com so cool is also what makes the partnering with a Force Partner potentially limiting. Yes the platform offers flexibility but just take a look at the myriad of ways that your partner can tie up their customisations. Of course the idea is open so you can (in theory) move to a new partner if your relationship fails OR someone else can do a better job, but honestly, do you think that Force.com partners dont know that!

They are always a bit tongue in cheek ad campaigns like this from Microsoft - in some ways all they actually achieve is is to validate that Salesforce.com are the number one for Cloud CRM. What it does for us is highlight how careful you need to be when deciding on your CRM strategy.

Sales Pitch : If you need customisations on your OpenCRM system our team of clever professionals will be on hand to help you get the best from what we have to offer.

What is the European Union's Data Protection Directive (EUDPD) and does my OpenCRM system meet these guidelines?

The European Union has a data protection Directive which in essence protects users data from being stored outside of  European Union countries.

One of the core elements of this directive is to create a set of guidelines that protect personal data and to achieve the adherence to these guidelines data needs to be stored within the judicial boundaries of the European Union and its members.

The essence of the directive is that data should only be held on systems within a Union country.

OpenCRM hold ALL European data within Approved member country Data Centres.

This is important for OpenCRM subscribers because you will likely be holding personal information within your OpenCRM systems and you need to be assured that you are holding data in compliance with the guidelines.

Data held outside of the EU has similar regulatory guidelines in terms of protection. At OpenCRM we adhere to guidelines and regulations that apply in the country where the physical data is held - the Data Centre, if you would like to limit your data to being held within a specific location please advise us and we will make the necessary arrangements.

UK and European subscribers do not need to do anything if they are happy that their data is held within the European Union ONLY. We follow the guidelines set out within the EUDPD.

The IGC Group provides business communication solutions. They use their knowledge and business experience to assess their clients’ business requirements and provide the best package to suit their communications needs. Management of this information depends on a reliable CRM software solution and we are pleased to announce that IGC have elected to use OpenCRM to manage this.

http://www.igcgroup.co.uk/

Based in the heart of MediaCity UK, The Studios is an HD television studio complex that also features audio studios as well as post-productions, media management and support services. As you might expect, connectivity is of paramount importance in the media business, and how better to manage these connections than within a CRM solution, we are therefore happy to announce that The Studios have selected OpenCRM to manage their CRM requirements.

http://www.mediacityuk.co.uk/studios/the-studios

Chad Lighting designs and manufactures contemporary luminaires for use in leisure, corporate and domestic environments. A strong customer focus and ethos of delivering every project on time no matter where in the world means that a powerful CRM solution is called for and we are proud to announce that Chad Lighting have decided to use OpenCRM for their cloud-based CRM software needs.

http://chadlighting.co.uk

International company The Pipe Supports Group specialises in pipe support equipment for power plants - both fossil and nuclear, petro-chemical, oil, gas, LNG, renewables & water treatment industries, as well as commodity hardware for commercial and industrial applications. Bergen Pipe Supports have chosen to use OpenCRM for their CRM requirements and we are very pleased to take them on as a customer.

http://www.pipesupports.com

Cloud Security. It’s only ever going to be as good as the security levels you have in place on the ground. Recent research by Symantec has shown that over a third (36 percent) of data breaches in the UK in 2011 were caused by negligent workers or contractors. You can read the report by following the link below.

Of course, providers of cloud-based services have a responsibility to provide the requisite security measures. As well as secure centres and data encryption to prevent criminal attacks, there are security measures available to the end users and system administrators, for example being able to set a minimum level of security on passwords, and using permission levels to set data hierarchies and restrictions within the cloud solution.

But one of our key takeaways is to know that we need to educate within the organisation, and get processes, technologies and policies understood by all users. Of course each breach of data and security has not just a financial implication, but also has an impact on the brand and customer satisfaction. When seen in this light, the cost of training your users might seem very reasonable as opposed to the cost of repairing a data breach. There’s no point in blaming the cloud, if your users are leaving the gates to the skies wide open…

To read the full report please click here

SONIC Performance Support is a privately held provider of video learning solutions founded in Hamburg, Germany in 2006. Its prominent product is the Instant Learning Server ® — a Web platform that makes short, instructional video snippets available online. SONIC is working with a team of 30 in two locations, Hamburg, Germany and Philadelphia, PA. We are very pleased to be able to announce that Sonic PS have chosen to use OpenCRM for their cloud-based CRM requirements

http://www.sonic-performance-support.com/en

Financing business assets such as vehicles and equipment is a challenge that has individual requirements, timescales pressures and objectives. Cardiff based firm MacManus Asset Finance aim to deliver the best service in this field and have some specific requirements of how a CRM solution can help manage this. Formerly using Salesforce, we are very happy to welcome MacManus Asset Finance on board with OpenCRM.

http://www.macmanusassetfinance.co.uk

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 the clever things CRM can help you do is to help you stimulate business and revive any accounts that might be flagging. You are able to do this by creating a display showing all accounts which have done no business with you within a specified period of time. Of course you can create different categories of these records – accounts with no activity for the past month, accounts which have been inactive for six months and so on. You can then launch a course of action relevant to each of these lists of records – for example sending a products overview to one set of clients, or making a special offer or other benefit to another group of clients.

Another business tool that your CRM solution offers enables you to view reports on these accounts, in order to see how successful any campaigns to revive flagging customers have been. You can then make decisions about successful campaigns which could possible be intensified, or less successful campaigns and how you can turn these around.

Ultimately, your CRM solution can help you by providing a cost-effective method of creating new business by stimulating existing clients and making those win-backs happen.

Sales Pitch: The dashboard, home screen and reporting functions within OpenCRM allow you to gain insight into how your business is doing, for more information please click: http://opencrm.co.uk/features/home-page-and-reports.html

One of the nightmare scenarios for users of email tools such as Outlook is the mass mailout that you have just sent out – forgetting to put all the recipients into BCC. Not only is this a huge “ouch!” moment as it makes you look incredibly unprofessional, but it also gives away your valuable customer records which are a big part of your business collateral.

The email tools within OpenCRM are a great way of avoiding this scenario. When OpenCRM sends an email addressed to more than one recipient, it creates individual mails that are sent out one at a time, and as such these are ultimately individual mails and one bulk mail.

A further advantage of using OpenCRM to send your business mails is that it keeps a copy of your mails in OpenCRM, which is stored in the cloud. If your PC was to break down, you would not lose any of your data, as your mails are not just stored locally. Of course with storage space an issue that you need to take into account, now is probably a good time to point out that OpenCRM comes with 2TB or storage space, which should be more than enough for what you will ever need! For more details: http://opencrm.co.uk/storage-costs.html

There are a large number of further thoughts to take into consideration when we talk about bulk mailing – following good netiquette should really be high on that agenda for example. This is not only vital in making sure your potential customers remain happy to receive communications from you, but it also veers close to the legal parameters of what is allowed and what is going to get you into hot water.

There is a lot of documentation about the regulation of and accepted practises of targeted mass mails, so please search for this. At OpenCRM we also have a few articles in our Knowledgebase that may be of interest, for further reading please click here : http://opencrm.co.uk/crm-knowledgebase/kb1273036/What-is-the-Acceptable-Use-Policy-for-OpenCRM-Bulk-SMTP-Outbound-email-services.html

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 I received a follow up call, I did tick that box at the order stage” or “why am I getting marketing information for gardening equipment when I am interested in pet products?!”.

These questions can be avoided when a cloud-based CRM solution is used to manage the sales cycle. Right from the pre-sales stage, the salesperson can enter the correct details for the prospective customer into the CRM system. When a product or service has been decided on, the transfer of this quote to a sales order is an automated process. This means there is no manual process in having to re-enter the product information and therefore no chance to enter an incorrect product code for example. Remember that, as the sales person is using the cloud to enter the details, they are able to do it there and then on a mobile device when servicing the client. The results are instant and error-free.

When the item has been ordered and the sale has been processed, the invoice for the finance department can be generated again at the push of a button, without needing to re-enter any information. No nasty surprises for the customer when the email with their invoice arrives!

Finally, when the post-sales support mechanism kicks in, the support team can bring up the invoice and sales order details, and have a full and accurate history of the prior activities associated with that transaction. If the customer has made any specific post-sales enquiries or requests, these can be logged as activities on the CRM system as and when the requests are made, with a system of notifications in place that ensure enquiries are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Sales Pitch:

A hosted CRM solution such as OpenCRM is a great place for you to manage your sales cycle from start to conclusion and beyond. You can find further details on what we offer by clicking on the following link: http://opencrm.co.uk/features/sales-orders.html

So you want to move to a new CRM solution. This might be your first time using CRM with this organisation, or you could be migrating from one CRM solution to another. Perhaps you feel your existing solution has become too expensive; there are countless reasons that might prompt a move.

On top of getting the new system up and running and educating your Users, one of the main challenges is getting your data imported.

There are a number of things which can make this task either quick and simple, or long and painful. Having been in involved in the data migration process for numerous systems, here are a few pointers which might help.

• Have you mapped all the fields you need in the information you are exporting? One field that is often not present in data we see is the “assigned to” field. It is easy to add this field to a csv file by copying and pasting the relevant users prior to import, and this means that ownership is assigned to your data right from the start.

• Have you looked at the format in which the data is presented in the system you will be using? Look at the fields that contain details such as name and address – are they separated into first and last name? Is the street address all contained in one field? And is the data in the correct field? Looking at data on a csv file it is easy to see where email addresses have erroneously slipped into the phone number field.

• Have you looked at the related entities and how the data needs to interact within your new system? If you are importing companies and contacts, do you have the right company name on the contact record and are those names consistent? If you have a “Jones Limited” in one spreadsheet and a “Jones Ltd” in the next, this will create two unrelated records, which brings you quickly into those murky waters known as duplication.

• If you are importing other data such as Activities, do you have a means of identifying the related contacts and companies in the import data?

• Remember, all of your information is easy to merge, delete, re-arrange and tidy up at this early stage, when your data is contained in a spreadsheet format such as csv.

Of course in a CRM solution such as OpenCRM you can filter your data and should you need to bulk update records, this is easily done. But the earlier you start to tidy up your records and data, the easier it will be to manage when on your CRM solution, not to mention starting with a clean slate like this will help encourage a solid practise for future data management.

For more advice and tips have a look here: http://opencrm.co.uk/crm-knowledgebase/kb1401086/Things-to-consider-when-importing-data-into-OpenCRM--Troubleshooting-imports-that-are-not-working.html

The internationally-based company Green Investment Services is a carbon consultancy that work with their customers to help their decision-making in the Carbon Emissions Trading Market, to find and recommend the best green investments worldwide. This requires a sophisticated and deep CRM solution and we are pleased to say that GIS have selected to work with OpenCRM to fulfil this need.

http://www.greeninvestmentservices.com

We are delighted to announce that North Yorkshire based office fit-out and refurbishment experts Brava have opted to use OpenCRM for their CRM requirements. Established in 1980 Brava has developed into a client led resource for the office fit-out and refurbishment market place with an enviable reputation for service.

http://bravals.com

Different businesses and organisations all have one thing in common regardless of size or level of success – they are all facing the prospect of managing ever increasing volumes of data. This can be anything including growing numbers of historic records, email and other addresses, sales documents, marketing data, quotes and all kinds of information that you gather about your leads and customers. The quantity of data is increasing, and this needs to be processed with the same or possibly fewer resources that have traditionally been used.

A great step forward in terms of data management is the ability to store it in a centralised database. This enables the post-sales team to access data that was collected and managed before and during the sale by marketing and sales teams. The logical way to store this is in a cloud-based solution, which can be accessed real-time at any time and any place. Managing all your customer data in one location offers the marketing team the chance to push new product and company information, special offers and customer advice, based on the sales and account history of each client.

The more this data grows, the more challenging it becomes to manage. This challenge can be met by using a standardised practise, such one CRM solution to house this data and manage the relations between the different fields of knowledge. As your data grows, you are able to keep the historic data on your virtual workplace, without having to file it away into boxes of paperwork or discs down in the basement. Maintaining your data on your CRM solution also means you do not have to worry about any additional safety or security implications should you be storing data in a secondary location.

Whereas traditional forms of data grew and became more complicated to manage, filtering and reporting tools within CRM mean more information brings additional value as you are able to build up more complete and accurate images of your customers and potential clients.

What’s more, instead of piling more and more files on top of each other, cloud-based CRM stores these records in a manner that is easy to access and manage. If knowledge is power, being able to store all of this intelligence at your fingertips in a CRM solution is surely the most effective means of harnessing and benefitting from what could be your greatest asset – your customer data.

Sales Pitch: OpenCRM offers you a huge storage facility, allowing you to keep all your important data together, in one CRM solution. This provides many benefits, amongst others the ease of access of data in the cloud and the peace of mind of a secure storage solution for your day-to-day and historic business records.

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 social media. Of course social media is here to stay and every serious contender needs to feature it in the marketing mix, but jumping on every platform available simply “because it is there” is not going to work. Blatant sales marketing on a direct marketing platform will backfire as it breaks down the levels of trust upon which that very platform is built. Being spammed with an unsolicited sales message on a person’s private space is a sure way of getting to “unlike” or “unfollow” the product or company in question!

Implementing tools available in your CRM solution is a good way to get your social media campaigning in tune with your target audience. You can filter your customers and potential customers using the data you have collected, and are able to send intelligent direct messages that are in tune with the intended audience.

The campaigns module in your CRM solution is a great place to build lists of addresses related to a specific marketing offensive. This can be converted into the type of campaign required – whether by phone, email, a mailout or via a social network – your target group data is contained in one location with plenty of tracking tools to enable you to get the most from your marketing efforts.

Sales Pitch: Click on the hyperlinks to see how OpenCRM can help you with your Campaign Tracking and your Event Management .

When you use something on a daily basis, it quickly becomes a part of your routine. This might be the route you choose to drive to work, how you make a cup of coffee in the morning, or some of the ways you approach your work, or in our case, your CRM solution. Sometimes it takes a bit of observation and input from someone else to suggest improvements to your routine. Of course your first reaction will probably be to defend your way of doing things, after all this is how you have always done things – no-one likes change for the sake of it!

Once your pride has been swallowed however, you’ll see how filtering the water does makes your coffee taste so much better, or how that short scenic route to the office really does make the day start on a more pleasant note. I was happy enough with the way I searched for information in OpenCRM, clicking back and forth between modules in one window, when a colleague smiled and pointed at the magnifying glass beside the contact name. Clicking here opened the record in a new window, meaning I no longer had to click back and forth. Of course the magnifying glass had not appeared out of nowhere, it had been there all along. But having slipped into a routine I limited myself to see the tools I used every day and blended the rest out.

Every now and again some collaboration, advice and shared information will provide either new food for thought, or possibly a great new angle on how to approach certain tasks.

Sales Pitch: For advice on using OpenCRM whether a general overview or for a specific part of a particular module, our Knowledgebase is a great starting point. If the topic you are searching on is not covered in there, please contact us and we will do our best to remedy this.

We are pleased to take former Salesforce user Rubicon Workflow Solutions on board with OpenCRM. Rubicon is a company dedicated to supporting creative professionals working on a digital platform.  This is an exciting CRM project which we are glad to be involved with.

http://www.rubicon-solutions.co.uk

Nationwide is the UK’s largest vehicle body repairer, and we are proud to announce their decision to work with us at OpenCRM for their hosted CRM requirements. Of course a business such as Nationwide is as much about caring for the customer as anything else and so it makes sense to have a solid CRM solution in place.

http://www.ncrc.co.uk

A real benefit a CRM solution can bring to your organisation is one of information consistency.

Moving away from disparate siloed solutions and folders containing spreadsheets and data lists dotted all over on different machines means this data remains constant, with the added advantage of being able to track any alterations that are made.

Data conformity in CRM stems from the fact that everyone in your organisation is working on the same page. Instead of individuals or departments having their own copies of customer records, everyone remotely accesses and uses the same record. This means that as soon as one of your company clients changes their phone number for example, this alteration is apparent across the board instead of on the one person’s machine.

This centralised database of records promotes data consistency and reduces the margin of error.

A further benefit of using hosted CRM for your data storage concerns record of ownership. This means when viewing data, you can also see to whom the information is assigned, and who has been responsible for any amendments to the record. A principle beneficiary of this is the Helpdesk team. Being able to see the “assigned to” operator provides a Helpdesk ticket with an anchor point, should anyone else take a call from the same customer they are able to refer you back to the original technician or to view any notes made by that person.

This potentially cuts out any unnecessary and potentially unprofessional follow-up calls for a case that has already been dealt with.

The transfer of ownership is also a simple and error-free process. Reassigning a record keeps information intact, whilst notifying the new owner of the record in question. So if a particular issue needs to be transferred to another operator in your system there will be no loss of information, with the audit function offering the necessary mechanism for internal control.

In other formats, information passed around the office and beyond will gradually alter in shape and message as it goes from one desk to the next. However, information that is shared within a cloud-based CRM solution either remains unchanged or has all alterations accounted for. Your data is visible across the board and is accessible from anywhere, in the office, in a meeting or out in the field.

Sales Pitch: For more information on how OpenCRM can help with your data and contact management please click on this link

Something we believe in here at OpenCRM is transparency. We are confident that our product will work for you and we have great long-term relationships with our customers. A part of this confidence in our product is that we offer a monthly subscription rate. This gives our customers the chance to split payments for their hosted CRM solution over the course of the year making it an affordable and easily managed overhead. A recent study showed that two-thirds of Salesforce customers are billed annually*, making this a harder pill to swallow in today’s market place where the landscape changes more frequently than ever before.

As well as making the financing of OpenCRM more manageable, this helps keep the relationship with our customers active, as we interact on a far more frequent basis than simply an annual subscription renewal.  We work in close partnership with our clients, meaning that when you sign up with OpenCRM you are more than “just a number”, having a dedicated team working for and with you. We like getting to know our customers and us knowing their CRM needs puts us all on the same page and sets the foundations for a happy and fruitful working relationship.

*source: Zdnet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/salesforce-competition-distractions-to-hamper-growth/65230

Focussing on medical education services, we are pleased to announce that Pharma Mix have adopted OpenCRM as for their hosted CRM needs after having vetted a number of different solutions. Pharma Mix is a technology and services company specializing in knowledge and effectiveness solutions for the healthcare industry.

www.pharma-mix.com

My Business FD are a UK based company that provide Finance Directors to help secure funding for businesses of all sizes. The team works with their clients to help build a business plan, provide a financial forecast and assist in funding applications. We are happy to announce that for their CRM requirements, My Business FD are now using OpenCRM, and we look forward to a bright sunny future together.

http://www.mybusinessfd.com/

OpenCRM is being used by a huge variety of companies, each of which has their own individual needs and demands of the system. One way in which we are able to service these differences is by enabling the creation of custom fields. This allows you to capture all kinds of unique data within your CRM solution.

Furthermore there are many distinct types of user-defined fields you can create. As well as text fields,  some of the more common ones we use all the time on clients’ systems include creating picklists, checkboxes, URL, telephone  and user selector fields. As well as broadening the functionality, this makes creating new records quicker and reduces the margins of error – selecting a value from a picklist means they will always be consistent rather than having to type the entry every time.

To give you an example you could create the following field on a company record entitled “Catchment Area”. This might be a picklist populated with the values South-East, South-West, North-East, North-West, Midlands and London.

Once you have created the ability to capture this unique information, the next logical step is to make this data quickly and easily available for you. Having a way of displaying all the companies in a particular catchment area means you are able to use this list, perhaps to send out a targeted message relevant to this group of companies, or you can work your way through the list in a systematic and logical way. This is easily done in OpenCRM by creating a view which displays companies based on the selected filter.

This is just one example of how creating custom fields gives you a great way of distilling your data – by using combinations of fields, custom fields and views, you can clarify the data in as specific or general as your needs demand.

For further information on how you can create custom fields in OpenCRM please refer to this FAQ.

Year in year out, this is the period in the calendar when people throw themselves head first into those New Year’s resolutions. They come in many shapes and forms but often fall into common categories – healthy diet, active living, a more positive approach to family and working life. More often than not it will be these same resolutions that were made the year before, and they are the resolutions that tend to fall by the wayside come this time next month.

If you need that kick in the rear every now and then to remind you to take advantage of your expensive gym membership, or your determination to not forget family birthdays, then OpenCRM may be one way of helping you out. Just as you can set yourself reminders that let you know when your meetings and activities are due you can also set up those digital memos to appear and jog (sorry bad joke) your memory as to just how much the gym subscription cost you, or that your brother-in-law’s birthday is just round the corner.

Of course, whether you pay attention to these notifications is entirely up to you – your hosted CRM solution can remind and TELL you to get down to the gym – sadly it won’t do the workout for you! (not in version 3 anyway :-)

Why not let OpenCRM help you with management of your time, your appointments and your other calendar entries? Furthermore entries that you have put into your Google calendar can be quickly and easily synchronised into OpenCRM with the tools we have available making them easily available on the road (or rowing machine) on your mobile devices.