Acquiring new customers is a painstaking & costly exercise. You’ll have to run from one end to another marketing or pitching your product to customers. Often times it takes an umpteen number of meetings before you can sign the customer. All the previous calls & meetings with lost opportunities are not entirely useless either.
A combined knowledge of successful & unsuccessful pitches will help make your next sales call more efficient. On a similar note, customer retention is just as important. As repeat sales lead to positive word of mouth and less overhead towards marketing. But how can you achieve all these things economically & effectively? Using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution such as vtiger.
Overview
vtiger CRM is a free, full-featured, 100% Open Source CRM solution that’s ideal for small and medium businesses. The CRM package comes with a standard set of features such as Salesforce automation, marketing automation, activity management, calendering, support tickets, email management, inventory management as well as security management.
Overview
As mentioned earlier, vtiger is free to download and use, although professional support is not. However, if you need professional support for deploying or running the package, affordable paid support can be availed from the development team.
Installation
vtiger deployment is as awesome as it can get. If you are planning to run it behind your local firewall or on a desktop, vtiger CRM software comes in a package with all the necessary software integrated as a single executable file which is available both for Windows and Linux (RedHat, Debian, SuSe, Fedora, and Mandrake) operating systems.
The installer handles everything by itself, including the tough tasks of setting up of a database, web server and other dependencies that you require for running vtiger CRM smoothly. Installation experience will be similar to that of installing a music player or a web browser and not a business automation app.
Planning to run a hosted version of the vtiger? There is a package for that too. Just grab the source file instead of the exe file and you can install it on any typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server.
Setting Up the Self Hosted Version
Installation Check
Extract and upload the CRM script into the root folder of the domain you are planning to use via FTP. With vtiger, there is no need to edit the configuration file to add the database information and you can go to the domain for installation straightaway. Once you agree to the ToS, vtiger will examine if the webserver has all the requisite components in place. Warnings and errors will be displayed prominently for you to check & reconfigure.
Selecting Modules
If the web server is competent, we are then asked to choose the list of modules to be installed. Now we come to the most important part of the process – filling out database information and configuring login access. Take the help of your network admin or ISP to fill in the correct information or else the installation will go bust.
System Configuration
Once we are all set, you have the option to fill the installation with demo data and my advice for newbies is to go with it. This will ensure that you know exactly what can be done with the CRM solution.
Automation, Customer Support & Inventory Management
Salesforce Automation
As with any good CRM solution, vtiger has a solid salesforce automation. From Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Account & Contact Management, Sales Pipeline Management, Sales Forecasting to Sales Analytics vtiger covers the key options needed by your sales team.
Leads
Right from creating leads to converting them into opportunities, vtiger lets you perform end-to-end lead management. With the help of web forms, you can capture data from your webpage and convert them to leads directly.
Opportunities are labeled Potentials in vtiger CRM and all customer related activities associated with communication like calls, emails visits etc. can be tracked.
Marketing Automation
vtiger CRM automates a major chunk of marketing activities like Campaign Management, E-mail Marketing, Online Lead Forms and Product Management. This makes organization-wide marketing campaigns more streamlined.
Marketing Campaigns
When running a marketing campaign, you can send mass mailers directly from the CRM to multiple mailing lists using custom HTML templates.
Customer Support
Support Tickets
Critical customer support & service features, such as Ticket Management, Knowledge Management, Customer Self Service Portal, Reports and Support Statistics are part of the core CRM solution.
A Support Ticket
Tickets can be managed centrally and assigned to agents & tracked end to end till the issue is resolved. The customer portal for support tickets can be integrated to your webpage for ease of use.
Inventory Management
Even though inventory management falls mostly as a function of an ERP solution, vtiger goes the extra mile by adding this feature by default. Complete sales cycle management is achieved by integrating Inventory Management functions (Products, Price Books, Vendors, Sales Quotes, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders & Invoices) with CRM modules (Leads, Accounts & Contacts, and Opportunities).
A Price Book
The main goal behind this seamless integration is to provide reliable pre-sales and post-sales activities management at a single place rather than juggling multiple apps.
Final Thoughts
vtiger is every bit a competent CRM platform when compared to its outrageously priced rivals like Salesforce CRM or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. One thing people forget when choosing a CRM solution is the cost of the infrastructure it is going to reside in. When you go for a proprietary CRM solution like Microsoft Dynamics you will have to buy separate licenses Microsoft Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server on top of the CRM solution. The costs will just keep piling up and it would be years before the investment is recouped for a small or medium business.
With a ridiculously simple point & click interface for installation that can even be run on your age old desktop, it is just impossible to ignore vtiger. As with most other open source software, vtiger has a rather lacking website design. Now that they have their own hosted solution & a well known partner like Zoho, they might consider redesigning their webpage to give it a more professional edge.
It took forever for me to get the packages and exe files to download from their servers. Except for these glitches, the core CRM solution is flawless & production ready and vtiger is indeed a diamond in the rough.
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