When your business is small and you are starting off in business it is very easy to keep track of all your communications with your clients and for that matter communications between employees, but as you grow and start to expand your business that’s not so easy any more. That’s when some things start to fall through the cracks and you don’t keep in contact with your customers quite so often. Studies have shown that the main reason customers stop doing business with you is that they perceive that you don’t care or don’t value their business.

This is where a good CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) system comes in. A good CRM system will allow everyone in your organisation too maintain those contacts with your customers and not only retain customers but grow the business.

Similarly in these recession times your employees can be spread much thinner on the ground and particularly if you have people on the road it’s difficult to work as a cohesive team and get that pool of knowledge and skills to be passed around between employees. That’s where good collaborative software can really help.

Unfortunately both CRM and Collaborative software systems can require significant amounts of IT and computer infrastructure to run effectively and apart from the capital costs to install them these systems, they require expertise in terms of IT Personnel to keep them running efficiently. That means extra recurring costs that your business can ill afford at this time.

But there is an potential answer, Software as a Service or to put it another way rent the software . That way all those complicated bits like servers, firewalls, networks, ups, databases, backups and the IT people to keep it all running smoothly are in a hi-tech data center and all you need is remote access via a broadband connection. From a business and budgeting point of view you don’t have any capital outlay and have predictable monthly costs.

It is these things that can give you the edge over your competitors in tough times.

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Well done to all concerned, great content, great format and plenty of networking opportunities.