I have had a pretty good look at the main serious Web-based hosted SFA and CRM solutions.  Salesforce.com, Netsuite, SugarCRM, EBSuite CRM.  They are all very similar and probably very appropriate in many situations.

However my opinion is that none of them are intuitive and in a sales situation none of them are fast enough.  There are too many clicks for the bread and butter task which is

• get the customer history on-screen
• identify the contact - or record a new one
• record the call,
• send a mail
• schedule the next call. 

The user is buried in a sea of leads, opportunities, tasks, timetables, cases, quotes and projects.  Each with its own list and its own update form.  Of course most of this doesn't get used, but it does clutter up the screen something rotten.

In the end I wrote a  system for my own use and have rolled it out to a couple of clients where we could integrate it with the web site functions so that transactional data is included on the customer screen. 

The objective was to be as simple and intuitive as possible.   You won't recognise it as the same animal as the market leaders I listed above, but for me at least and my telesales person it seems to work very well at the core task. 

There is a demo at http://sales.textor.com 

Obviously it needs development and probably money to take it any further.  Here is my question.  Is there an opportunity here? Should I think about taking it further?  And (gulp)  does someone in this august body feel they could contribute and would like to work with me on this?

Bob ()

I think the issue here Textor is like looking at the capabilities of Word and saying you only want to type a letter.

Also important is to realise that Customer Relationship Management is what it says on the tin - having evolved from systems designed to manage customer information, and a company's relationships with that customer. And that can be quite a long way removed from either Sales Force Automation, or indeed new developments like Sales Management systems.

You might find some of this debate interesting - http://www.modernselling.com/forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=41 - or even a look through a rather more extended list of CRM type suppliers already on the market here - http://www.modernselling.com/business-directory-sales-team-suppliers/technology/software-services-crm.aspx. There is a variety of more and less complex stuff, including integrating with accounts etc. as Denis was suggesting (and that is a trend in medium and larger companies).

You might still have a shot, because lots of CRM implementations are failing, not least because sales staff are swamped with input requirements which are irrelevant (to them) and time consuming. But have you got much further than a kind of basic Outlook function? And, if so, what exactly is the added value that prospects will perceive?

Hope that helps - Neil