What kind of business do you own?  A mediocre, subdued one that struggles for growth year after year? Or a super-charged one that climbs higher and higher on the success ladder?  Statistics says that more than fifty percent business startups hobble and barely make margins to stay in business. They never reach one level high in revenues so that they can plan innovation, upgrade or improvement.

If you are in the first category, then you desperately require a contact management system. Interestingly, it is equally essential for you if you belong to the second category of flourishing businesses. According to business experts, no business can survive without new-age, smart tools such as Contact Management System.

The need is there for everyone

Whether you are a small business or large, the variety of contacts is the same; the magnitude may differ. You have clients, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and sub-contractors and so on. It is not possible to manage such huge lists using Smartphones or Email server.

Even if you are able to manage the details somehow; it is impossible to derive meaningful and relevant information when you actually need. The routine, default systems do not suffice your requirements. They are standalone systems which can’t be integrated with surrounding solution.

What is the way out then? The answer is simple, use a full-fledged contact management solution. It is handy, useful and effective.

Two things that make contact management effective

Every small and medium business that is looking for massive expansion will need robust contact management system. According to experts, a good and effective system has two important characteristics.

1) It presents relevant information in the right manner

Of course, the basic demographics (name, contact numbers, and address) are essential, but an effective contact management system brings much more than that. It brings a lot of other relevant details, e.g. record of services or products bought; anticipated services and products preferred by the customer, transactional information and project related information, etc.

Not only it presents information in a user-friendly manner, but also allows the users to augment and edit the existing information. Keeping the information up to date becomes easy with a robust CMS.

2) It gives tools for effective filtering and grouping

Once you record business contact with relevant information, you need tools to derive meaningful information. When you implement a good contact management system, it gives the facility of grouping the important categories. You can search by applying relevant filters.

For example, customers who bought a specific product can be filtered easily. It facilitates you in deriving cross-selling or up-selling strategy. You can also target promotions based on the usage patterns.

Not only customers but grouping and filtering can be helpful in managing subcontractors or suppliers as well.

Advantages of installing software-as-a-service for contact management

Well, after understanding the importance of effective contact management, the next question to consider is whether to go for installed systems or Software-as-a-service that is a remotely hosted system?

When you own a small or medium business, it becomes all the more important for you to make use of contact lists. It is possible to take the benefit of a full-spectrum suite of utilities by hiring a smart software-as-a-service.

• It brings a suite of all necessary tools that your business requires. You can manage projects, schedule your resources, and perform tasks such as generating quotes and purchase orders. There are several other utilities for managing customer relations.
• Usually, contact management is a part of the complete package of all-encompassing services. Software helps you to collect every useful bit of information of your contacts.
• It uses social networking data for keeping track of different things. It gives you the facility of searching relevant data by applying filters on relevant data fields.
• You can organize and re-organize the contacts and create tags for faster retrieval. Organize contacts using selection criteria such as skills, logical groups or the most recent activity done by them.
• Software-based contact management allows you to share the details internally (with the team members) or externally (with clients, contractors and channel partners).
• Software-as-a-solution model is always cost-friendly as compared to the installed software as you save greatly on the hardware cost, time of installation and maintenance and upgrade. Here, you get access to the system and it ready to use.
• You only require the Internet connectivity. Rest all can be done using any computer system from anywhere. Since you access the system using a secure connection, there is no threat of data leakage.
• Since contact management is hosted remotely with a foolproof backup mechanism, there is no risk of losing valuable information.
• You get instant help, round the clock.

It is very much important to take the benefit of software-based contact management in the fiercely competitive world today. Your high-performing small and medium sized business needs smart tools to manage contacts well.

Conclusion

In the competitive scenario, opportunity loss is equal to business loss. Therefore, you should not lose a single opportunity of cracking a business deal. Well-managed contact list provides a chance to you where you can increase business opportunity.

Not only Email posting, but you streamline and structure every activity. When contact management systems offer customizable user permission, they improve the end-user experience further. Group permissions that fit the expectations of multi-faceted teams of today can easily accommodate your set of requirements as well.

When you install a state-of-the-art product after in-depth research, you get performance that exceeds your expectations. By defining permission settings, you can explicitly assign the actions users can perform.

If they are allowed to view certain details, then they can only view. If they are allowed to edit, then they can edit with certain user-authentication. It makes the system secure and foolproof.

Even if you need to pay extra for security features, don’t cut corners. Contact Management System contains the most valuable and sensitive data that you must protect at any cost. No unauthorized users should have access to a single bit of it.