Book Image

vtiger CRM Beginner's Guide

By : Ian D. Rossi
Book Image

vtiger CRM Beginner's Guide

By: Ian D. Rossi

Overview of this book

<p>vtiger CRM is free, full-featured, 100% Open Source CRM software ideal for small and medium businesses, with low-cost product support available to production users. It is used widely in dozens of countries with localization available in over 15 languages. If you want to manage your customer relationships successfully using one of the most dynamic CRM systems that is truly open source then this is the right book for you.</p> <p>vtiger CRM <em>Beginner's Guide</em> will show you how to unlock the power of the Open Source vtiger CRM system, to reorganize your sales processes and manage customer relationships better. It explains the basics of a CRM, going on to explain how to create a CRM using vtiger, adding extensions, plug-ins, and theming.</p> <p>This book will teach you how to organize and streamline sales processes and customer service processes and to automate routine business processes to save valuable time. With it you can empower your sales force and start increasing sales. You can get more visibility to sales performance through centralized activity management and reporting. You will understand how vtiger receives data from external systems through its API and how you can use that API to get data into vtiger. You will discover how vtiger provides many extensibility and customization features to enable your CRM solution to meet the needs of your business and how use them correctly.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
vtiger CRM
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The "how" of CRM


During our startup phase, we began to ask customers, prospective customers, and CRM professionals this question: "What is the greatest challenge that you face in choosing/implementing/using CRM tools?" The overwhelming response really surprised us. We thought we had it pegged. We had lists of features ready that we wanted to add to vtiger CRM and plans for more integration with other tools and services.

The answer to our question was not even related to the CRM tool. The answer was: user adoption/acceptance.

Keep in mind, our focus group was comprised of individuals that used many different tools. We had some that used Microsoft CRM, Siebel, SageCRM, Salesforce.com, and more. Each of them said that their greatest challenge is getting their organization to buy into the idea of it and then getting their users to actually use the tool.

This changed the entire playing field and, therefore, our entire strategy. While our prepared feature lists still held some importance, we realized that it would be most important, from a business perspective and from our customers' perspective, to focus more on the "how" of CRM.