Home topics small-business-resources sales-and-marketing Marketing Marketing Customer Relationship Management applications Guest Author September 28, 2007 After a rocky start, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications have grown up – Helen Bradley finds the new models offer an SME streamlined centralisation and can be hosted, leaving technical machinations to the experts. In the past CRM applications have been like the little girl with the curl—when they were good they were very good and when they were bad they were horrid. In the last few years CRM has matured, and its developers and end users better understand its role in business. It has, at last, begun to cast off the ‘little girl’ legacy and is becoming a must-have application for businesses small and large. CRM software can help manage three key areas of the business: sales, marketing, and customer service. In the sales area, sales force automation tools offer benefits such as opportunity management and a consolidated view of all sales opportunities that the business has in progress with the ability to forecast your future revenue stream with greater accuracy. In the marketing area, CRM applications help manage your marketing campaigns and monitor individual leads from capture to closure. They also help determine which campaigns are generating the highest returns. In the customer service area, a customer's complete history as well as answers to queries can be easily obtainable from the centralised database. The problems that plagued early CRM applications were many. A successful CRM solution not only took time to install and