A Customer Relationship Management package can make you or break you. There are scores of software packages out there, and most of them have ten times as much functionality as the average company needs. A few of the more popular options:

GoldMine, sold by FrontRange Solutions, has been around for years, offers a dizzying array of functions, and is designed to work well in networks so that information can be shared easily throughout the organization.

Act!, sold by Sage Software, is also tried-and-true. It is nearly as robust and more intuitive than GoldMine, but is not primarily designed as a network solution. However, for stand-alone users, Act! is an excellent option.

Rapidly growing Salesforce.com is a web-hosted system. By using it, a company avoids the rather substantial internal costs of owning CRM software, but it also gives up the ability to customize.

Which, if any CRM package is the right choice? Before talking to software vendors, I think it’s a good idea to do a careful internal assessment. These are some important issues that you must think through.

1. What does our current sales process look like?
2. How do we want it to look?
3. Where are the bottlenecks?
4. Which bottlenecks can we live with, and which need to be fixed?
5. How much computer training will our sales people and staff need to use CRM?
6. What are the crucial things for customer service and retention we are not yet doing?
7. What are our competitors doing with CRM? Do we notice any effect?
8. Is our IT infrastructure capable of handling the workload of a CRM package?
9. Do we have a champion to spearhead implementation, training, and adoption?

Generally speaking, the safest CRM implementation is one in which the company has a well defined sales process that is more or less working, but needs to be scaled. At the other extreme, moving from a vague or undefined sales process directly to CRM requires a discipline and mindset change that most companies just don’t have.