vTiger CRM Review for the Small Business

Are you running a small business? Are you looking for the perfect invoicing system?

I would like to recommend the solution I have been using for the past 3 years. It’s the web-based vTiger CRM.

vTiger is actually a complete Customer Relationship Management software. For my business, I am using only 20% of it’s overall power.

The top features I like about vTiger is recording customers contact information, recording product prices, sending quotations, sending invoices, and easily following up with marketing messages.

1. Accounts. Every customer come from a company. Accounts is the section to record the company name, business address, phone, website and email. This is the first thing to do when we get new customers. One account can contain many contact people like in a corporation. One thing to note though you cannot input the contact person’s information here.
2. Contacts. When we deal with a company, we usually talk to just one person from that company. Contacts is the section to record the contact person’s email, office phone, mobile phone and more. You can input many individuals and link them to one company account. This is perfect to stay in touch with people from different departments in the same company.
3. Products. The stuff we sell to customers are recorded in the comprehensive Products section. There is another section for Services if you sell services. We prefer to lump our service into the products section as it allows us to record pricing, detailed description, stock quantity and even the supplier’s information. Once we fill up the products section, sending quotes and invoices is a breeze.
4. Quotes. Now down to business. What to do when customers request for quotes of certain products and services? Go to the Quotes section, select the Account and Contact you are quoting to, then select the products and specify the quantity you want to quote. If you want to give discounts, there is a box to do that. Convert the quote into a neat PDF file and email it to your customer.
5. Invoices. The beauty of vTiger CRM software is the ability to convert a quote into an invoice directly. Very easy and convenient. Without a quote, you can still create an invoice directly by selecting Accounts, Contacts and Products. Again the PDF print out is beautiful. You can totally customize your invoice PDF layout with your company logo and your own design.
6. Campaigns. After you have a substantial number of customer records in vTiger, you can start making more money by marketing to this list. The Campaigns section is designed for mass email marketing. You can send the same message to everyone yet each receiving a personalized email to their name. We get a lot of repeat customers with this feature. This is a marketers dream machine!
7. Projects. There is a Projects section with features that can be found in dedicated projects management software alone. You can start planning and tracking unlimited number of projects with tasks and milestones. The most amazing of all is the automatic generation of a Gantt chart! We may be using Projects for reasons nothing to do with CRM

That’s 7 features I like about vTiger CRM. There are 80% per more powerful features but I am happy with the few to run our small business.

One draw back is the difficulty in automatically linking the sales data with external accounting systems.

So if you want to use the free version of vTiger, I suggest you look into your current web host to see if you can install it automatically. If not, get a web host that does.

Adrian Lee
http://AdrianVideoImage.com