But that’s not all – as this was a feature suggested by our users we also added the feeds to each organisation, person, opportunity and activity within Tactile CRM – we hope this helps makes the best small business crm system even better!

A really simple sales tool with RSS – how it works

If you’ve not come across RSS before it’s a neat tool to keep up to date with ‘feeds’ or lists of information. There are lots of tools that will help you read RSS, including many of the popular web browsers.

What this means for you – well now you can keep up to date with the information you and your team are keeping within Tactile CRM without having to login. Simple click the handy ‘Subscribe’ button on your dashboard or wherever you see a timeline and you will be kept up to date with the information being entered, it’s a really simple sales tool to help you keep up to speed with what’s going on.

Remember, we are constantly striving to make our cost-effective crm the best small business crm system available. You can really help us by giving us your ideas and feedback, and don’t forget you can sign up for our free web based small business software if you haven’t already!

These fields are for linking two things in Tactile CRM together. There are three ways they can be used.

The first, is when you are wanting to link to an existing record in Tactile CRM. For example, if you want to add a new Person to an existing Organisation, you can search for the Organisation by typing its name:

If any results are found, they will be displayed in a list under the input, with any you have recently viewed at the top of the list:

Clicking on any of these results will select it, and the field will change to show your selection. If you wish to cancel the selection, click on the ‘Clear’ link:

The second way is when you wish to create a new record when the form is submitted. For example, you are adding a new Person, and want to specify the Organisation they belong to, but neither are present in your system yet. Simply type the full name of the object, and by choosing not to select from any matching results, the text ‘New’ appears next to the field:

Submitting the form in this state means that a new Organisation with the name ‘Tasty Sandwiches’ will be created, and the new Person will be linked to them.

The third way to use these fields is when you want to create a new record, but wish to specify more than just the name. When the ‘New’ indicator is displayed, by clicking on the plus sign next to it you can launch a window where you can add more information:

When the popup form is submitted, the field is populated as if you had chosen from a search result; the new Organisation is already saved.

However it’s not the ‘silver bullet’ that will save/expand your business with no thought given to your current CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. We see lots of people trying to jump into Social CRM before they even have the basics right with their current CRM system/process.

Social CRM is perceived to be easy and cheap – it’s not. Think about how much time you are spending tweeting/face booking/etc. – it is definitely worthwhile doing right, see how our friends at Pepsmedia are helping people exploit scrm, but before you jump headlong into a scrm strategy make sure your crm is in order to handle all those new customers/enquirerers.

This can be as simple as a spreadsheet to keep contacts and information upto date and a good todo application if it’s just you or you may want to take a look at a simple CRM system for your small business, how about our easy contact management system Tactile CRM – you can sign up for free.

1. Choose a secure password
2. Subscribe to your Tactile CRM activities with your favourite calendar tool – it works with everything from Outlook to Google Calendar, iCal and everything in-between!
3. Customise your dashboard to show the information you are interested in
4. Add your drop box to your email client so that your emails appear in Tactile CRM

That’s all there is to it, you can even skip 2-4 if you want!

Do you have any ideas or tips that you give to your users? Just let us know and we’ll update the list.

1. Decide if on-premise or hosted/SaaS is right for you – there is no right or wrong answer to this
2. Define your main goals for your new CRM system – this shouldn’t be a huge document 5-10 key points you think are critical to a successful system
3. Look for a system that will grow/evolve with your needs – what you decide on today will evolve as you understand your CRM system more
4. Make sure the systems you consider will cover the areas of your business you need – this could be via integration with 3rd party products or built in, but it’s key that you make sure you can do what you need to run your business
5. Speak with the vendor/consultant – your relationship with them is key to a successful implementation and you should be working with them even after the system has ‘gone live’

These tips should help you get on your way to choosing a CRM system/supplier.

Looking for an easy to use CRM system? When not give Tactile CRM a try – you can sign up for free.

We will still announce new updates via the Tactile CRM dashboard and newsletter when they are available, but we will now be providing more regular updates on our new updates page on the Tactile CRM website.

Whilst we were at it, we’ve also updated the roadmap to be more accurate about our current plans, and a new release page shows what the major releases we have been working on it.

All these pages will be kept regularly updated as part of our new plans to keep you in the loop of what has been going on.

Contactology is an email marketing software built for business that allows you to easily create, send and track email messages, newsletters and more. Using the new Tactile CRM import driver users can:

• Import contact data directly into your Contactology account from Tactile CRM.
• Contactology imports the Tactile CRM custom field data allowing users to personalise their email marketing campaigns
• Contactology automatically dedups your list
• All unsubscribe data is managed within Contactology, eliminating the need for Tactile CRM users to manage email marketing preferences.

You can see how the integration works in the video below, and full details are available on the Contactology blog.

“omelett.es ltd is committed to making seamless integration between online business apps easy for its customers, so adding our Tactile CRM app with the Google Apps Marketplace was a logical choice for us,” says George Step, head of product development, omelett.es. “Our customers have been asking for tighter integration with Google Apps to get a powerful suite of web applications that work together seamlessly to fulfill their day to day customer collaboration and sales requirements.”

omelett.es ltd has been providing easy contact and sales management for its worldwide user base for more than two years, allowing them to easily manage their customer contacts, emails, sales leads and pipeline in one easy to use system. With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, the Tactile CRM application now allows users to seamlessly move between applications using Google’s universal navigation and offers single sign-on built on OpenID. In addition, sending emails to customers from Tactile CRM is now a seamless experience using Gmail™, meetings are sync’d with Google Calendar and Tactile CRM application contacts are available in the Google shared address book for everyone in your business.

“We are very excited to have Tactile CRM in the Google Apps Marketplace,” adds Scott McMullan, partner lead for Google Apps. “Through the Google Apps Marketplace, ISVs like omelett.es are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps, allowing IT administrators to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and extend Google Apps to meet more of their business needs. We are happy to offer Tactile CRM to the millions of Google Apps users who have embraced the cloud.”

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than two million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Google Calendar and Gmail are trademarks of Google Inc..