The tool we’re going to focus on this week for managing your business with more efficiency is sales tracking. Today I want to give you several tools that are free or dirt cheap that have the capability of managing every aspect of your sales funnel, customer base and vendor relationships.

Many of you may be thinking at this point “this doesn’t apply to me” to which I’d argue, yes it does. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Sales Tracking tools are not just for big corporations with massive budgets and an even bigger customer base. All of us could stand to manage our customers more effectively with these tools. If we’re honest about our businesses, sites and customers, many, if not all of us, are leaving money on the table due to poor relationship management.

Here are 3 CRM products, all with free versions available, that will help you track your sales leads more effectively.

1. SugarCRM

SugarCRM has been a pretty popular CRM package for a number of years now. Their name really made it into the marketplace when they released their free, open source product. Today, SugarCRM offers 3 different levels of product that cover everything from the free, self-hosted version to an enterprise product designed to compete with high end products like Salesforce.com.

SugarCRM will cover just about anything you want to do with your sales and support efforts including the following:

1. Marketing Automation – Campaign management, Email marketing, Web-to-Lead forms, Lead management, and Marketing analytics
2. Sales Force Automation – Opportunity management, contact and account management, Forecasting, Quotes & contracts, and even Mobile solutions
3. Customer Support – Case management, Inbound email, Knowledge base, Bug tracking, Self-service portal

Looking through that list, which is just the tip of the iceberg for SugarCRM, all of us, even if we’re a one person “team”, can find something that would help us improve our businesses and make them more profitable with less effort. SugarCRM also has some project management and activity management features to help you manage outsource teams from a single interface.

I’ve personally used SugarCRM for a number of years and like the product. The early versions were a bit clunky which was pretty typical of open source products, but the last couple of releases have improved usability and the feature set quite a bit. The free version is more than sufficient for most small business owners in the blogging or Internet marketing arenas.

Read more at: SugarCRM.com.

2. Free CRM

Free CRM is a product I ran across a few weeks ago that looks pretty promising for helping manage workflow, sales efforts and customer support needs. Being a web based software solution, it plays nicely into the Dot Com Lifestyle, so it definitely gets some points for that in my book.

Features are what you’d expect from a decent CRM package. There are some great team management tools such as call automation and tracking, group calendaring and other groupware features. Integrated email campaigns are also standard as are call campaigns.

The Free Edition offers unlimited users, 10MB of storage and a self-service option. Although I’ve never used Free CRM, judging by the screen shots and demo, the free version would more than suffice for most online entrepreneur’s needs. Personally, just the fact that Free CRM is web based is enough to sway me to give it a try. I love products that don’t require me to mess with downloading, installing and hosting them somewhere. Especially if the free hosting included is solid (which you’ll only determine over time unfortunately).

The other thing that really strikes me about Free CRM is the interface feels very Outlook-like. Although I’m a Mac user, I used Outlook for years and know it well. Any time I can use products that follow the same pattern or use an interface I’m used to, it’s one less thing for me to learn to use and saves time putting the software into action.

Read more at: FreeCRM.com.

3. Zoho CRM

I mentioned Zoho a few weeks ago in this business software series highlighting their Microsoft Office replacement software (read the post here: 4 Free Microsoft Office Replacements). Zoho doesn’t stop there though. They have a great CRM offering that is easy to use and has some integration features with their other products.

Zoho CRM offers a free version of their service for up to 3 users. Each additional user you add is only $12 per month. Features are again fairly typical and include: sales and marketing tracking of campaigns, leads, sales pipeline and forecasts; support management; inventory management; and email campaign management.

Want to customize Zoho CRM to better fit your business and the processes that suit you best? No problem. Drag and drop UI tools for customization are available to you as are APIs for integrating CRM modules with third-party business applications. All this means that you can start out with Zoho CRM and it will grow with you.

I’ve only used Zoho CRM a little bit over the past few months, but I have to say, it’s very very easy. The interface is extremely intuitive. Even if you don’t have extensive experience with CRM tools, you’ll feel right at home and be able to start using the tool right away. Zoho CRM is web based, so you know I like that. It’s very quick and I was able to plug in sales data and leads in less than 10 minutes for the screen shot I took above.

Of the three CRM products I touched on today, Zoho CRM gets my nod of approval and I’ve already started plugging in data to use it on a daily basis for some customer data I want to manage. I’m also going to use it to manage some of my advertiser relationships across a number of my blogs.

Read more at: Zoho CRM.

So what’s the application of this technology? That’s a great question. Unfortunately I don’t have the end all, be all answer. HOW a person uses these applications in their business is as individual as time management or other related activities. One thing I do know is we could all use a little more organization, management, and central collection point for critical information such as customer and vendor data. This data often gets neglected, when it should be the focus of what we collect.

When I look back and think about some of the sales greats, they have been people who have learned to manage the data that comes across their “desks”. Even if you don’t consider your primary job to be in sales, if you’re trying to make money online, then you ARE in sales and should manage your data like the best have learned to do. You’ll find it will take less time, make you more productive and ultimately make you more money.

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