9 Small Business CRM Solutions

TJ McCue divides his survey of CRM solutions into three categories: e-mail-focused apps, apps with a social collaborative orientation and sales-focused solutions.

"Customer relationship management has always felt like the wrong term to me. You don’t “manage” customers. You don’t “manage” your relationship with a customer. You might nurture it. You might encourage it. You would strive to strengthen it. But manage? No.

However, I understand what a company is aiming for when they say it, and the term has stuck for a long time, so I will get off my soapbox and share nine powerful CRM tools you’ll want to consider for managing your small business. Each of these tools has a customer database at its core; that’s a given. How they approach that customer data is what each section explores."