Why does the corporate world do what it does!
Why won't my client move to Smart Clients?
I had a meeting/presentation last week with the national sales manager, business development manager and national product manager regarding the current software strategy for customer management. My client has an ERP called Pronto system sitting on a unix box and uses Goldmine for management of contact information. Now using a contact centric system as apposed to a customer centric system is another issue and one that I might talk about later, now back to my gripe. Goldmine uses MS Access to extract order information from Pronto via ODBC and present it in Goldmine. This is achieved by hacking the Goldmines ini file and DB2 database.
This is not a great solution. In fact it has many problems not to mention the fact that most users in the company won't use Goldmine (because they say that it too difficult to use lol!).
Now I made a good presentation of the benefits of building an application with true CRM functionality.
Using Win forms, Web services and Sql Server. A system that included customer management, project management, call center management and quotation management. That has both On-line and Off-line mode, that can be extended to include mobile devices. They seemed to be quite pleased with the presentation.
I heard later that one of them said they believed that the business should stay with Goldmine because they had already spent $20,000.00 on the system!
I guess I need to go to sales school...
crm software customer relationship management