This post was written by Kara Gibraltor

In the past, customer relationship management (CRM) tools were often outside the reach of small businesses due to its complexity and high cost. However, with the increasing availability of CRM tools on the Internet, small business executives can manage their relationships with customers across a team of colleagues easily.

According to the Financial Post, of the several tools available on the net, Salesforce.com Group Edition and InfoStreet’s StreetSmart Small Business CRM are ideal for small business. However, the former is much sleeker than the latter and offers you reporting facilities that let you explore metrics, such as opportunity pipeline, neglected accounts, and sales by individual representatives.

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This post was written by Melissa Chang

SAP has taken its latest CRM application for its full-blown enterprise resource planning application and ported it to be a fit for mid-sized firnms. This gives SAP’s Business All-in-One group a pre-configured CRM module containing all of the functionality built into its CRM 2007 top-of-the-range product, according to Donal Madden, U.K. channel manager at SAP.

Our approach to All-in-One is to build a template that contains 80% of the most important features and enable customers to deploy that straight out of the box.

Read the full story here.