Recent developments in the hosted CRM industry have made the market quite competitive for growing CRM-related businesses. With expansion into the cloud, customers want customization, increased security features, accurate data recording, and agent proficiency.

In a recent interview, TMC (News - Alert) sat down with Manu Das, president and CEO of Soffront, who let us in on the tactics the hosted CRM provider has developed to keep up with the competitive marketplace.

TMC: How does Soffront set itself apart from other competitors in the CRM industry?

MD: Soffront gives our customers the ability to customize the CRM quickly and easily to facilitate changing business needs. Most CRM vendors claim that their software is customizable, but the level of customization abilities varies from vendor to vendor. For example, if you want to setup two fields - one to list countries and the second one to list states or provinces of a selected country, which should be a simple task for any CRM to do. Unfortunately to do this simple task in Microsoft (News - Alert) dynamics CRM, you have to write code! Salesforce.com does not even allow the country field to be a list field - you are required to type in the name of the country (need to know how to spell)! Soffront CRM has a very simple user interface to accomplish this. 

TMC: What trends, if any, has the company seen in recent years?

MD: We have been seeing more and more sales managers who are asking their telemarketing team to record their prospecting (cold call activities) effort into CRM. Due to a very small conversion ratio (large number of calls resulting a very few leads), many cold callers carries out this activity outside of CRM using a list such as Microsoft Excel and enters into CRM only after the initial qualification process. When it comes to prospecting most CRM slows you down. Such as in Salesforce.com (News - Alert), there are about 6 steps to record a call properly reducing your productivity by 50 percent.

Another important trend that we observed is the increase in centralization and controlled circulation of business documents like sales presentations, agreements etc.  Document version control plays a key part in this process. Though this is very important functionality it is missing in the standard document management functionalities in reputed CRMs such as Salesforce.com.

TMC: How has Soffront reacted to these trends?

MD: Soffront CRM is designed to make communication history visible at the task and activity levels eliminating the need for users to drill down accounts and contacts history. In Soffront, it takes only 2 steps to review past history then make and document the call and then setup a follow up call; whereas in Salesforce.com it takes 6 steps slowing you down dramatically.

Soffront offers a powerful Document Management that has built-in version control. The document management allows users to quickly search the most updated document and email directly using Soffront CRM.