clients relationship management software?

[hissho]

Hi all

I'm in the sales industry and would like to seek some advice here:
i'm looking for some software application that can help me build up a database, record all my clients' details, reasons for purchase or turndown, details of my products etc etc
i'm not too sure the proper term for this kind of application but basically it's a database kind of thing, recording all the prospects and leads and product information. also i should be able to put comments so that i can learn my lessons and find out why i succeeded and why i failed and how i can improve myself.

any comments/help would be much appreciated!
thanks a lot in advance!

[wuwei23]

Hey hissho,

If you're not keen on rolling your own CRM, there are plenty of opensource products out there competing for that marketspace. Probably one of the most highly regarded is SugarCRM, which has both commercial and OS versions available. There are some demos available on the site which should help you identify if it meets your needs (although I do believe it's also very customisable...). You can even just rent their CRM as a server-based service and let them take care of the sysadmin side as well.

This is all based on positive hearsay from others, thouh, as I've mostly avoided it due to its PHP and MySQL foundation, but that's due more to my own preferred development environment than any criticism of SugarCRM's tech choices.

wu wei