Microsoft outlook and contact manager???
 

Hey guys and gals, I was hoping some salesman/sales managers out there could help me out with something? This week I am starting as a full time outside sales person for my families business. I am trying to figure out if Outlook with contact manager will do the things I want it to do. I want to be able to enter all my customers with business name, contact name and all the other critical contact info. Some other things I want to be able to do are enter notes for customers when I visit, group different types of customers together depending on business/fleet type and I want to be able to send out mass emails with flyers/promo's attached and be able to send those to the different groups I set up. I would assume Outlook also has a calendar that allows you to input appointments and add due dates for certain things.

Will Outlook and contact manager do these things for me? Would I be better off using salesforce or another internet based CRM? Is there a way to be able to view your calendar and contacts as well as enter notes from a droid?

The salesperson I am taking over for is really old school and uses a 3 ring binder to keep his contacts and input notes.

Also, if outlook and contact manager will do these things what is the best way to learn how to fully use the program? A ...... for dummies book or some sort of training manual?

Also, we only have one other sales person but he is willing to use technology to his advantage so would it be easier to use an internet CRM with both of us under one account?

Not sure about Outlook and CM but we use Goldmine and it does all that.

Within your contacts in Outlook you can have separate folders of contacts....I arrange based on what telecommunications equipment they have in this case so you can mass email a list. Yes you have a calander and can enter any notes as well. From my iPhone I can control which contact list I see. ie. Work, Personal, and my customer lists.

Outlook would do it, but something like Goldmine makes way more sense as it is designed for this, outlook was not.

Anybody used Zoho? I have a droid and it looks like goldmine only has an app for apple products. It looked kind of like salesforce had the same.

Just looking at it really quickly zoho professional would be $12/month plus $3/month for the android app. Zoho appears to have a free version but it appears to not have mass emailing in the free version.

Go with Salesforce
 

Salesforce group edition is 15$/mo per user. It will do what you need and more. Besides, if you grow as a company, you would already be using an enterprise class application. All you would have to do is upgrade as you grow (if you outgrow group edition).

I think I am going to try the $5 month salesforce program. It allows you to enter customers, contacts, contact info, write notes, syncs with outlook(although I need to figure out if it will if I use a POP3 instead of an exchange server) as well as they have an android app that will let me use my phone on the road so I wont have to have a laptop with me all the time.