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Customer Relationship Management is used by businesses that use call centers or any other form of remote sales. A Customer Relationship Management, abbreviated as CRM, captures and stores important information on leads and clients. This data is retrievable by sales agents whenever they need it. CRM become more versatile and less of a hassle for companies when they allow another company to host the software. Hosted CRM provide many opportunities to integrate with other telephony software and solutions to create an effective sales organization.

The powerful data management that CRM offers has many applications within a sales team. They serve as platforms for the management of individual and group calendaring, managing both office events and deadlines as well as providing reminders for follow-up calls to be made by specific sales reps to specific leads.

Hosted CRM may also be linked with the telephone dialer used by a business. Regardless of the type of dialer (ration, predictive, auto, or power) the CRM will pull up the previously stored data associated with any number called. With this the sales rep can easily see when the lead was last contacted, what the result of that contact was, and what action needs to be taken next with that lead. The sales rep can easily edit that information, or add additional notes and details about the call.

Hosted CRM linked with a dialer in this way provides additional options to the sales rep that would not be available if he used the dialer alone. Customer Relationship Management should give the sales agent the option on their computer screen to instantly send an email or a fax to the lead they are contacting. Additionally, the CRM allows the sales rep to leave a prerecorded voice message when a lead is not reached. While the voice message is being left by the Customer Relationship Management system the sales agent may move on to his next call.

This integration of CRM and a dialer helps sales teams be more productive. Hosted CRM makes this setup even more profitable. The host company maintains and manages all hardware needed to run the software, which is also housed by the host company. The software is accessed by the remote sales organizations over the internet. This option opens up the possibility of having sales representatives work from home, or completely separate offices since they do not need either the hardware or software they need at the site from which they work.