Seems like every day this month I've answered the same question: Why should I use Drupal instead of WordPress? And this is the answer I've come up with. They are entirely different applications, about as different as Microsoft Word is from Microsoft Excel.
Whether you realize it or not, you're doing CRM already. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot buzzword that all kinds of businesses desperately want.
What are the results you are trying to achieve? How can your web site help you get those results? These are a couple of questions we're starting to ask all our clients, and what we're finding often reveals some very easy things we can do to drive more results, quickly and easily.
If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?
If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.
If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.
Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:
As we delve more and more into ways to make our customers' organizations run better, we keep an eye out for things we can do to make their jobs easier. One big problem lots of our customers have is out of date contact information for their customers, members, or audience.
I'm having a lot of discussions about CRM systems these days. What is CRM? To hear many talk about it, it's some magical program you buy and suddenly you start getting more business.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, they sound so great! Setup a CRM, put all your contacts and clients in there, add some forms to your website and BOOM the money will just pour in.
Except that’s not how it happens.
We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7.
