The Race is Close | Native iPhone App for Online CRM

Zoho CRM has been work­ing on a Native iPhone App for months if not years. I keep hear­ing that in two months, we’ll see some­thing. I’m not sure which two months they are talk­ing about, but I hope it is soon. Until this App is a real­i­ty, Zoho CRM still has an excel­lent online prod­uct. It is tru­ly a threat against the big box Sales­force. Sales­force, is still the leader and has a nice prod­uct. The prob­lem with Sales­force is the price tag for small busi­ness own­ers. It is just not afford­able. Zoho CRM is very afford­able. A small con­tract­ing com­pa­ny can pur­chase 3 – 4 users for around $25 a month. Zoho also just added a Chat fea­ture, which will just make it even bet­ter! Tac­tile CRM, though not as robust as Zoho, Sales­force or ACT! by Sage, is an up and com­ing online CRM. It does the basics: Sales track­ing, Cal­en­dar, To-Dos and basic Report­ing. They told me this week they are work­ing out the final bugs on their native iPhone app and will be releas­ing it to Apple I would hope by mid August. If Tac­tile beats Zoho CRM, I might give them a try. Their price is around $9 a month. I believe you should be able to use Tac­tile App for every­thing and cut out Google Apps etc. How­ev­er, I like Google Apps and Out­look and hope Tac­tile will still make a two-way sync for those of us who do not want to switch. Final­ly, Pipeline Deals already has a nice iPhone brows­er-base App. They too are work­ing hard to release a native app to Apple. We should see their App be released with­in the month. Pipeline Deals is a sim­ple CRM. I real­ly like it. The last time I tried it, I did not like their Cal­en­dar fea­tures. BUT, I received a noti­fi­ca­tion that they have made some dra­mat­ic changes to the cal­en­dar and task sched­ul­ing, which I think will make Pipeline Deals a favorite of mine. So who will be the first of these three com­pa­nies to release a Native App for the iPhone? When I know, you’ll know. I’m still wait­ing for ACT! by Sage to get their ​“act” togeth­er and release a stand alone App for the Black­ber­ry, iPhone and Droid. They have been the small busi­ness leader and are NOT stay­ing ahead of the game. They will be los­ing a lot of clients with­in the next 6 months if they do not fol­low suite. I’m call­ing 2011 the year where Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment pro­grams become big­ger, bet­ter and cheap­er than ever before: all online too and on your phone. Note: It takes time and mon­ey to devel­op an App. The iPhone is rel­a­tive­ly easy to devel­op an App and the Black­ber­ry is not. Android Apps are also easy…but are not the same as the iPhone. So all these com­pa­nies are doing one at a time. At this time, iPhone wins!