Spending on social applications to help sales, marketing and customer service is expected to surpass $1 billion worldwide this year.

According to Forbes, adoption rates have been highest among business-to-consumer (B2C) type organizations, business to business companies are now aggressively investing in social. By year-end 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 percent of all projects worldwide, which is an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2011.

According to Adam Sarner (a research director at Gartner) “Social CRM applications are used by sales, marketing and customer service organizations to encourage the capture and sharing of data among users, ceding levels of decision control to a community. Users include customers, as well as sales, marketing and service organizations, to create brand awareness, gather information, build trust, evaluate decisions, sell and aid post purchase activities. Social CRM applications can have both internal and external company users, and they can be public or private, outsourced or hosted, and make connections to external communities.”

CRM will only work if organisations and communities actively want to use it. If you like many businesses throughout the UK are running small business accounting software such as Sage 50 accounts, it is vital to integrate accounting information within your CRM system.

Then not only can the benefits of accounting software help the accountants within an organisation but also the sales and marketing teams can get access to accounting information, without having to manually enter all the data.

If you require more information on integrating CRM and Sage 50 accounts please contact Oakley Software for more information.

01268 724005