Choosing a CRM product is complicated. Dozens of CRM products exist, and it's difficult to determine their different features and functions, let alone how easy they are to learn and use, how difficult they are to implement, and so forth. Choosing a CRM requires knowing the organization's requirements as well, and often those requirements aren't fully known, or, if they are known, they are changing as the organization grows.

This exercise is designed to give you a sense of the challenges involved when choosing a CRM product. Form a team of students, fire up your browsers, and answer the following questions:

Act! and GoldMine are two of the lower-end CRM products. They began as sales lead tracking tools for individuals and small offices but have evolved since then.

a. To learn about these products, visit http://na.sage.com/ sage-act' and www.goldmine.corn.

b. As you can see, it is difficult to know how these products compare based just on the information on those sites. To learn more, search the Web for "Act vs. GoldMine"; because these products change quickly, use only comparisons that were done in 2013 or more recently.

c. Summarize your findings in a 2-minute presentation to the rest of the class. Include in your summary the intended market for these products, their costs, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Salesforce.com and Sugar are CRM products that are intended for use by larger organizations than Act! and GoldMine.

a. To learn about these products, visit www.salesforce .com and www.sugarcrm.com.

b. Classify these products as thin vs. thick applications and PC-LAN vs. cloud-based.

c. These two products seem to differ in orientation.To learn how others view these differences, search the Web for "Salesforce vs. Sugar CRM:' Read several comparisons.

d. Summarize your findings in a 2-minute presentation to the rest of the class. Include in your summary the in-tended market for these products, their costs, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Given your answers to questions 1 and 2 (and those of other teams if you have been presenting to each other), consider the desirability of CRM product offerings for a variety of businesses. Specifically, suppose you have been asked to recommend two of the CRM products you've explored for further research. For each of the following businesses, recommend two such products and justify your recommendation:

a. An independent personal trainer who is working in her own business as a sole proprietor

b. An online vendor, such as http://www.sephora.com

c. A musical venue, such as http://www.santafeopera.org

d. A vendor of consulting services, such as http:7www.crmsoftwaresolutionsica

a A vacation cruise ship line, such as hap www.hollandamerica.com

Present your findings to the rest of the class.

Summarize what you have learned from this exercise about choosing a CRM product. Formulate your summary as an answer to a lob interviewer's question about the difficulties that organizations face when choosing software products.