PipelineDeals

If you find yourself missing out on sales opportunities because your sales team is disorganized, you may just need PipelineDeals so you don’t miss out ever again. Import and track all your contacts, then organize contacts by status, source, tags and more. Set recurring tasks to remind your team to follow up, then collaborate between team members. You can even customize deal stages to suit your process. Dynamic charts make it easy for everyone on your team to see the big picture and set priorities. You’ll have a complete overview of the whole process so you won’t miss anything.

Jugnoo

Sometimes the good stuff gets even better, and that’s the case with cloud-based social CRM tool Jugnoo. Jugnoo allows users to monitor and manage their social media activities; create content including video, slide shows and promotions; and track and measure social media efforts. Recently, Jugnoo added BufferApp integration, Google Analytics and social analytics for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From the Social Dashboard, business owners can consolidate all their social network accounts in one place, monitor multiple search streams, optimize key information from each social network and create videos from a variety of templates.

Reachable

Do the contacts in your email address book and your various social media accounts add up to enough make your business grow? Or are you wishing you could find more potential customers and talented employees? Reachable pulls your contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and your email address books and imports them into a new (and bigger) database of contacts so you can build your business faster and more efficiently. Reachable’s contact list includes more than 65 million professionals, putting everyone at your fingertips, but goes further by helping you create your own specialized database based on the kinds of contacts in your address book.

Nimble

If you’re hooked on social media, it’s a good bet that Nimble’s approach to social CRM is going to be right up your alley. Nimble takes a social network approach to organizing your contacts, sales and activities, and ties into all your communication such as email and social media outlets. Nimble also offers project management (called “Activity Management”), and its sales tools can help you keep track of all your business opportunities in one place. Nimble also integrates with other solutions such as HubSpot and MailChimp, and unifies all your notifications and comments from your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts in one place.

Intercom

Are you an app developer? Here’s a way to connect with your app customer and build a relationship all in one easy package. Intercom lets you browse your users; sort and filter them by age, activity or other factors; view their social profiles to learn more about them; and reach out to them for feedback or to ask a question. If you want to store your history of communication with a user, simply add an inbox. You can respond easily and track your relationships to see how much attention the app user is getting.

MyLife.com

If you’ve ever run across MyLife.com, you know it’s a way to search for old friends, family and acquaintances and to find out who has been searching for you. But the website can also be a great tool for small business owners looking to streamline all their email accounts and social media networks. MyLife’s Personal Relationship Manager now allows users to maintain multiple email accounts without having to login to the individual accounts. Users can directly manage and monitor their social network profiles on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (Google+ is coming soon). MyLife also recently launched the mobile app version of its Personal Relationship Manager.

AgoraPulse

If your Facebook business page is getting out of control and you’re not sure what to do, AgoraPulse offers a range of tools to help you manage your page. The biggest problem with maintaining Facebook pages is knowing how to actively engage with fans and turn those fans into qualified leads. AgoraPulse tools also help you do just that by identifying your fans and collecting valuable data. You can also export your fan data into a CSV contact list, plus create contests and quizzes to engage your fans and keep them coming back.

By Maria Valdez Haubrich

Despite qualms about a possible double-dip recession and lots of uncertain economic indicators, companies by and large aren’t planning to cut their IT budgets, InformationWeek reports.

InformationWeek took a look at several different IT-related surveys, including the Society for Information Management’s poll of CIOs and other IT leaders. In that survey, more than half (56 percent) of respondents said their companies’ 2011 IT budgets will be higher than last year’s. In contrast, only 17 percent expect to cut IT budgets cut. This is a dramatic change from 2010, when only 34 percent expected IT budgets to rise and 35 percent expected them to fall.

What about next year? The picture is just as bright for 2012, with 51 percent projecting that their IT budget will rise and only 15% predicting them to decline. InformationWeek notes that its own survey, done a few months prior to the SIM survey, was even more optimistic, with 69 percent of companies surveyed predicting 2011 IT budgets to increase.

So despite the gloomy economic news, why are IT departments still planning to spend? One expert cited in the article notes that in prior recessions, the value of IT wasn’t as evident and so it was one of the first areas to be cut. That view is outdated today.

A senior technology equity analyst with Wells Fargo, who also agrees that IT budgets are likely to stay on course, told InformationWeek there are several reasons IT budgets won’t get cut: First, they’re already lean from the prior recession. Second, since companies’ growth projections have been cautious to begin with, an economic slowdown won’t make a huge difference. Third, IT is now seen as essential to remaining competitive.

That said, what areas are businesses focusing their IT budgets on? Business intelligence is still number-one on the list, but cloud computing moved from number 5 on the list last year to number 2. Mobile apps and customer relationship management (CRM) also entered the top five.

What’s your IT priority this year, and why?

Image by Flickr user Blake Patterson (Creative Commons)

GroupMe

Sending one message to a large group in your contacts is now easier and faster thanks to GroupMe. Download GroupMe to your phone and it enables you to create groups and send to anyone in your contact list. Need to make a quick conference call? Each group has a unique number; call that number and you’ll reach everyone you need to. Other features include sharing a map with your group so they know your location and even sharing photos with the group—all from your phone. Available for Android, iPhone, Windows phones and BlackBerry.

Bantam Live

As your business grows (and your number customers do, too), keeping track of customer data can become a growing problem. Bantam Live is a fully hosted solution to your customer contact and CRM needs, which means there’s nothing to download and you can access your information from any computer. Recently acquired by Constant Contact, Bantam Live allows users to see their contacts across all channels, from email to social media to event attendees. And now that the company is part of Constant Contact, users will benefit from both companies’ expertise in contact management and building customer relationships. Bantam brings social CRM functionality to Constant Contact and will eventually be built into all of the company products, including a new paid social media marketing offering available later this year.