Given that sales and customer retention are the lifeblood of any organisation, we thought we'd take a closer look at three of the leading mid-market CRM solutions. Two of them, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SageCRM, come from large, integrated vendors, while the third, Oncontact CRM, comes from a smaller, best-of-breed vendor that offers CRM solutions only. Sage's CRM solution comes in both hosted (SageCRM.com) and non-hosted configurations.

For this Showdown, we looked at all three of the main CRM modules: sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service and support. To eliminate any chance of bias and to ensure a level playing field, all the criteria that make up these three modules in our CRM Evaluation Center were given equal weight and priority. In other words, no area of functionality was treated as being more important than any other. All results were based on the most recent request for information (RFI) data supplied to us by the three vendors …