As businesses become more sophisticated in the way they use data, customer relationship management systems are becoming more commonplace.

Salesforce.com has been leading the charge for several years by offering a system that is affordable, by hosting it on the Web and by allowing clients to use their Web browsers as their interface. This has had a great impact: 16,900 companies use Salesforce.com.

The biggest draw has been that sales people (and the executives above them) don't need to install software. It's already up and running.. They log in to their Salesforce.com accounts and get immediate access to their customers, prospects, opportunities and sales pipelines -- making it much easier to effectively get sales. An added benefit is that they can access the data anytime from any place: at the office, on the road or at their customer's facility so they can handle issues or update their data on the fly.

The latest Salesforce.com offering introduced AppExchange, a subsystem that allows external developers to offer extra capabilities to Salesforce.com users.

Harrison City-based HarvestGold is among the first to take advantage of AppExchange to make its Sales Goal Planner available at no additional charge to Salesforce.com users. Sales Goal Planner allows users to figure out what they need to do to reach their own earnings goals by calculating the required numbers of phone calls, visits and other activities.

Other applications available as Salesforce.com add-ins include programs that cleanse sales data, help salespeople get credit reports about new prospects and create accurate quotes or invoices.

Salesforce.com accounts start at $65 per month per user, with a Team Edition price of $995, which covers five people for a year.