Recently released into private beta, Stride is looking to change the way you do business by providing a customer relationship management system that’s going to be a little unlike anything you’ve ever used before. While other customer relations management systems offer a variety of features, Stride focuses on essentially one thing: the bottom line.

Stride differs from a lot of the other major customer relationship management systems out there in that it doesn’t cover near so many different metrics as the standard suite does, and instead offers up a greatly simplified interface designed to track deals and related measures. While most typical customer relationship management systems allow you to assign multiple salespeople to a variety of deals, add contracts, manage cases, and do a variety of similar functions, Stride keeps things simple and very bottom-line oriented. It’s the partial creation of a design shop owner who found most current systems far too complex for the needs of the small business, and needed something to track some of the simplest parts of a small business: sales and profit.

Basically, any relationship that has a dollar value–incoming only, from the look of it–gets entered into Stride, showing you things like the deal name and status, as well as a variety of buttons that allow you to change the current information about the deal, like what phase it’s in, and the dollar amounts associated with same. And from there, you can track the total number of deals in process, as well as get an idea of the value of the various parts of the deal, like time spent and the accompanying value of same.

At last report, the software will be free for anyone who wants to use it–but you’ll only get 25 deals to track (upgrading to infinite deals, however, will run you $7 a month)–so most anyone who finds themselves interested in keeping track of their sales efforts but not in keeping track of large numbers of sales reps will likely find this one well worth talking about.

But as is generally the case, your sales numbers are only one part of the equation. To ensure that the customers you’re trying to make can keep in touch with you, and thus take those deals from pitch to completion, you’ll want a good stock of communications tools, including cloud-based telephony options like digital fax services and hunt groups.

Still though, even this is only part of the deal, and keeping both sides well in hand will help ensure the best possible results.

Related keywords: cloud-based telephony, customer relationship management, sales, tracking software