This guest post is written by EO Seattle member James Wong. James is the co-founder and CEO of Avidian Technologies, makers of Prophet, the easiest CRM software for Microsoft Outlook.

Many sales teams use customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of all their customer information, create a consistent sales process, track goal progress and forecast sales for an allotted period of time. If you’re considering CRM software, one of the crucial decisions you need to make is whether you want an on-premise solution, which is physically located on your own infrastructure, or a hosted solution, which is maintained by your vendor in the cloud. Hopefully, the following breakdown of the benefits of each avenue will help you decide which type of solution will work best for your business.