Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com are terrific marketing companies. Terrific marketing companies which have heavy, hard to use, and expensive CRM tools. The tools are hard to use making user adoption very difficult. Both microsoft CRM and salesforce have junior high functionality. The dirty little secret is in over 75% of deployment cases of these CRMs costly and extended CRM customization is needed to make the CRM fit the customer.
Most CRM Demands Costly Customizations to Make it Work
The VAR or value added reseller makes money on customers. Think about this. Where is the profit for a VAR to sell you CRM at 65 USD per month per user? The profit lies in adding functionality to your service and extracting dollars through your nose. This extraction is painful. Take a pain pill and lets look at your options
Base CRM is Too Heavy to Get Payback
Base CRM is commodity software. There is no exceptional value add unless it is niche focused for your industry. Commodities need to be priced right. Priced to give matching ROI and payback to the buyer. I define base CRM as this:
* Marketing
* Sales
* Support
Beware Sales Force De-Automation
The websites for Microsoft CRM and salesforce.com rave about these modules. Big deal. You create a campaign, track a lead, if you want to pass a lead to a partner, pony up a 1000 per year for the partner license. If you are lucky enough to win a deal fire up your quoting software to do a quote. If your quote is accepted, fire up the accounting software to do an invoice. Then go back to MS CRM or salesforce.com to record the double entries about quote and invoice activity. This process may have made your sales process harder not easier. This is why these CRM tools are sales force DE automation. Where is the sales force automation.
A better option is a fully integrated CRM. Like this:
* Marketing
* Sales
* Support
* Product Management
* Quotation Management
* Sales Order Management
* Invoice Management
* Vendor Management
* Purchase Order Management
Start to Automate your Business Processes with CRM
True sales force automation is nudged along with an integrated CRM tool. Marketing campaigns spit out leads, leads are qualified to business opportunities, products from vendor catalogs and your own catalogs are assigned to the business opportunities, these speeds a one click quotation process, one more click converts quote to sales order, and invoice is sent, PO is cut to vendor to replenish inventory stock to which hit a reorder point. All in CRM. Best of all is this:
* Marketing
* Sales
* Support
* Order Management
* Customer Data Integration
Now CRM Value Proposition is Better
Now we are talking real value and real sales force automation. What we have here is integration into your ERP, Accounting, Data Warehouse, pricing engines, vendor systems. This creates accurate customer and product information across your company. The benefits of this are roll across your company; from product management to accounting to ERP to Customer support, to sales to the executive suite. This is very hard and expensive to get with Microsoft CRM and with Salesforce. The biggest wall to this is you do not own nor have access to the hosted crm code or the hosted crm database. Changes are costly customs and support and upgrade paths are cut off due to customizations in your CRM. The customs are done by your VAR and your other nostril is now under attack.
The very best CRM architecture has this:
* Marketing
* Sales
* Support
* Order Management
* Customer Data Integration
* Partner Integration
Grease Your Communication Rails to Optimize your Company
Partner data integration, both buy side and sell side, cuts costs and sprays WD 40 on the your business process rails. Your product and sales data are on a high speed train which travels from your vendors or manufacturers, your other locations and sites, directly to your customers. The train tracks are fluid and are far reaching across your enterprise and the walls are breached collaborating and sharing data with buy side vendors and sell side partners like manufacturer representatives and distributors.
Find Affordable CRM with Access to CRM Code and CRM Database
This can be done. First own your CRM code, second find affordable CRM to expand your tracks or network to key partners. Access to code and database can turn basic CRM into Pavarotti. CRM will sing, will streamline your business process, will delight your customers, and sales a profit will be able to hit the high notes. I can hear the melody now, can you?
