salesforce for small company - worth it?

[BGARK]

Surely to help the OP you would need to know exact number of clients and frequency of contact, ie 1 large sale each year or 1 small sale every day, the process of managing by volume and expectations are different in every business.

o/t
By the way in my opinion Sugar CRM is better than Salesforce.

[BerksBoy]

not withstanding the great product input above, sounds overkill for 100 clients.

Salesforce is a sales force automation tool, great at multi-channel sales strategies, lead to opportunity process, territory and rep management along with forecasting and a heap of other stuff

all great but for 100 clients even with ambition to grow, i would steer clear of anything so fancy....

hth

[EddieSteadyGo]

BerksBoy said:

not withstanding the great product input above, sounds overkill for 100 clients.

Salesforce is a sales force automation tool, great at multi-channel sales strategies, lead to opportunity process, territory and rep management along with forecasting and a heap of other stuff

I kind of agree.

From my experience of different CRM tools over the years, I wouldn't have chosen Salesforce unless I had wanted potential to manage our back office processes/automation via salesforce.

As an aside, I know a software company who manage all of the software licensing, renewals etc which is an very big admin job, all using salesforce/force.com

[Sheepshanks]

EddieSteadyGo said:

If you don't have appetite for this, there are much cheaper alternatives which will perform the basic functions for less.

Could you suggest which CRMs you'd be thinking of for more basic opportunity management for a smallish company?

[DBrannan]

I work for a Salesforce consulting partner. If this is still an active requirement please let me know.

[jammy_basturd]

Sheepshanks said:

EddieSteadyGo said:

If you don't have appetite for this, there are much cheaper alternatives which will perform the basic functions for less.

Could you suggest which CRMs you'd be thinking of for more basic opportunity management for a smallish company?

Check out:
Base CRM
Highrise CRM
OnePage CRM
Nutshell is quite nice
Capsule

[Sheepshanks]

Thanks. I had Base on my list, but none of the others.

[jammy_basturd]

Each of those systems have their own opinions about CRM and processes, so you should be able to find something that aligns with your way of working amongst them.

[fomb]

BerksBoy said:

Salesforce is a sales force automation tool

Salesforce is so much more than this. Granted it's not for small businesses for the most part, but there are many companies spending millions on it across their entire business.

[BGARK]

fomb said:

there are many companies spending millions on it across their entire business.

for what type of ROI?

[EddieSteadyGo]

BGARK said:

for what type of ROI?

It varies, and it depends upon the project. The point is that salesforce / force.com as a fast, stable, reliable platform for enabling automation and streamlining of many business processes is pretty good imo.

Finding good developers at a reasonable price is much harder.

I guess I am trying to say you can use it for a lot more than just managing CRM functions if you want to.

But as with everything in IT, there are usually lots of different ways of solving the same problem, and I'm certainly not saying this is the only or best option for every case.

[fomb]

BGARK said:

for what type of ROI?

All sorts. Remember Salesforce is all sorts of things, ranging from force.com to ExactTarget and Heroku.

[mattdaniels]

juggers said:

We have to take 3 exams to keep up with it.

That is bonkers.

[surveyor]

To my mind all of these require so much customizing you might as well start from the beginning with Podio....

[juggers]

Frimley111R said:

If Salesforce handled this perfectly, then you wouldn’t need to also have in-house resource to customise it And, why is it that Salesforce charge £40 a month more per user to allow you to use the API? Answer: because they want customers within their walled garden.

The reality is that it’s not about savings, as you quite rightly point out (and FWIW the hosting is virtual cloud for the website with the customer database so the net additional cost over having a website hosted is… er… £0). Time taken to make these changes - as much as it takes to get it mapped out. Less downtime than Salesforce.

The choice is about flexibility - we use the best tools for our work: Twilio, Sendgrid, Wordpress … all of them working exactly the way we want connected with smart logic which we can amend and update as and when we want to. And if we don’t like one of them, we can just switch out and replace with another supplier. So, there is a cost saving, but the reality is that we have a much more agile model than those who are shackled to the one of the great behemoths.

The clever thing is that Salesforce have positioned themselves as a cloud company, they’re not they’re a ‘private cloud’ - you’re either in or you’re out and that’s why they’re desperately trying to acquire extra tools to add to their system to keep people on the drip.

And in terms of ‘cheap’ then we also have a couple of clients on the Open Source version of Sugar. And you don’t get much closer to ‘free’ than that, but we found that once we put this kind of functionality in place then they never even logged into Sugar - because it’s all managed through inboxes, mobiles, apps and connectivity.

No out the box application would meet every industries requirements hence the need to development and customise that is the same with every crm/platform. And as far as them charging for API's I assume your referring to the licensing which is negotiable and if you know your licensing can be reduced dramatically if you are not using OTB functionality.

I find it hard to believe your system is more agile than that of a native salesforce solution when you are using 3 integrated applications on 3 different platforms.

Theres no questioning that the Salesforce business model is a sticky one, but as a CRM/platform/business application theres not much out there that touches it including Dynamics.
Salesforce is a complete end to end solution for all your business requirements sales, service, marketing, HR, ERP.....

What other platform allows you to run all areas of your business from your mobile phone?

[BGARK]

fomb said:

BGARK said:

for what type of ROI?

All sorts. Remember Salesforce is all sorts of things, ranging from force.com to ExactTarget and Heroku.

You stated above companies are spending millions on Salesforce, what "Return on Investment" would they calculate based on the costs of such a system?

[fomb]

BGARK said:

You stated above companies are spending millions on Salesforce, what "Return on Investment" would they calculate based on the costs of such a system?

Unfortunately that's where I need to say 'I can't say'.

[EddieSteadyGo]

BGARK said:

You stated above companies are spending millions on Salesforce, what "Return on Investment" would they calculate based on the costs of such a system?

In a previous life, I've written a few business cases for fairly big IT projects covering similar areas to Salesforce (although not using SF).

Making a case work for these kind of projects is difficult because you don't often know the true benefits.

To sidestep the issue, they often tend to be underpinned with general assumptions around "this is conservatively expected to increase yield by x%" etc etc. Hence the ROI aspect of the case is always a 'no brainer'.

However, regardless of what the business case benefits are, it comes down to a subjective assessment based on experience if it 'makes sense'. At least that is my experience

[juggers]

BGARK said:

You stated above companies are spending millions on Salesforce, what "Return on Investment" would they calculate based on the costs of such a system?

It's a bit of a open question I don't think anyone can answer and depends on the use case.

They would calculate the ROI by impact assessing the the area's in 90% of cases time/efficiency adding workflow automation can eliminate the need for employees in some cases or you can utilise that resource else where which will allow for growth.
Real time data on the fly allows user to generate revenue and close deals while from there mobile phones e.g if you have sales agents.
These are just examples and would be dependant on your business, it can can be 20-30% growth in sales/efficiency don't quote me on this as it all depends on the use case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAb5tOuncKc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ntEatqj3k

I've said it before and i'll say it again salesforce it not just a CRM it is an end to end solution for any business!

Edited by juggers on Thursday 15th January 23:31

Edited by juggers on Thursday 15th January 23:32

[mattdaniels]

fomb said:

BGARK said:

for what type of ROI?

All sorts. Remember Salesforce is all sorts of things, ranging from force.com to ExactTarget and Heroku.

I think you need to differentiate Salesforce the product(s) from Salesforce the company. When people talk about using Salesforce I think they have the CRM system and associated tools in mind. eg. when people deploy code to Heroku I don't think for one minute they feel they are "using Salesforce". I certainly don't. It would be like saying that in deploying to Azure you are using Dynamics. The OPs post and focus of the thread has clearly been about the software product.