salesforce for small company - worth it?
Discussion
jammy_basturd said:
There are a tonne of CRM systems out there, my advice is just to try as many as possible to see which one suits best.
I'd also advise trying applications like Xero, Kashflow, Quickbooks and Freshbooks for accountancy - the game has really moved on since Sage.
agree i use clearbooks myself! must admit havent used sage for years are they still stuck in the past?I'd also advise trying applications like Xero, Kashflow, Quickbooks and Freshbooks for accountancy - the game has really moved on since Sage.
Sage and spread sheets are a thing of the past, I.T has evolved and investing in a decent CRM system is a no brainer. If we didn't invest in salesforce our business wouldn't be where it is today. The standard application will not meet your business requirements, but with a little investment you'll be running your business from your mobile device!.
Frimley111R said:
Agreed but be careful of paying too much for a lot of functionality you don't need. If you are not a large business (can't tell from your post) you will find systems that do what you want for much less.
We have the required functionality and more, it is a enterprise level application which allows us to compete with the big boys with out having to spend a 10,000's each year. We are a small company, but the way we operate you'd think we had a 20 man team salesforce has allowed us to keep our model lean and agile. We were that impressed we have set up our own in house development team.Sounds good. However, let’s quickly clarify (relating to some posts above), cloud accounts/financial management is definitely worth investing in. We use Xero and it’s great, but it’s not CRM (and, Xero and Fresh Books are having some of the traditional players, like Sage, for breakfast). Sage does have a CRM but it’s really poor.
Secondly, in terms of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) there are two problems:
1. Sales is changing from a more fixed funnel ‘outbound' approach to a more versatile model (inbound/outbound, multi-channel)
2. CRMs are just databases that hold data, nothing much more than that
Salesforce, being complimentary, is what we call ‘the golden shackles’. The greatest myth of CRM is that you need a CRM - that’s just not true. Worse, with Salesforce the initial licenses are only scratching the surface, if you want to do the really clever stuff (i.e. marketing automation) then guess what… the cost starts heading north, fast. But you’re stuck, your data is in Salesforce and you're in a contract. Shackled. Salesforce is like a massive swiss army knife. You pay for it all, but may only use a few of the tools regularly but have still paid for the rest!
To give you an example. Our business has an in-house team of three, with four installers lined up this year. It needs email (functional and sales), CRM, sales management, automations, SMS notifications, distributed lead and supplier management with the usual quotation templates. Salesforce would cost us £1000 a month, but our own product is £150 for the same with a number of advantages.
Secondly, in terms of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) there are two problems:
1. Sales is changing from a more fixed funnel ‘outbound' approach to a more versatile model (inbound/outbound, multi-channel)
2. CRMs are just databases that hold data, nothing much more than that
Salesforce, being complimentary, is what we call ‘the golden shackles’. The greatest myth of CRM is that you need a CRM - that’s just not true. Worse, with Salesforce the initial licenses are only scratching the surface, if you want to do the really clever stuff (i.e. marketing automation) then guess what… the cost starts heading north, fast. But you’re stuck, your data is in Salesforce and you're in a contract. Shackled. Salesforce is like a massive swiss army knife. You pay for it all, but may only use a few of the tools regularly but have still paid for the rest!
To give you an example. Our business has an in-house team of three, with four installers lined up this year. It needs email (functional and sales), CRM, sales management, automations, SMS notifications, distributed lead and supplier management with the usual quotation templates. Salesforce would cost us £1000 a month, but our own product is £150 for the same with a number of advantages.
Frimley111R said:
Sounds good. However, let’s quickly clarify (relating to some posts above), cloud accounts/financial management is definitely worth investing in. We use Xero and it’s great, but it’s not CRM (and, Xero and Fresh Books are having some of the traditional players, like Sage, for breakfast). Sage does have a CRM but it’s really poor.
Secondly, in terms of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) there are two problems:
1. Sales is changing from a more fixed funnel ‘outbound' approach to a more versatile model (inbound/outbound, multi-channel)
2. CRMs are just databases that hold data, nothing much more than that
Salesforce, being complimentary, is what we call ‘the golden shackles’. The greatest myth of CRM is that you need a CRM - that’s just not true. Worse, with Salesforce the initial licenses are only scratching the surface, if you want to do the really clever stuff (i.e. marketing automation) then guess what… the cost starts heading north, fast. But you’re stuck, your data is in Salesforce and you're in a contract. Shackled. Salesforce is like a massive swiss army knife. You pay for it all, but may only use a few of the tools regularly but have still paid for the rest!
To give you an example. Our business has an in-house team of three, with four installers lined up this year. It needs email (functional and sales), CRM, sales management, automations, SMS notifications, distributed lead and supplier management with the usual quotation templates. Salesforce would cost us £1000 a month, but our own product is £150 for the same with a number of advantages.
I guess your sales model will be dependant on the nature of your business, but I would imagine the majority of businesses have a multichannel sales strategy as that change took place many years ago with e commerce and recently the introduction of social.Secondly, in terms of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) there are two problems:
1. Sales is changing from a more fixed funnel ‘outbound' approach to a more versatile model (inbound/outbound, multi-channel)
2. CRMs are just databases that hold data, nothing much more than that
Salesforce, being complimentary, is what we call ‘the golden shackles’. The greatest myth of CRM is that you need a CRM - that’s just not true. Worse, with Salesforce the initial licenses are only scratching the surface, if you want to do the really clever stuff (i.e. marketing automation) then guess what… the cost starts heading north, fast. But you’re stuck, your data is in Salesforce and you're in a contract. Shackled. Salesforce is like a massive swiss army knife. You pay for it all, but may only use a few of the tools regularly but have still paid for the rest!
To give you an example. Our business has an in-house team of three, with four installers lined up this year. It needs email (functional and sales), CRM, sales management, automations, SMS notifications, distributed lead and supplier management with the usual quotation templates. Salesforce would cost us £1000 a month, but our own product is £150 for the same with a number of advantages.
And this is handled perfectly by Salesforce and many other CRMS including Dynamics with a open API allowing you to integrate and develop your application.
Salesforce is more than just a CRM it's a very powerful platform that allows you to manage your business and can covers all area's from sales, services and marketing. Which is the no 1 reason why blue chips including o2 are scrapping there legacy systems and moving to the salesforce platform.
You save £850 a month, but what about your server and maintenance cost say circa £150 a month and the time it takes to make these changes which will be dependant on the language or platform your system is developed in . Down time/Extra workload cost per day say £250-1000 a day dependant on the number of individuals effected and there goes your saving. In-house CRMS are a thing of the past if cost is a issue you could consider the likes of Zoho.
Sheepshanks said:
Is that for your own purposes, or to sell as a service to others?
We're looking at Salesforce and it certainly generates very polarised opinions.
We offer the service to other companies, but predominantly work on our own projects.We're looking at Salesforce and it certainly generates very polarised opinions.
A lot of negative comments will be the result of not understanding the platform/application limitations and functionality the pricing and maybe even a poor implementation which can happen with any system.
I'll be honest theres so much salesforce has to offer that even we don't know the half of it and there is a update 3 times a year with more and more functionality. We have to take 3 exams to keep up with it. However they are great at listening to there customers and if they get a lot of requests for certain functionality they will implement on the platform.
We used it for our property portal , with all the tools and data at hand it allowed us to grow rapidly exceeding all our targets. We can pull in data from all sorts of applications and analyse it in one central repository. Heck I can even do it on the fly from my mobile device!!
Also licensing costs can be reduced massively if your implementation partner knows his stuff on licensing.
juggers said:
I guess your sales model will be dependant on the nature of your business, but I would imagine the majority of businesses have a multichannel sales strategy as that change took place many years ago with e commerce and recently the introduction of social.
And this is handled perfectly by Salesforce and many other CRMS including Dynamics with a open API allowing you to integrate and develop your application.
Salesforce is more than just a CRM it's a very powerful platform that allows you to manage your business and can covers all area's from sales, services and marketing. Which is the no 1 reason why blue chips including o2 are scrapping there legacy systems and moving to the salesforce platform.
You save £850 a month, but what about your server and maintenance cost say circa £150 a month and the time it takes to make these changes which will be dependant on the language or platform your system is developed in . Down time/Extra workload cost per day say £250-1000 a day dependant on the number of individuals effected and there goes your saving. In-house CRMS are a thing of the past if cost is a issue you could consider the likes of Zoho.
If Salesforce handled this perfectly, then you wouldn’t need to also have in-house resource to customise it And this is handled perfectly by Salesforce and many other CRMS including Dynamics with a open API allowing you to integrate and develop your application.
Salesforce is more than just a CRM it's a very powerful platform that allows you to manage your business and can covers all area's from sales, services and marketing. Which is the no 1 reason why blue chips including o2 are scrapping there legacy systems and moving to the salesforce platform.
You save £850 a month, but what about your server and maintenance cost say circa £150 a month and the time it takes to make these changes which will be dependant on the language or platform your system is developed in . Down time/Extra workload cost per day say £250-1000 a day dependant on the number of individuals effected and there goes your saving. In-house CRMS are a thing of the past if cost is a issue you could consider the likes of Zoho.
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.
juggers said:
Salesforce is not just a CRM it's so much more than that!
Exactly right. We use Enterprise Salesforce and the power of the system is immense. We use it as a platform to automate and manage all kinds of our business processes.
To get the best out of it, you do need a good IT company with skilled salesforce developers. You should then also be prepared to invest in building upon the base system. The cost of this can make the license costs seem like small beer.
If you don't have appetite for this, there are much cheaper alternatives which will perform the basic functions for less.
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