With the latest news of Salesforce and their 9.6 million profits in their first quarter out of a total of 247.6 million in sales in the quarter goes to show the amount of money the giant of the Online CRM Software industry has to spend on marketing. I will admit I am a fan of underdogs in many situations and the Web Based CRM industry is no exception. I like to see many CRM vendors do well because it will create a more competitive market and keep a single company from obtaining a monopoly. With more competitors battling with roughly the same market share the end user and small businesses are sure to benefit from lower costs and better service.
Unfortunately it is sometimes the case that when a company grows into a position where they control the market they can neglect their current clients and provide less then optimal customer support since there is not much fear of a client going elsewhere. The same scenario plays into the pricing of software and services or software as a service, prices can be raised because it is almost certain that businesses will pay the higher price if the marketing of a company controls the means people use to research other possibilities. There are many Web Based CRM Software vendors out there who offer small, medium and large businesses a great solution for their CRM needs. These vendors are companies like Netsuite, Salesboom.com or Oncontact; there are many more out there you just need to dig through the marketing of the large firms to find the other great CRM solutions.
Yesterday in the CRM Software industry there was an offer put on the table for exsisting Salesforce.com customers. This offer did not come from the CRM giant, rather from one of their competitors, Salesboom.com. The offer is comprised of an enticement program for those who migrate from Salesforce.com CRM Software to Salesboom.com and have a minimum of 20 user licenses. The details include a $5000 check and free data migration with the Migration Magic Button if an agreement is made by a certain date.
The Migration Magic Button is stated to quickly migrate all data along with business processes from Salesforce.com to Salesboom, kind of a way to rest aside the moving pains and ensure the integrady of a companies information remains intact.
So I wonder if this move by Salesboom to target the customers of the largest CRM player in the market will pay off or piss off, either way it will let those who are unhappy with Salesforce.com know there is an alternative out there, they're no long stuck.
The latest Salesforce.com news is all about the speculated proposal of their shares to Oracle, this combined with the fact that Marc Benioff is selling his Salesforce.com shares daily makes one wonder, how interested is he? Apparently Oracle was approached and offered Salesforce at a price of $75 per share, this was roughly 50% higher then the closing $50.87 of that day. Whether this move makes sense or not for either of the companies involved is not what I am concerned about. If this transaction were to take place all the small to medium sized businesses currently with Salesforce are going to suffer.
Right now Salesforce.com is the largest Web Based CRM Software vendor on the market, their prices are already the highest and their focus has been moving away from SMB's in attempts to attract large corporation's. If Salesforce was under the direction of Oracle, SMB's would only suffer more since their focus also overlooks SMB's.
What this means for the other Web Based CRM Software vendors like Salesboom.com or Entellium for example, is that there could be a lot more of what is already happening to come in the future. Salesboom has noted that a large number of their clients were former Salesforce.com customers who were fed up with high prices and lack of support for smaller companies. The possibility of Salesforce changing hands could mean a lot more SMB's will be looking else where for their CRM solutions.
Everyone is always searching for the best CRM Software, as they should, but when they search the internet they often don't find the best solutions for their business, often times they find the companies who pay the most money to be palced at the top of the search results. I would suggest to anyone looking for the Best CRM Software solutions to do their research, or look for vendors like ACT, Salesboom or Netsuite that offer product comparison's, if you do this you should have a much easier time finding the perfect solution for your company.
With all the buzz around CRM Software for SMB's or companies of any size, we tend to forget about the management needs of groups and organizations. These groups need similar software to manage members, financial transactions and any other daily tasks. For example, Church Management Software can assist and ease the work involved in managing church members and all other administrative aspects, these organizations look to grow the same as any other business.
Most CRM vendors have some sort of Microsoft Outlook integration built into their platform. This being true not many integrate in a way that you don't loose Outlook functionality, companies like Salesforce.com and Salesboom.com both have a solid Outlook integration system, but even from a company like Salesforce.com some functionality is lost. When integrating Microsoft Outlook with Salesforce, notes attached to contacts are lost in translation, this doesn't happen when using Salesboom. So even though many CRM vendors claim to have Outlook integration, beware of their fine print.
Salesboom.com has just put out a press release saying they will end phishing attacks on CRM. They are using a two factor authentication security approach which means an employee must insert a USB key into their computer before login, if the username and password entered match the "digital ID" then access is granted. This would have been helpful to salesforce.com when one of it's employee's was "tricked" into disclosing their password, with Salesboom's security you could give your password away and it's still no good to any scammer out there, Salesboom says that the USB keys can not be duplicated and are encrypted. This news is good to hear, something needed to be done to help protect companies databases., by the looks of things, 2008 should be a safe CRM year.
Salesforce.com is in the news again, this time for a breach in their security, an employee was tricked into giving out a password, providing hackers with access to a portion of Salesforce.com's clients data. With the size of Salesforce.com occurances like thisthreaten to give the entire CRM industry a bad name, customers may fear that data is not safe while using a hosted CRM solution, this however is not true, other companies like Salesboom.com have constantly provided it's clients with safe and secure hosted CRM Software solutions. So if you're wondering if your data is safe, maybe you should wonder which CRM provider you should trust.
In today's news I am seeing alot about the price slash by Microsoft on their CRM Software Dynamics. They were able to drop the price they charge their partners to $15/user enabling them to resell it at a much lower cost then companies like Salesforce. What i take away from this is the fact that it shows just how much CRM customers have been getting over charged when they purchase their CRM Software solutions from large vendors who charge too much. It certainly makes some smaller CRM vendors like Salesboom.com look good since they have been offering their hosted on demand CRM Software solutions for as low as $40/user from the beginning. I am glad that customers now know what they should be paying for their CRM Software which should help them make decisions when it comes to future CRM purchases.
When a company decides to make the move to CRM Software Solutions like that of Salesforce or Salesboom.com, they are truly shining light on parts of their company that may not have been visible by all employees. There will be no more using old data because someone didn't forward you that, with CRM Software everyone works from the same database so all have the most upto date information.
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