Salesforce could be coming to O365
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Looks like Salesforce will be integrating their CRM SaaS app into O365 tools. Pretty cool. I can't wait to see the price structure.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/053014-microsoft-salesforce-282076.html?page=1
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Price Structure: Very, very expensive. LOL
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Of course. I was hoping it would be SOHO friendly.
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I find it odd the way some companies look at CRM pricing. For example, a sales team 0f 12 was balking at a $6k cost for an in-house CRM. A sale for them ranges from $25k to $300k. If just one person brought in one extra sale because of the CRM, it'd more than paid for iteself.
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@alexntg I see your point, the numbers speak for themselves. Although it is widely known that smaller SOHO's don't usually have a IT budgets.
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@technobabble said:
Of course. I was hoping it would be SOHO friendly.
I don't think that that is a reasonable possibility.
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@alexntg said:
I find it odd the way some companies look at CRM pricing. For example, a sales team 0f 12 was balking at a $6k cost for an in-house CRM. A sale for them ranges from $25k to $300k. If just one person brought in one extra sale because of the CRM, it'd more than paid for iteself.
And likewise, CRM is often crazy. If you have six salespeople but 300 users by choosing Salesforce you either stop 294 people from interacting with the data or pay $30K per month. So bringing in a few more sales doesn't pay for it. CRM can be great but it isn't a pure win. It comes with surprise costs and caveats.
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@technobabble said:
@alexntg I see your point, the numbers speak for themselves. Although it is widely known that smaller SOHO's don't usually have a IT budgets.
How many companies do you know where the salespeople both bring in enough extra to cover the difference - remember that it has to be the average extra against every user who needs access to the data. In an SMB often two people need data access for every salesperson. In a big shop with lots of salespeople it makes perfect sense. But pricing in the SMB often does not.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@technobabble said:
@alexntg I see your point, the numbers speak for themselves. Although it is widely known that smaller SOHO's don't usually have a IT budgets.
How many companies do you know where the salespeople both bring in enough extra to cover the difference - remember that it has to be the average extra against every user who needs access to the data. In an SMB often two people need data access for every salesperson. In a big shop with lots of salespeople it makes perfect sense. But pricing in the SMB often does not.
It's very situational. In many cases, there's data floating in salespeople's mailboxes and one-off spreadsheets they manually compile and then send out the spreadsheets via email. A barebones CRM install would only need coverage for those users. The users could still generate their reports and send them off. Everything else is a la carte. If you wanted to go the next step and offload some of the administrative work to others, you'd need licenses to cover them. In those cases, however, the people doing the administrative work typically were feeding data to the salespeople and processing what they receive, so it would take a work study to see if the time saved on both sides by working directly with the data paid for the CRM's administrative users. If done properly, it should at least be a wash. At some point, there's a data export/import process going on (automated or otherwise). There are pure overhead, completely optional users, such as non-sales management. Some would prefer to just look at the reports they receive, and others like to play with data. That would impact the number of licenses.
For the environment of 10 salespeople, only 4 additional licenses were needed, for the 3 Customer Service/Order Entry folks and the Ops Manager. For the Customer Service people, it was a huge time saver. Less time was spent chasing down the salespeople for info, and more time was able to spent putting the data to work to get results. They were on the cusp of adding a fourth Customer Service person, but didn't need to because of the time savings CRM provided. That alone paid for the system.
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@alexntg said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@technobabble said:
@alexntg I see your point, the numbers speak for themselves. Although it is widely known that smaller SOHO's don't usually have a IT budgets.
How many companies do you know where the salespeople both bring in enough extra to cover the difference - remember that it has to be the average extra against every user who needs access to the data. In an SMB often two people need data access for every salesperson. In a big shop with lots of salespeople it makes perfect sense. But pricing in the SMB often does not.
It's very situational. In many cases, there's data floating in salespeople's mailboxes and one-off spreadsheets they manually compile and then send out the spreadsheets via email. A barebones CRM install would only need coverage for those users. The users could still generate their reports and send them off. Everything else is a la carte. If you wanted to go the next step and offload some of the administrative work to others, you'd need licenses to cover them. In those cases, however, the people doing the administrative work typically were feeding data to the salespeople and processing what they receive, so it would take a work study to see if the time saved on both sides by working directly with the data paid for the CRM's administrative users. If done properly, it should at least be a wash. At some point, there's a data export/import process going on (automated or otherwise). There are pure overhead, completely optional users, such as non-sales management. Some would prefer to just look at the reports they receive, and others like to play with data. That would impact the number of licenses.
For the environment of 10 salespeople, only 4 additional licenses were needed, for the 3 Customer Service/Order Entry folks and the Ops Manager. For the Customer Service people, it was a huge time saver. Less time was spent chasing down the salespeople for info, and more time was able to spent putting the data to work to get results. They were on the cusp of adding a fourth Customer Service person, but didn't need to because of the time savings CRM provided. That alone paid for the system.
When you say that the cost of the system was justified, is that only compared to doing nothing or are you comparing to a lower cost, and probably lesser, alternative.
For example.... MS CRM is definitely superior to SugarCRM or vTiger. But given that those are free and can have every user have a login, MS CRM has to be a LOT better to justify the extra cost. If there was no free option, I would find high cost CRM easy to justify. But with free options, it is much harder.
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Like if it is Excel vs SalesForce, it would be rare for SF not to be worth it.
But if it is vTiger vs SF, much harder to justify.
And with salespeople having to generate reports, that lowers the value of a more closed system.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Like if it is Excel vs SalesForce, it would be rare for SF not to be worth it.
But if it is vTiger vs SF, much harder to justify.
And with salespeople having to generate reports, that lowers the value of a more closed system.
If a company already has vTiger as a CRM, it'd be an issue of platform migration, which wouldn't be worthwhile unless there was certain required functionality worth the effort of the migration. That's a lot different from someone not having a CRM already.
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Sure. Brownfield would be extremely hard to justify a move
But assuming a greenfield scenario where you are starting from scratch. Still very hard to get enough extra sales from SF vs vTiger.
