The CRM Software Guide

April 27, 2007

FRI 27 APR 2007

Salesforce.com- You have other options. By Tom Greenberg | 7 comments Tags: crm; crm software; customer relationship management; on emand crm; salesboom; salesboom.com; salesforce.com

While Salesforce.com is considered the number one choice for on-demand CRM due to their marketing machine effectiveness and the loud mouth of it's CEO,Marc Benioff; there are other options available to small and medium size business that are proven both more suitable and less costly.

A closer look at other fashionable offers include Netsuite, Salesboom.com, RightNow, Entellium as well as the newly SAP Sales Force Automation on-demand solution. In the case of Netsuite and Salesboom.com, both companies offer out-of-the-box wall-to-wall integrated business solutions (CRM and ERP) in one package for almost half the price in the case of Salesboom.com and the same cost in the case of Netsuite.

Uptime Guarantee

Other important factors to consider when deciding what company to go with is the service level agreement- SLA. Salesforce.com does not have an SLA for most customers. That simply means, if Salesforce.com goes down (which happens frequently read this) then your employees can't access your customer records or use the system, and you will never get a refund. While some vendors offer up to 99.98% uptime guarantee only Salesboom.com offers a refund and a penalty clause to every customer.

Watch for tricks

Salesforce.com and other vendors resort to different sales and marketing techniques to get more money out of each and every customer. Take for instance the restriction of team edition users, if you have 10 users team edition, and you need to add one more user, you will be forced to upgrade to the Professional Edition which will mean a total increase of over $6000/year in subscription fees, just like that! Salesforce.com's Team Edition does not have custom fields or mass email capabilities, rendering it obsolete for most companies.

Also, the only vendor that seems to allow your company to mix-and-match editions is Salesboom.com. All other vendors require all your users to upgrade to the higher edition even if only one user out of your 50 users require the functionality in the other edition. This can result in huge increases in subscription fees and most likely will stop the company from utilizing the features needed.

Salesforce.com might tout it's platform as the next big thing; but in reality customers are looking for integrated systems; rather. Kudos to Salesboom.com and Netsuit for their integrated approach.

1:28 PM | Permalink | 7 comments | Tags: crm; crm software; customer relationship management; on emand crm; salesboom; salesboom.com; salesforce.com

Comments (7) for "Salesforce.com- You have oth...

Andrew; custom fields in Team Edition does not populate in custom views or reports, so it is a bad desig. Also, yes actually Salesboom.com was the first to introduce a monitor to track the service: http://monitor.salesboom.com/ . Do you by any chance work for Salesforce.com? Because if you do, then Tom the blog owner should expose you! hahaha By Jessica Wambolt - 5/2/2007 8:33 AM

I think Salesforce.com can afford to over charge their customers since they are the largest of the providers; however in an in-bound marketing environment where customers use google to find CRM vendors, customers can see the difference and will eventually opt out of SFDC to the others such as Netsuite and Salesboom.com By Tomy Markus - 5/3/2007 3:29 PM

Hello Andrew, I wish to chat with you . Please give me a number to call you. Many thanks, Mark - Team Edition customers can add 100 custom fields to every object in Salesforce - Salesforce.com publish their uptime at trust.salesforce.com - does any other vendor do this? - "if Salesforce.com goes down (which happens frequently read this)" - trust.salesforce.com would prove you wrong By Andrew - Tue, 01 May 2007 20:22:12 GMT By Mark Hogg - 5/10/2007 1:08 PM

Jessica ....hello . Interesting .Could you give me a number to call you . Interesting about sales f ,would like to know more. Mark By Mark Hogg - 5/10/2007 1:16 PM

yes other companies publish their uptime...salesboom.com does it in real time....go to http://monitor.salesboom.com/ and see for yourself. By Jason - 5/25/2007 10:47 AM

Watch out for tricks: watch out for salesforce.com deceptive practice of automatic contract renewals. It is not disclosed in any manner (let alone in a clear and conspicious way) when you sign the subscription order form or sign the credit card authorization form. There are no automatic renewal notices sent before the renewal period ends and there is no clear cancellation policy even if you are aware that your subscriptions will be automatically renewed. The number of subscriptions is such an import metric for Wall Street Analysts, that salesforce.com engages in deceptive practices to trap businesses into automatic renewal. Their billing department acts like a collection agency. Oh, and try getting your data out of the professional edition - not so easy. Beware. By Evan - 6/5/2007 9:23 AM

I left Salesforce Team Edition (renamed Group Edition) for Netsuite and wow, am I sorry. Now I'm looking for another vendor, maybe Salesboom?? I left Salesforce because at $60/user is expensive for CRM alone. Then went to Netsuite and paid more because there is the ERP, which means you get accounting AND ecommerce for slightly higher than Salesforce. Netsuite is a disaster as it is very buggy and implementation is a nightmare because it is not really intuitive, and the user experience is not consistent along all pages and tabs. The accounting function is much harder to use than Peachtree or Quickbooks while not giving you much more features. And the eCommerce--I don't even use it. If you read blogs and other comments, you will find a consistent theme and stream of complaints. Salesforce is much easier to use, but is limited in user setup and security controls. I can say this.. be very careful with Netsuite if your company does not have at least 1 full time IT staff to help implement and administer the system. Salesforce is good if you can afford it. By Chan - 10/22/2007 9:14 AM