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Has anyone dropped salesforce.com and migrated to another CRM platform? If so, to who and why?
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18 Answers
Back in the day, say 10 years ago, organizations acquired CRM as a capital expenditure versus a monthly accrued expense. What does this mean? Before writing a big check for upfront software license fees, hardware and implementation services, business leaders did their homework. A clear 3-year ROI, and a winning project plan were created to ensure a smooth adoption and transition into day to day operations.
Salesforce is easy to buy, without planning, forethought into implementation, and IT involvement. And sure there are plenty of migrations from Salesforce. But primarily for reasons that have nothing to do with the product or service. I refer you to the white paper ,10 drivers to CRM failure at http://www.focus.com/briefs/sales/10-drivers-crm-failure-and-roi/
Having said my peace about proper planning and implementation. What are the reasons business leaders look to alternatives from Salesforce? Let's assume an organization acquired Salesforce and implemented it the right way. Users Adopted. Proper sponsorship. Continual improvement of CRM processes. Why would then, an organization look at alternatives?
1. Price. Quality doesn't come cheap. And at $1,500/user for Enterprise Edition per year not including implementation, administration, training, etc., Salesforce is among the priciest solutions on the market. Salesforce would be happy to craft a 3 year total cost of ownership and ROI plan for you. And sure, there are less expensive solutions on the market. Could they work for you. If your willing to do the homework. Maybe? Why not?
2. Control. Salesforce makes it easy for organization to acquire and maintain. Really easy. Is it at the cost of control and flexibility? Salesforce does not give you direct access to the database or the application code. Backups are provided to you in over 15 different CSV files that you have to join together. Many may view the proprietary services as too constraining. However, nobody complains too much about the proprietary nature of Apple's iPhone. Benefits to many. But for some, this may serve too constraining for the savvy organization that knows what they want. A very specific user workflow experience, direct and inexpensive integration to the database, tight integration with applications within the firewall, or on-premise options.
3. Policy and Compliance. Once upon a time organization were very suspicious of relying on SaaS vendors for their business critical applications. And hosting sensitive customer information in the cloud. To the benefit of the entire industry, Salesforce has broken this barrier. Example, Salesforce publishes real-time security and performance information at www.trust.salesforce.com. HOWEVER, many organization, particularly in the financial services sector, will never host their data outside of their firewall. Seeing how blue chip goliaths proved vulnerable, Arthur Anderson/Enron, MCI, Lehman Brothers, and Merril Lynch. The thought of losing access to critical customer information still remains frightening to many...but they do it anyways.
If you fall within one of these categories, you may have chosen to investigate the list of usual suspect found in a Forrester, Gartner, or Destination CRM report. You'll find Microsoft, Oracle, SugarCRM, and others in these sources. On a lighter note, the most prevalent solutions used for CRM still are not on these analyst reports: Outlook and Excel. For good reason, don't you think?
Specific names are omitted to protect confidentiality. My sources are personal experiences with the implementations of more than 100 implementations across 10 products, and a Salesforce.com Level II Consulting certification acquired in 2006.
Agree or disagree at ray@crmevangelist.com
Hi Michael,
About 77% of our clients are previous Salesforce users. Their main motives for switching to our application is price, customer service, training and ease of use.
Salesforce is a great application, depending on your business type/size, but it's incredibly expensive, the contracts are misleading, and it lacks integration into other aspects of business management.
Leaving will save you a lot of money, and time - if you migrate to the right software. I would suggest going with an all in one solution that's going to save you the hassle of picking up multiple apps. I'm not sure how you manage other aspects of your business, i.e. projects and billing, but you can save time and money if you consolidate. WORKetc has an all in one interface that combines crm, projects, and billing to give you a birds eye of all operations in your business. It's helpful in the sense that you could login to your dashboard which shows you which leads are on the go, which projects are being worked on and due soon, which invoices have been sent and unpaid, as well as reminders, to-dos, and support cases.
All of these features integrate directly so you don't have to worry about spending more money paying for integration and additional addons (yeah, i'm implying the salesforce marketplace).
We do a lot of conversions from Salesforce.com to ACT. The primary reasons for moving away are cost and usage. Several people told us, as alluded to in a previous post here, that the contracts were misleading. Once their activity increased and they needed more functionality, extra charges started showing up. In addition, many clients find out the hard way they can't get access to their data because they were not on a corporate account or had not been paying the extra price to guarantee access to their own data. The usage piece usually involves around the ability to work offline and make changes easily. As for volume we are averaging around 4 conversions a month. About 6 months ago we started getting more requests. I think people needed to start looking at their bottom line.
The danger of doing that also means they may go with a solution that doesn't fit their needs. Open source is just that - open, cheap, maybe not as robust. MS CRM is a great product but is really designed for a large community. The online version is a good start at a more affordable solution, but it too is a monthly fee. More and more clients are calling and looking for cheaper solutions - especially around Google apps. People realize they need to follow up on their customers - they just want to do it as cheaply as possible. And when you realize that over 80% of the companies that run America have 10 employees are less, there are a lot of companies out there with critical needs but limited budgets.
Corie, have any of clients moved to your platform from Salesforce.com? If so, why?
We use the enterprise version of salesforce and have thought about dropping it to move to something else (such as infusionsoft) but at the end of the day the functionality and customization you get with SF is quite impressive. It's a beast of a platform that is not user friendly but the functionality from the ability standpoint is quite impressive, especially when combined with chatter, custom workflows, and additional apps.
At the online Dynamics CRM 2011 launch from Microsoft last week they had a large Salesforce client on the stage who was moving a large Enterprise organisation from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics.
Can't remember the company but a quick search for the meeting and launch website should find the story.
The lady managing the transistion was very animated and was touting costs and flexibility as the main reasons for moving.
Thanks for your response, Corie
Corie hit the nail on the head. Here at Emery Creek we roughly get the same percentages from Salesforce customers. At the end of the day it's all about customer service and user adoption, and their prices are way too high!
Not a problem, Michael. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me directly: ckaftalovich@luxorcrm.com.
The adoption of any CRM tool needs to accompanied with a solid strategy and unlimited customer service and support.Otherwise your big investment will not pay off in the long-run.
As a long time top US ACT! Software consulting firm, we recently began offering SugarCRM as cloud solution that does the same thing as Salesforce.com but at a cost of 50-75% less.
I agree with Corrie. Strategy, planning and solid support are key factors to consider when evaluating CRM solutions whether on-premise or hosted.
We're very excited about SugarCRM 6 and closed our first deal within a month of becoming a SugarCRM VAR.
We get a decent amount of new business from SF migrations, and I'd love to say the #1 reason comes down to features (i'm sure much of it does) but the biggest thing we hear about is cost. It's cheap for a small business to start in SF with their intro packages, but to get the features they really need their rapidly escalated to the enterprise edition--a cost they simply cannot swallow--and so they come looking for alternatives.
What it really stems from is this: SF was not designed for small businesses. It's the wrong size shoe. We get enough of these types of migrations from SF and others that we created a video to address the common issues. http://www.addresstwo.com/small-business-crm/
Nick
We are CRM consultants and help our clients migrate to the CRM solutions that fit them best. We have found a growing number of customers leaving salesforce.com for other systems. Mostly MS CRM and SugarCRM--but even some ACT. It seems people are paying a lot of salesforce and it's difficult to use--so user adoption is fairly poor.
Tim Priestley
www.accentgold.com
About 25% of our customers are users switching from Salesforce.com, typically in the 10 - 50 seat range. The three primary reasons are:
Price - We are roughly 1/2 the price PUPM for similar functionality.
Support - Customers feel we offer a higher level of personalised support.
Sales Order Processing - Workbooks offers sales order processing as part of our Business Edition. This allows customers to create orders, purchases orders and invoices in our platform. Meaning they get 'Prospect to Cash' in one integrated application.
John Cheney
Workbooks.com
We left the TEAM edition of Salesforce.com which is priced very reasonably (I think they market it as GROUP now), but we left because many of the security features we needed was in the higher cost professional tier and that was price prohibitive at the time.
So we moved to tactilecrm.com which was less expensive and had the security features we needed.
Here are my take on this one:
Salesforce.com Pros:
feature rich
active community of add-on developers
well integrated with many other legacy and web-apps
you can build your own custom apps into it using the Force.com platform
very scalable
good all-in-one solution that goes beyond a CRM pure play
Salesforce.com Cons:
takes a bit of time to setup upfront
need for extensive training
requires continual customization
expensive and yearly up-front payment
I actually prepared a complete post on the topics with some popular alternatives
http://www.getapp.com/blog/salesforce-crm-should-you-stay-or-should-you-go/
Salesforce.com has been struggling for some time with cancellations. Its one of the reasons they mandate a 1 to 2 year contract. There are a number of reasons for the cancellations. First is cost. Many of the customers that select Salesforce have done so simply because they know someone else who signed up. The company may not have properly outlined their requirements and as a result later learn that they simply were not using much of the functionality they purchased and Salesforce is anything but cheap.
This product is really designed for the enterprise market where scalability to thousands of users along with muti-language support is required. The company's lower cost offering limit functionality and the number of users and as such is no bargain. For the mid-market, Commence CRM from Commence Corporation is a popular choice. The company has a 20 year track record in the sector, a lot of solid references and very affordable price point. Sage CRM is another well known firm but located in the UK.
Hi Dylan,
Migrating from one CRM system to the next can be very challenging but the majority of our clients who have done so, have found that migrating to our solution, Luxor CRM, has been smooth and simple.
I'd like to learn more about what you're specifically looking for in a CRM solution to see if Luxor CRM is a fit.
In the meantime, feel free to take a look at Luxor CRM at: www.luxorcrm.com. You can also contact contact me at: ckaftalovich@luxorcrm.com
Best of luck with your search,
Corie
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