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What are good CRM prices?
We are starting to look at purchasing a CRM system and are trying to get an idea on pricing (what’s competitive, what should we look for? Hidden costs, etc).
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12 Answers
I would say that to get up and running on Salesforce.com is easy and cheap. If you need a low level of functionality, you can get away with the Group or professional editions at prices around $60 / seat. However, if you need a complete solution, one that includes things like workflow and approvals and integration with external systems, you'll need to step up to the Enterprise Edition. At a list price of $125 / seat that can get pricey quickly. In my experience, Salesforce.com is willing to provide a 10% discount even at very low seat counts and will increase the discount to 20+% if you push them and you have about 25 seats.
If your intention is to use the application as a stand alone then you shouldn't find too many hidden costs. However there are a bunch of gotchas if you have a complex organization or need to do a lot of integration with the system. Here are some of the things to be aware of:
- If you are integrating with external systems, the system limits you to 1000 API calls per day per seat. Further, they don't seem willing to change this number and don't sell additional calls ala cart. This can add up pretty quickly - for example a Marketo (Marketing Automation System) Integration uses 5,000-10,000 calls per day. If you need to write your own systems you will need to take care (read spend extra development time) to minimize the number of calls you will make.
- If you need to manage a large number of items in the system, storage will add up quickly. By default, Salesforce.com requires 2Kbytes for each record, and the enterprise edition only comes with 1GByte of storage allowing you to store about 500,000 records. While this may seem like alot, if you are have a large call center and are tracking them at the activity level, you will use the storage quickly. If you are in this situation, make sure you purchase additional storage. The overage charges are usurious, $50/Mbyte/month and pre-purchases storage is absurdly high as well, $500/GByte/month. Fortunately, Salesforce is willing to deal on storage and you get very high discounts on that line item.
- If you need to do any sort of data segmentation, i.e. limit parts of you organization from seeing all the data, be prepared to purchase extra seats to help manage this. All data sharing is done at the user level and we have found the least confusing way to deal with the problem is by having extra seats and giving users multiple logins.
- If you need to do any reporting outside of the basics, be prepared to purchase some sort of external reporting system and snapshot your salesforce data. There are plenty of outstanding off-the-shelf reporting products and the integrations aren't difficult, but it is an additional cost.
Don't let the above scare you away from Salesforce.com. It is a great platform that lets you get you application built and deployed very quickly, but make sure you talk to your sales person about some of these issues (if they apply to you) as I have found that they recognize these issues and will work to accommodate your needs.
What are your main goals in using a CRM software and what are you trying to improve in your organization etc.?
Do you have a price point for purchasing a CRM system? (Monthy, annually or per user..etc.
We are in the early stages of the process. We are trying to make ours sales reps more efficient because we're using outlook and excel right now and it's becoming difficult to manage and for me to have insight into their pipeline. We haven't determined a specific price point or budget yet...just trying to get an idea of what to expect.
I'm a little biased, but I think $60/user/month is a good price. But I would make sure you are getting what you need.
Would you be interested in looking at a demo of Ivinex?
Craig
You might want to take a look at http://www.insidecrm.com/ and http://www.focus.com/research/product/crm/ to help with your research. Here is a short buyers guide to help: http://www.insidecrm.com/whitepaper/pdf/sfa-buyers-guide_9-07.pdf
Depending on your needs and the fact that your company uses Outlook, you might look into Microsoft Dynamics CRM - . It integrates seamlessly into Outlook so you can use one interface to manage all of your daily tasks. It has two deployment options: On-demand (web based) and On-premise. The cost for the On-demand version is a lot less although reoccurring, but it doesn't allow the integration or customization that is possible with an On-premise system.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM main site: http://crm.dynamics.com/
On-Demand: http://crm.dynamics.com/deployment/ondemand.aspx
On-Premise: http://crm.dynamics.com/deployment/onpremise.aspx
Hi Mary,
I am a huge fan of Salesforce.com. Been using them for about 5 years. The biggest win for me is the number of other vendors that snap-in to salesforce with no custom coding.
Here is a comparison of their "editions". http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp
Please shoot me a message if you have any specific questions about them. Good luck!
Mary, how many licenses do you need? And would you say you need the most basic functionality (contact/lead management) or more advanced functionality (e.g. advanced customization, data integration). These will all drive the pricing for on demand CRM.
In terms of hidden costs, there's no doubt that the biggest hidden costs is who in the organization (even one with only 10+ users) will manage the app. For example, even in SFDC, there is lots of work to constantly update the application based on your sales process - what is a lead, what do you want to know about them? How do leads get passed from marketing to sales? Etc.
We are going to have 10 users and my initial assumption is that we will only need basic functionality. Thanks for the heads up on hidden costs; I was thinking that our sales manager would be the person managing the app. In your experience, do you think we would need to hire someone to handle the day-to-day management of the app even if we only have 10 users? Or is it something that can be handled with a few additional hours a week from a current employee?
Fred makes very good points. A good price for the software may be anywhere between $40 and $80 per user per month, depending upon what you need, but the highest cost for many CRM systems is not the software or even the implementation services, but the cost of maintaining/updating the system to reflect experience and meet changing needs.
You can minimize these costs is by choosing a system that can be configured by your own staff without depending on external consultants and getting a fixed price bid for the implementation.
The following document details a process by which you can ensure that the system meets your needs at a manageable cost:
http://www.focus.com/ugr/research/crm/how-pick-right-crm-helpdesk-bpm-vendor/
I think Simon is heading in the right direction here, licensing costs for any system are not the key decision making driver. It should be TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that informs your decision in the end.
For a small organisation only looking for a minimal number of seats you might want to consider something customisable that is remote hosted to further drive down costs. There are some interesting looking offerings out there now outside of the Salesforce/Siebel etc. groupings that are fully independant. Though I have not tried them myself.
Most importantly though before you make any buying decision you need to be very clear what it is that your chosen CRM solution must bring in terms of business benefit before considering any particular implementation. Too often CRM systems turn in to millstones round the necks of companies who were doing just fine without them and implement because they think they should have them, rather than demonstrating a real need for them.
Hi Mary,
I hear you say that you need to see your sales people data. And you are currently using Outlook.
Our CRM software has contact, calendar and sales management with email integrated. So you can host your email with us, unlike Outlook where you still need to get the mail forwarded to Outlook from your ISP. We have team management where we can setup a team with member and manager. We can set the permission for member and manager. The simplest setting is to set read permission to manager. This way the manager can always see the team data such as lead and opportunity.
I am happy to show you it can be done. Or, you can subscribe to our Free Edition and no time limit, and it gives storage 100MB. When your storage grows you can upgrade to paid edition with 1GB storage. Please visit http://www.borneosoft.com
Generally, I would suggest you choose hosted CRM and I agree to previous poster, cost of maintaining hardware and software is too high, not to mention the software license like Operating system to run the application. Some think that buying software license is better than paying monthly subscription to hosted CRM. But it is not true, since someone still has to maintain and manage the hardware and software involved in running the CRM application. And if you also want to run mail server in your own company infrastructure, it can be quite costly to maintain it.
Kind Regards,
Luke
Mary,
Price is relational to technology and function. Typically, the more you pay, the more function you receive in turn. I know you say that you only need "Basic" functionality, but you need to define what you consider Basic Functionality in your world and if you require integration with any existing system. You may think is basic functionality may not be considered basic functionality with some vendors.
I encourage you to look at or give us a call at 800-988-8850 to discuss options available to you.
Business is not one size fits all, nor should your CRM be. Cool Life Systems delivers affordable and effective database management tools that tailored to your business process.
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