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Why does SalesForce.com have such a vast footprint?
I have just migrated a client from SalesForce.com to Zoho CRM. It turned out to be a "no brainer."
During the last three years, this and one other company charged me with putting their CRM house in order after purchasing and deploying SalesForce.com without developing a plan or thoroughly evaluating vendor options.
For my current client, as their SalesForce.com annual contract renewal approached, we compared it to competitive options and selected Zoho.com as most appropriate the meet the needs of this particular business (4 - 10 seats during the next 24 months) and proceeded with the fearful task of migrating.
It became immediately clear that Zoho CRM is superior to SalesForce in every way other than its' footprint in the marketplace, including consultants and 3rd party application developers.
If anyone has related experiences, opinions, questions or other points of view, please consider this an opportunity to share.
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4 Answers
Please elaborate on "superior" with specifics. I know Zoho as well as Salesforce.com and Ms Dynamics, and SugarCRM and a few others. Each has it's strengths and weakness but I would not classify any as superior in all instances.
Each work well in different environments and in respective situations. Given that and understanding of the clients needs and your ability to further customize to those needs it is possible to create a superior overall solution and ownership experience. But not out of the box in my opinion.
As to why Salesforce.com has a larger footprint...
It was one of the first truly Cloud CRM solutions. It understood the sales process and built its solution accordingly (it is not just a customer database). It delivered what the market was asking for, a turn it on and use model. It had adequate funding to create an engaging marketing story...shall I continue?
Reasons for Salesforce's "large footprint":
1. First to market: This is one area of their hype that is based on fact - it was visionary for Benioff to create a single instance massive oracle powered web server/service in 1999. Especially after the 90's application server boom/crash.
2. Low Friction: Salesforce built a web browser based solution that business owners (as opposed to IT) could deploy simply by starting a trial.
3. True believer mentality within the company - I went to a one week partner Bootcamp at Salesforce.com headquarters at One Market Street in 2003 - the sales/marketing and other staff were almost religious about how good their solution was.
4. Coming from Siebel/Oracle the Saleforce.com managment new what buttons to push in corporate sales situations - the long drawn out implementations of that era caused the software to be clunky and out of date by the time it was in place.
5. The larger vision of being a platform for business solutions and embracing social networks hasn't hurt either.
Personally I feel that it isn't the best solution for small implementations - at this point their web based solution is starting to look clunky and bloated. Reporting is limited and you need the expensive enterprise subscription to do anything interesting. The 5 user limit on their entry level offerings can turn an affordable beginning into an expensive upgrade to Pro.
They are taking advantage of their Apple-like status at this point. It's like Blackberry years ago - Treos were no good , if you were a hip smartphone user you had a BB.
If their pricing was more reasonable and they offered API access to all subscription levels I would like them better.
I have been using Salesforce for 7 years now (group edition). It was probably 5 years too long. The open and use model was great in the beginning since we didn't know much about CRM and IT requirements (and possibilities!) The next 5 years was spent in fighting with the salesforce to get it to do what we wanted it to do without upgrading to the cost prohibitive developer/enterprise editions.
I am in the process of migrating from Salesforce to Zoho as well. Zoho looks good so far but the jury is still out. It is not completely superior to Salesforce. There are things that salesforce does do better (including the interface). However, there are just too many restrictions that necessitates the transition (workflow, access controls, etc.)
I do have a question regarding the migration: how do you migrate the attachments? Salesforce export gave me this tremendous list of files (1GB) and how do I import it??? Where are the associations with contacts & potentials?
I have been using Salesforce for 7 years now (group edition). It was probably 5 years too long. The open and use model was great in the beginning since we didn't know much about CRM and IT requirements (and possibilities!) The next 5 years was spent in fighting with the salesforce to get it to do what we wanted it to do without upgrading to the cost prohibitive developer/enterprise editions.
I am in the process of migrating from Salesforce to Zoho as well. Zoho looks good so far but the jury is still out. It is not completely superior to Salesforce. There are things that salesforce does do better (including the interface). However, there are just too many restrictions that necessitates the transition (workflow, access controls, etc.)
I do have a question regarding the migration: how do you migrate the attachments? Salesforce export gave me this tremendous list of files (1GB) and how do I import it??? Where are the associations with contacts & potentials?
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