Watch out SFDC here comes Microsoft CRM
So now that I am playing the role of a CRM analyst, well a blogging analyst on CRM Software. I have already written about my credentials on CRM software, the fact that created an online CRM software called realclients.com and I invested in Clarify, my business partners founded Primus Knowledge Solutions. Well, the world of success demands not what I did almost 10 years ago, but what I know today and how can I provide insights in to the CRM and CRM software market. To do this well, I have to scour all the public relations spin and provide intelligent insights. Here is an article from the credible ZDnet, before Tech Crunch, they were one of the best IT news sources, but of course I am biased. I did work for Gartner for 3 years so I know a few things about news and analysis without spin, which CRM world does require. Check out the article as MS is going to launch an online CRM solution this week. I do think that was the impetus of the Google and Salesforce announcement last week, they wanted to slow down the Microsoft dominance on CRM, which it does with Dynamics and Outlook. Here is the article from ZDnet, I can’t believe they provided a summary along with the blogs snippet, folks these people are smart technologists not just journalists.
Microsoft CRM Online Hunts Salesforce.com | Enterprise Anti-matter | ZDNet.com
Now there’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. And the challenges for Salesforce.com can now begin. The goals of CRM Online are to match or beat Salesforce.com in feature/functionality, absolutely beat it in price, and with the combined power of the Microsoft brand and the ubiquitousness of the Outlook user base, seriously challenge Benioff’s hype machine on the marketing side. And they definitely have a chance at succeeding in all three.
I’m not going to parse the feature/functionality battle between the two at the individual function level here, but I can offer three main reasons why I think CRM Online needs to be taken seriously as an alternative to Salesforce.com. The first is Microsoft’s Outlook UI, known though not always loved by hundreds of millions of users. Love it or not, that user experience makes training for CRM Online a non-issue. Salesforce.com is pretty easy to use as well, but using Outlook is, for most desktop users, already intuitive.
Functional advantage #2 for Microsoft is the ability to shift between on-premise and on-demand, and mix and match the two. On-premise support is about customer choice, and lots of customers I know don’t want to be locked into on-demand any more than they want to be locked into any other deployment model. There are good business cases for on-demand deployment, and equally good ones for on-premise, and Microsoft CRM wants to support them both, something Salesforce.com simply cannot match.
Functional advantage #3 for Microsoft comes from Office integration. Right now this is an on-premise Office integration to CRM Online, which means that if you want to push sales data into an Excel spreadsheet, that spreadsheet can only reside locally. This is not equivalent to the on-demand integration that Salesforce.com is promising with Google’s Apps, but, as I don’t believe Google Apps are really ready for prime-time in the enterprise, I think the Office integration direct from the Outlook UI is a better functional advantage than either Salesforce.com’s Google Apps support or its own native Office support.
That’s the functional side. On the price side, CRM Online wants to seriously undercut Saleforce.com pricing, and is doing so by charging significantly less than Salesforce.com for both basic and premium functionality. At the top end, Microsoft wants $59 per user per month for functionality that would cost a Salesforce.com several hundred dollars per month. Especially when you include the 20 gigs of storage that Microsoft offers for free, for which users of Salesforce.com would pay dearly for. For a comparison of Salesforce.com premium pricing, look at Ephraim Schwartz’s column on the subject. I think it’s going to be largely impossible for Salesforce.com to institute any across-the-board pricing changes to match Microsoft, without watching its stock price collapse. So, on the pricing front, I think Microsoft has Salesforce.com beat cold.
Now for the hype side. That will be hard, as Benioff has proven time and time again. Deals like the Google Apps agreement play well, even if substantively they are a lacking in demonstrable market impact. Regardless, Benioff keeps pulling rabbits like Google out of his hat on a regular basis. But Microsoft has it’s much-vaunted market clout, and Brad Wilson, the GM in charge of CRM at Microsoft, is no wall flower either. And, once Microsoft can get its own platform-as-a-service, Office in the cloud story aligned with CRM Online, there’s going to be a lot to hype that, under the covers, will be more than just a fortuitous rabbit popping up in a cloud of smoke. A lot more.
This definition of CRM is from our friends at Entellium, they are one of the best and more progressive CRM Software companies in the country.
A Simple CRM Definition
Businesses Like Yours That Use CRM: 4.5%
Businesses Like Yours That Need CRM: 100%
Simply put, a CRM software or solution is anything that helps you develop, maintain or improve your customer relationships.
Whether storing information, automating processes, communicating directly with customers or analyzing customer data, CRM has several different aspects and many different types of implementations.
At Entellium, we focus on two of the most important aspects: sales force automation and customer service and support.
- By supporting your sales force, you can make it more productive while gaining insight into your sales cycle and results.
- By supporting your customer service and support functions, you can strengthen the relationships you have with your current customers.**By keeping track of both of both aspects, CRM Software helps you make sure your clients believe that they are #1 in your book!
Features of the Sales Force Automation CRM product features:
Features
The Survis Group
Sales Skyrocket 60% with Entellium eSalesForce
Activity Center™
Unlike most CRM Software solutions, eSalesForce gives you one location where you can manage all your daily tasks.
Quota Planner™
Any CRM Software solution can help you track revenue and sales targets. With Quota Planner, you can track every activity that affects your results, such as cold calls, number of appointments or conversion targets.
Leads Distribution
No more lost leads. eSalesForce automates lead distribution based on criteria you select.
Report Automator™
Create and distribute reports automatically on a customized schedule.
Document Automator™
Whether you need a proposal, quote, letter or contract, you can merge your data with included or customized templates to generate documents quickly and accurately.
Process Customization
Savvis
Your Data is Safe: We partner with the same data centers used by organizations like the New York Stock Exchange
The same sales process doesn’t work for every type of customer. With eSalesForce, you can create different sales stages, checklists and forecasting rules depending on your target.
Virtual Sales Coach™
Another industry first, this knowledge base gives your reps one-click access to competitive selling points, objection handling, product information, sales scripts and benefit statements.
Marketing Automation
Tear down the wall between sales and marketing with a wealth of features that integrate the two departments—and automate many tasks.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Most CRM Software solutions are intended for huge corporations with huge sales teams. Their complex features and complex rollouts make them hard to implement and hard to use.
eSalesForce is specifically designed to work with a wide range of business types and sizes, from just a handful to hundreds.
Make sure your solution is a good fit.
Customer Service and Support CRM product features:
- High Level Components
- Incident management
- Workflow management
- Workforce tracking
- Activity tracking
- Web-based support forms
- Contract/Warranty tracking
- Personalized support pages
- Full 360-degree view of customers
- Alerts and notifications
- Business intelligence
- Email incident management tools & integration
- Business Intelligence
- Response time and resolve time measurement
- Built-in report generator and distribution engine
- Report on system & custom fields
- Ability to build and save reporting scenarios
- Export reports to Excel
- Incident Tracking
- Customized incident capture forms
- Capture incidents from Web chat, Web forms, personalized support pages, email and manual data entry
- Call tracking by type
- Review and track incidents online in real-time
- Route items to work queues
- Establish standard turnaround times for items in a queue
- Automatic alerts when incidents exceed standard turnaround times
- Incident cloning
- Complete call scheduling
- Store and monitor Service Level Agreements (SLA)
- Setting for due date and time including target date and time for resolution
- Auto-update customer progress using email and SMS
- Customer self-service
- Set target resolution times for incidents and monitor progress against goals
- Sort work queues as well as custom user-defined criteria
- Search for specific data within queues such as responsible role (i.e., look for all work-items last handled by customer service)
- Supervisor notification—reporting alerts and warnings to the participant’s supervisor
- Workflow Management
- Automatically assign work based on staff skill levels and/or workloads
- Build separate business rules for each customer
- Match and deliver to contracted service levels
- Define absolute or relative dates when activities or work items must be completed
- Escalations and re-assignments
- Conduct team-resolution
- Ad-hoc & FIFO routing
- Rules builder
- Generate and manage notifications and alerts, including how the alerts are registered, logged, and to whom they are posted
- Support roles
- Ability for users to have multiple roles
- Push or assign work to participants as well as allow participants to pull work from their queues
- Preserve consistency by ensuring only one participant can access a task and its work-items at a time
- Multiple views of a user’s work lists (as a group member and as an individual; users may take items from a group list and place them on an individual list)
- Clearly differentiate between new and existing work tasks
- Set up various work queues such as an individual inbox or person-specific queue
- Define automatic routing and escalation (routing to a supervisor) of a work item as a result of activating a trigger
- Activity Management
- Track all activities related to Incidents
- Create and apply sets of activities to match business processes
- Delegate actions to others
- Integrate rule-based workflow processes
- Task/Diary function that synchronizes with MS Outlook
- Allow scheduling of both service staff and other staff
- Alerts and notifications
- Convenient daily print outs
- Customization
- Add custom fields
- Change field values
- Change look and feel of application
- Customize business rules at record and queue level
- Web Services API
When I first started to write about CRM in our blogs, the topic was due to the focus on CRM Software. Things have not changed, we have only recognized that the world of CRM is constantly changing, and there are so many players that we never could have imagined. Our friend Mark mentioned last week, that there are smaller players investing $20,000 to $30,000 in pay per click. So I wonder how the market share of Salesforce.com and other major players breaks down?
Can anyone direct me to those market share numbers for CRM software providers?
A friend of mine recently became the Director of Product marketing at a local CRM Software provider in Seattle. I had a meeting with him and his Director of Marketing on Friday, and it went well enough that I decided to write this blog on the latest CRM trends, directions, and analysis. Before, we start I want to mention that this is probably my most knowledgeable area of expertise. I invested in Clarify one of the original CRM Software companies, which got sold to Nortel back in 1999. I also have had investors and friends who co-founded large CRM software companies that went public with stock prices over $100/share. I have also wanted to start my own CRM software as a services, Internet company, and actually had someone develop the software for us, needless to say it did not work out. And, we never fully developed the business plan, though we had a great URL called RealClients.com, which I don’t even know if we still own. We have given up so many URL’s in the last year, just due to budgetary concerns. Believe me, there are still good one’s to have. So getting back to the world of CRM software and CRM with Internet and mass emailing functions is what I wanted to create.
It seems as my friends company had created probably the best system in the world. They are super well funded, and we might do some work for the, from an SEO and lead generation perspective. So I thought I would start this blog on CRM. Before we get further, I wanted to define in simple terms what is CRM? Not just the acronym definition, but what it really helps businesses accomplish, and how it’s coming down stream to contact management and email functionality. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and it is the software that helps to manage interactions with customers, it came from the customer service perspective in large companies, but is now focused towards sales force automation.
Large companies needed CRM software to help them manage their contacts with existing customers and keep track of customer services issues, and client records. On the other end sales people needed account information on companies and clients. In the middle were product and inventory management systems, that really didn’t have anything to do with CRM, but if integrated with customer databases would be a great tool. Well focus that is where CRM software has come today, any information about a customer, the companies interactions with prospects and clients, even which products were shipped to them, and when. To be able to access this information from a login account on the internet from any where any computer or cell phone, that is where CRM software is going today, and is already.
So you can imagine, as technology sales executive as my first career, an SEO Consultant now days, and a marketing expert with over 16+ years of technology experience I have learned a few things about sales and marketing management. I am excited to see an amazing CRM software company in Seattle, until we sign a contract with them, I am going to keep the name elusive to you all, but i do love the company offices and people that I met there on Friday. So stay tuned for great CRM advice, Information and insights to help you make a great CRM software decision.
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