While your success is well-deserved, Salesforce, your accompanying hubris was ultimately your downfall with us at SMB Nation. We’ve left you for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Online for some very important reasons. I’ll share the story right here, right now.
Money. As we approached our annual Salesforce renewal date, it wasn’t lost on us at SMB Nation how expensive Salesforce had become. I call it the “CRM cost creep.” It’s funny how in year one (a few years ago), the entry-level for Salesforce looked very cheap compared to our then CRM/ERP system (NetSuite). But fast forward the movie and somehow, someway the costs had escalated. I can’t put my finger on it exactly but I felt “poorer” continuing my journey with Salesforce. Of course, a proper lady will never kiss-and-tell, but the amount of money in play was significant.
(Pictured: Jenny, Edna and Marianne wave "goodbye" to Salesforce)
Full disclosure though. We moved to Dynamics CRM 2013 Online as a bona fide Microsoft partner and received 25 full licenses. While it appears “free” at first blush, such is not truly the case. There are true switching costs when moving from one CRM system to another plus staff retraining time. However – in the long run – the decision to end our Salesforce relationship was correct.
Inflexible. Salesforce became annoying with respect to licensing. Inside SMB Nation, we have different needs. Essentially we have tiered licensing needs. The top professional Salesforce CRM license was needed for management but the lower-level (and cheaper) license would have worked just fine for our “callers” inside the call center. Salesforce wanted to commit you to only one class of license. Ergo – low-level callers were using very expensive professional licenses.
Functionality. While the spoils go to the victor, in the case of Salesforce it means lack of innovation. The Salesforce user interface, which I feel I know intimately, feels really “tab-next-field” mainframe to me. Contrast that to the “touch friendly” experience with Dynamics CRM 2013 Online. I’m using Windows 8.1 with touch-enabled devices and it’s a game changer. The Microsoft CRM solution has the big button. Trying to use Salesforce with a touch device would be agony! I’ll end with this. How many times have you seen a hot shot category killer app such as Salesforce fall behind? I believe in my heart that such is the case. I’d offer that Dynamics CRM 2013 Online has caught up to Salesforce.
Integration. Dynamics CRM 2013 Online strongly integrates with Microsoft Outlook 2013, unlike any other CRM or ERP solution I’ve worked with (including Salesforce). Bottom line is that you don’t need to use a wonky third-party connector to collect and save your emails to a lead, account or opportunity. It’s much more of a natural act and very important to our workflow at SMB Nation. I can also manage Dynamics CRM 2013 Online from the Office 365 management portal at www.office365.com. And it’s a single-sign-on experience for me between the CRM application and core Office 365 functionality.
Use case. So having used NetSuite and Salesforce, it turns out we, as a small business, don’t use 100% of the functionality of CRM. We probably use 30% of the power of this type of tool. I want to harness more of the power but I’m very busy, just like you, and sometimes I feel our CRM function is a glorified contact management system. Because we didn’t have extensive workflow customization in Salesforce, it was an easy decision to move and after some initial training, we are back to par in terms of our use case.
Partner-to-Partner. Finally we were able to engage a friendly Microsoft partner, Fine Solutions, to assist us in our migration and on-going journey. It was a case of value given and value received. Highly recommended.
So the bottom line is that we have departed Salesforce and we have not looked back for a minute. Looking forward to sharing more bloggage with you as we discover more features and benefits from Dynamics CRM 2013 Online!
