Product Roundup: Convergence
Selling Smarter
Traditional sales automation tools such as Act! and GoldMine have done great work for small businesses and companies with several small independent sales groups. The successful deployment of more powerful customer relationship management (CRM) systems requires close attention to the time needed for deployment, and the ongoing costs of technical support and customization. These factors can best be appreciated after conducting a cost-of-ownership evaluation of world-class CRM offerings from Seibel or Oracle. More modest CRM applications, such as Commence, Surado SQL, and GoldMine CustomerIQ, provide good basic synchronization between dispersed salespeople, marketing, and other business functions -- with a smaller expenditure for solution acquisition and support.
Getting Wired
Deploying a Web-based service, such as salesforce.com, is a cost-effective way to implement CRM within a rapidly growing business. These solutions require almost no internal technical support -- a big advantage for small or mid-sized companies. They also ramp up a lot faster than traditional software/server-based systems -- typically a few weeks versus three to 12 months for conventional solutions. Web-based CRM solutions are more easily scalable, and new users typically can be added in a matter of hours. Salesforce.com recently introduced its Team Edition, a simple but powerful CRM solution optimized for small companies and workgroups. If you do decide to work with a Web-based solution provider, look for one that, like salesforce.com, owns its core software. Financial analysts regard this as a much more sustainable business model than those that depend primarily on hosting and reselling applications from another vendor.
These same criteria can be useful in selecting Web-based partners in other areas, such as finance management and collaborative conferencing. For example, ePeachtree is based on its popular series of accounting applications and backed by the deep pockets of parent company Sage Software. Conferencing leaders WebEx and Convene both run their own standards-based software, and provide scalable services that offer a good to value both small businesses and their large, sustaining, enterprise scale customers. For a more personal touch in these areas, check out networkable accounting solutions such as MYOB AccountEdge and the customized conference-management services of companies such as V-Span.
Acceptance is the Key
Often the most important factor in the success of a business process initiative is the degree of acceptance it receives from those who have to input key data. In deploying CRM, the greatest resistance usually comes from salespeople and account managers who feel they have better things to do with their time than to fill out electronic forms. One sales executive told me that he had achieved less than 45% participation in his company's new CRM system until he directly linked participation to compensation. In his words, "We told them that if it wasn't in the system, it wasn't a sale."
Ease of use for salespeople and other remote workers is also important for CRM and other collaborative solutions. Some CRM and conferencing applications need to run on fast machines if they are to coexist smoothly with the usual run-of-business applications. Not every employee in the field has a 1.4 GHz Sony Vaio laptop or a monster desktop CPU from Totally Awesome computers. So be realistic when evaluating applications, and look for solutions that will run on the least powerful machines in your extended business family -- or be prepared to include the cost of computer upgrades in your ROI calculations.
