| The Small Business CRM Challenge |
| Written by Eric Novikoff | |
|
I've been spending a great deal of time in the last few weeks looking for a Customer Relationship Management system for ENKI. In general, CRM is something we've been thinking about because it's a way to formalize the desire for all relationships we engage in to be win/win. Ideally, CRM will track and nurture a customer from the time they appear as a lead in your sights until they are happily coming back to buy more services or products from you. It can be a way to ensure that your committments to respect or even love your customers are realized. It can also be, as I'm discovering, a huge black hole for time and money! And a great learning experience. What follows is a journal of my experiences with various CRM vendors in my attempt to find one that understands ENKI's win-win business approach. However, I'm going to summarize my learnings about win-win from this journey up front. I am seeing that win-win is just that, and no more. I had some ideas that win-win would mean finding an incredible deal on just what I wanted, but in this market, the CRM vendor can't seem to make ends meet with that arrangement. So win-win doesn't mean getting a great deal. It does mean that I get to solve my business needs, but solving them may cost more than I'm comfortable with. It always means each party is willing to listen: the vendors I found who weren't able to listen also couldn't collaborate on crafting a relationship in which both sides won. In a few instances, I even had suggestions about how this collaboration could be done, but they had a set idea of how a sale would work that got in the way. So win-win also means having a flexible attitude without preconceptions. Now, that is very hard to maintain! And of course, any time I feel pressure or in a corner in my relationship with a vendor, it's not win-win, though I can choose to stand in my own truth and power and try to move things back in that direction rather than feeling taken advantage of.
Recently, we partnered with 3Tera to provide support to AppLogic customers, and with another company as well for professional services and support. We need a way to share customer issues between the three companies, moving them to appropriate people for resolution and yet keeping other company confidential information private. In addition, we would like to empower our customers to create or check on the status of issues they submit to us. My CEO would dearly like a way to do more than keep track of sales leads, but rather automate the sales process so that every prospective customer gets adequate sales attention to be sure we've explored the possibilities for a win/win relationship. So far, ad-hoc tools like excel, Outlook, and email are doing some of the job for us, with great effort from all concerned. I decided to start looking for a solution that would cost us about $5000 for the first year, for six users.
Having implemented a worldwide CRM system for Hewlett-Packard about
6 years ago, I was sure that by now the benefits of CRM would be easily
available to small and medium businesses. What I have been finding is
that there are a lot of products claiming to provide the benefits of
CRM, but very few of them deliver on that promise. And none of the SMB
CRM products support barrier-free collaboration of the type that ENKI
is looking for, though some come close. I see small businesses
constantly collaborating as I speak with my customers, but I get told
repeatedly by CRM vendors that they've never heard of such a thing.
Teamwork, maybe. Collaboration, no. Being a big proponent of open-source software, I thought I'd start with Sugar CRM, a supposedly complete open-source system. Sugar is developed as open source, but then the company which employs most of the Sugar developers, SugarCRM, adds another 50% functionality and sells it as a product. The open source version is almost a toy in comparison to the for-pay version, which is priced at close to $500 per seat per year. Both versions are a bit behind state-of-the-art Web2.0 technology and are a bit clunky to use. Essential features which ENKI needs, like a customer Portal for self-service support, cost extra. Not only that, but SugarCRM sells you the software to install on your server, but then charges you the same amount every year. That doesn't feel like win/win to me, and it's a strange Software-as-a-Service model - without the service. Sugar's hand always seemed to be out, begging for more money, but even worse they seemed to be interfering with the open source aspect of the product by releasing an enhancement and then mysteriously having their employees stop working on the previously free open-source version of the same feature. Hey, everyone's gotta make a living, but if you say something's open source...
I also looked at Info At Hand, another proprietary customization of
Sugar CRM open source code, with at least 50% more features added,
including a spiffy simple cell phone interface, enhanced customizability, and some features for
front-of-the-house financial processes that would greatly enhance our
Quickbooks-based accounting. However, the Long Reach corporation, a
small company that provides Info At Hand, seemed overwhelmed by my
pre-sales support questions. Their "free trial" online version
was neither: I ran into bugs or intentionally disabled features, which when added to spotty documentation meant that I couldn't get some important features to work. They
suggested that I purchase the software and install it, and then they'd
support me. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to buy and install
something just to see if it was right for me, especially since my interaction with them produced
doubts about how well they'd be able to support me after the sale. While their prices for support are reasonable, the limit of one case per seat per year had me wondering what would happen if I asked more than six questions for my six seats, especially when I already had more than six questions written down. I
may yet follow their suggestion to buy and try out of frustration with the
alternatives, but I haven't gotten that far yet. There's another open-source CRM product, called Centric. I'm evaluating it now. I don't think it will meet my needs because it's not as configurable for some special requirements I have, such as tracking which hardware a customer of ENKI's is being hosted on. Also reports and workflow customizations have to be written in Java, something nobody here at ENKI has time to do. The jury is out, but at least the company is considerably more engaging and listening-oriented than SugarCRM or Long Reach has been.
I also took a look at the two "biggies" in hosted CRM:
Salesforce.com and NetSuite. I was struck by how unmotivated the
SalesForce sales team was, taking days to contact me or respond to
questions. Well hey, it is August. Or maybe their product is selling so well that they don't need to call back. I can believe it: the tool itself is very
user-friendly and intuitive. I instantly fell in love with it, but at
$1500/seat/year, you need more than love to make a purchase, you need
what you need to run your business. I haven't been able to answer that question yet. What's nice about their product offering is that the pricing is
very clear. I can tell what I'll be paying a year for now if I grow by a few seats. I also took a "test drive" of the NetSuite product. If you've read this site, you know that I used to manage their development team. So, I have some knowledge about how the product works and more than a little loyalty to the company and the people in it as I remember my time there with great fondness. However, the product is very expensive, so I can't let my feelings get in the way of making a sound judgment on whether the software is right for my business. My "test drive" was quite successful and I was able to demonstrate that the system could do what ENKI needs. Also, NetSuite's sales people went out of their way to make sure I was successful with the trial, including spending some time with me on a Saturday. I'd really like to buy the product, since its features both support my partner-collaboration model as well as provide a great customer interface. But their pricing model is confusing with lots of extra-cost options that you might find necessary as you try to get the system to do what you want. The cost of the system climbs rapidly and unpredictably as your company grows. So, it's really difficult to know what I'll be paying in a year, or even six months. That's pretty scary, and I have sympathy for their salespeople: it must be quite difficult to sell the product. The initial investment for ENKI is probably around $10,000 - including implementation assistance and fixed yearly charges that disappointingly contradict the pay-as-you-go promise of Software-as-a-Service.
I also looked at some expensive traditional boxed-software products,
but they are well over my $6000 desired budget, often heading north of
$20,000 for fewer features than the other products I looked at. Or, you can go to Fry's (the local computer store) and buy boxed software that will act as a fancy contact manager, which is far short of my needs. I even tried a free trial CD of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM, but couldn't figure out how to use it. It looks totally unconfigured, like a blank slate. I called them to confirm that what I was seeing was what they were offering either as a boxed product or as a hosted service and they said yes. In my business, I need to be able to run with the product out of the box, even if I know there is lots of configuration in its future, so that choice was out. There
are also a gaggle of CRM systems which focus mostly on sales and
marketing - often little more than intelligent spam generators. The
worst offender I found was a product called "Infusion" whose vendor not
only bombarded me with chatty overly-familiar sales entreaties, but
also seems to be responsible for a lot of the other chatty spam that I
get on a daily basis from other companies. It must work for them, as
the chatty ads claim, but it doesn't work for me! It's been a pretty discouraging journey so far. Either I have to get in bed with a vendor who clearly doesn't understand ENKI's win-win business model and isn't likely to be a successful partner for us, or I can spend much more than I'd like to get something that will do the job. My other option - a suite of single-point solutions for sales, finance, support, and knowledge management is looking better and better, though I learned rather painfully at Hewlett-Packard how difficult it is to manage "islands of automation" as your company grows and needs change. In any case, the cost of setting up a CRM system isn't just in the software: it's also in the initial customization you have to make to the system (and your employees) to support your own company's workflows, as well as all the data you have to enter before it becomes useful as a business tool. So for the moment, there isn't a solution that I like. I'll keep you up-to-date on my adventures here in the blog, or - if all goes well - you will simply see the CRM system in action on ENKI's web site. Or so I hope! Comments (2)
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