In a previous life I set up and ran a hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM service; so you’d be forgiven for thinking this post may be a little biased. But before you head off I’d like to say this; I sold against pretty much every CRM system in existance so I know their pro’s and their con’s.
So where do you start? Before you start comparing features there’s a few things to consider.
User Adoption
According to Gartner many CRM implimentations still fail to get used. Typically there’s a number of reasons for this. It used to be that projects just took too long to impliment and when they where launched they just didn’t do what was needed – so people didn’t use them. Unintuative environments – if it’s not easy to use it won’t get used. Integration – if you can’t link it to other systems people won’t it… and the list goes on.
When looking at any system consider the users. Will they want to use this new environment? How do they benefit? Can it work on the devises they use? Can it work from anywhere they want?
Size
The CRM market is highly broad with systems like ZOHO available for SME’s to larger enterprise CRM solutions like Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com and Netsuite and there’s everything else inbetween. Consider your operation size today and where you want to be in the future. If you are looking to scale then a hosted solution might be better. But if your business remains fairly static then it could prove more cost effective to buy licenses.
Solution Fit
Traditional CRM application automate 3 areas of a business operation; sales, marketing and customer service by giving you a central view of the customer. Whilst this sounds fairly standard across many industry they each have their own particular language and process that need to be adopted. Fortunately their are a number of verticle solutions that have been ready made
Total Cost of Ownership