Myappsanywhere Business Solutions Consultant and resident CRM expert Mick Circo shares a comprehensive guide to CRM options and his thoughts on which platforms work best for your business.
What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but in terms of your business, it means keeping your existing clientele happy while cultivating new opportunities. CRM encompasses not only account and sales pipeline management, but also customer service, product line development and management, as well as marketing, branding, and social media presence.
Regardless of where CRM overlaps with your interests, in the ever-increasing competitiveness of the digital age, it’s something that you can’t afford to ignore. A well implemented CRM solution helps you manage your customers, manage your data, forecast accurately, streamline processes and cut through red tape. In other words, CRM means productivity. If your competitors have it and you don’t, you risk falling behind, and even if they don’t, getting a CRM in place can give you one big leg up.
CRM Options
So we’ve established what CRM means and what it can do for you. How about your options? There are literally tons of CRM solutions out there, so we’ll limit our focus to the big three CRM packages with cloud-based solutions.
Let’s take a look at their features, limitations and what sorts of licensing plans they offer:
Sugar CRM
Sugar CRM is a good baseline offering. It has a number of features common to CRM software solutions:
Sales pipeline management and analytics tools
Marketing tools
Reporting and forecasting tools
Activity dashboards and visualizations
Customer service and knowledge base tools
Email server integration
Integration with productivity and document managed solutions (Office, Google Docs, etc.)
Customizable forms and dashboards
App for smart phone and tablet accessibility
Partner/private cloud hosting options
Open source and free options are available, but must be self-hosted
Sugar CRM has a fairly standard user subscription model. There are three flavors of user licenses: Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Unfortunately, higher sales functions, such as opportunity management, forecasting, and custom reporting features, are only available at the more expensive Enterprise and Ultimate levels. There are also some potentially severe limitations on data storage. Likewise, users are billed annually with a one-size-fits-all model, so you can’t just pay for what an individual user needs when they need it (although this may be alleviated by hosting with a partner rather than Sugar CRM On-Demand) and there is a five user minimum.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
Microsoft in many ways already sets the industry standard in business productivity software (how many of us use Outlook, Excel, and Word on a daily basis?). Thus, it should be no surprise that they also offer an industry-leading CRM solution with industry-leading features:
Sales pipeline management and analytics tools
Marketing tools, including social media integration
Advanced reporting and forecasting tools
Activity dashboards and visualizations
Customer service and knowledge base tools
Product line management
Order management and invoicing tools
App for smart phone and tablet accessibility
Collaboration and networking tools
Easy integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP and other Dynamics ERP suite solutions
Email server integration, including server-to-server email synchronization
Native integration with Outlook and SharePoint
User-friendly point and click customization, reporting and workflow automation tools
Extremely extensible framework allows integration with existing systems and third-party tools
Role-based security with auditing for compliance and data integrity
Partner/private cloud hosting options
Perhaps what stands out most about Dynamics CRM versus the rest is its unique concept. Microsoft describes the platform as XRM, meaning that it’s not meant to be limited to use by traditional sales driven businesses, nor as simply a sales pipeline management solution. XRM means that the software can add value to non-sales organizations (such as government or law firms), as well as be used to replace other ERP systems, such as project management software or HR systems. Dynamics CRM can truly be anything you need it to be. Microsoft also offers some of the most flexible and competitive licensing options. There are actually five tiers of licenses, and three that you should know are: Essential, Basic, and Professional. Not only are these options aggressively priced, but all license types allow access to customized data (although access to the customization and integrated marketing tools are limited to Professional users). Even so, the Professional license cost comes in substantially under the cost of high-end licenses for other CRM solutions. User licenses are also a la carte, so you can buy the licenses you need for the users you have.
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is perhaps most well-known CRM solution. That said, it’s more aggressively targeted to sales-heavy organizations and is a bit less flexible than Sugar or Dynamics CRM. Its features include:
Sales pipeline management and analytics tools
Advanced marketing tools, including mass email marketing campaigns
Reporting and forecasting tools
Activity dashboards and visualizations
Collaboration and networking tools
Customer service and knowledge base tools
Integration with productivity and document managed solutions (Office, Google Docs, etc.)
Customizable forms and dashboards
App for smartphone and tablet accessibility
User friendly point and click customization, reporting and workflow automation tools
Role-based security with identity management for site-specific access
Extensible framework allows integration with existing systems and third-party tools
Salesforce enjoys a nice mix of features found in both Sugar and Dynamics CRM, but their model is considerably different. Rather than being a holistic platform, each segment of their solution is broken out and priced as a separate unit. While this can be advantageous for organizations with separate marketing engines or customer service solutions, it can be costly to those looking for a more all-in-one solution. I won’t go over all of the licensing options, as they can vary widely depending on what segments of the solution pertain to your organization, but I will point out that access to extensible customization and third-party integration is limited to the higher end licenses, as are a number of the advanced social networking and marketing features. Salesforce.com also lacks the option for a partner hosted cloud, which means less flexibility in terms of access to raw data and integration hosting. Like Sugar, licenses are billed annually, so you lose the month-to-month option as well with no opportunity for partner hosting.
The Bottom Line
Given the options, features, and licensing, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has the most to offer. It compares well on features and crushes on price and extensibility.
You can learn more about leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 in the cloud here.