Selecting the right CRM solution for your business can be a challenging exercise. You don’t want to select a CRM system that you will quickly outgrow and at the same time you do not want to purchase one where you will be paying for functionality that your staff will never use. Yet this is often the scenario for many companies.
“We are getting a lot of calls from both camps” says Tom Gibson, sales manager at Commence Corporation. “The small businesses either did not have the time to do a proper evaluation or perhaps simply misunderstood what they were getting with the low cost solutions now on the market. The low end CRM products traditionally offer little in the way of flexibility or customizability and this is by design.
The solution provider simply cannot afford to take telephone calls or add the functionality these customers desire at their low price point. These are out of the box solutions and either you like what they offer or you don’t. What is clear however is that there are a large number of companies that are unhappy with what they have and are looking to change.”
“Many of the mid-size customers that call us had selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com and are paying quite a bit of money for their solution. Almost all of them indicate that they are simply not using the functionality they thought they would and as such, are looking for a capable but lower cost solution. Commence CRM fits the bill nicely for these people.” says Gibson. “We are that middle component in that we offer much more functionality and flexibility than the low end CRM systems, but not the complexity and cost associated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com. We have been positioned as that middle market CRM solution from day one” says Gibson “and it’s a good place to be. Of course we would rather earn this business in year one, and in many instances we are, but we seem to be getting more and more calls in that second year when the big renewal invoice is presented to these customers and they decide they need to change CRM vendors.”
More information about how Commence CRM stacks up to the competition is available here: http://www.commence.com/crm/crm-review/
Image courtesy of opensourceway on Flickr under Creative Commons license.