How to Save on Cloud CRM Budgets

How to reduce your CRM budget, spend less and get more for less?

Most businesses today are looking for innovative ways to cut costs out of the department budget.?

Many businesses are looking at their Cloud CRM budget and trying to reduce the amount spent on Cloud CRM and the integrations with ERP, Quoting, Projects, HR, and Human Capital Management (HCM).?

Many are realizing they are paying more for their Cloud apps and customizations, integrations, and professional services than they realized, and not getting the full realized benefits of the investment when they signed up.

Many companies are faced with reducing users on their apps or cutting out apps altogether, to meet new budgetary requirements.

So how to manage your software spending in times of tightened budgets?

First of all, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

First, let's look at the costs of systems. There are hard costs like user licenses, data backup, metered storage or usage fees, etc. Then there are the soft costs of setup & training, customizations, and integrations, change management, software implementation failures, lost time & productivity, employee turnover, lost opportunity, and so on.

The cost of customizations, integrations, setup & training can dwarf the costs of user license and usage fees.

The cost of SaaS applications is on the rise for most vendors.?

Salesboom hasn't raised our prices in over 15 years, and we were the first Cloud CRM vendor to offer a fair pricing guarantee with continued seamless upgrades each quarter, to drive value for the same cost, and we include setup, training, integrations, customizations, etc as part of our offerings, so the team to manage your short term and long term success is part of the solution, not a separate team that you have to source and manage over time.?

This leads to a more thorough requirements analysis, and the ability to set up a short-term, medium-term, and long-term plan to how to implement a solution that will work for you, without disrupting the current business processes.

Choose solutions that allow you to add them into your workflow, with as little change and disruption as possible, so that the new solutions are rolled out, tested, and people trained on the new systems, while still using the old system, and then after that, you switch to the new system.?

This is easier said than done and is the source of many problems when implementing a new software system in your business. Everything is changing so fast, in the Cloud software world, that it is very difficult for customers to keep up with, and manage the software alongside their current business goals.?

Our solution is 20 years of experience in hands-on consulting with our customers to make a plan that addresses their wants, needs, and fears, over the short, medium, and long-term, across many departments, divisions, and organizations, to provide an integrated solution that we support and maintain, and deal with change management, so that our customers can be the best they can be, without the risk and hassle of managing software projects.?

20 years of building our software, not growing through acquisition, and building the professional services offering and knowledge base of what works and what doesn't, across businesses of all industries, locations, and sizes, and the seamless upgrade of our offerings, and providing a point-and-click platform, self-service customizable by the end users, gives us the knowledge, the software, and the experience of implementing tens of thousands of iterations.

With more and more consolidation of Cloud companies, customers are being forced to switch to the parent company's offerings, which were not the first choice, usually because costs are high and these Enterprise Cloud software systems are so complex, they require teams of people to manage, and many times end in failure because the right team couldn't be put together and maintained over the life of the applications.

Adding too many Cloud vendors to your stack can quickly run over budget on your spending for marketing, sales, support, quoting, billing, projects, contracts, etc.

?Consolidate as many apps as possible into an integrated solution stack.

Consolidation of apps into one pre-integrated solution, allows you to drop other apps, and the monthly bill, integrations, etc., and at the same time, increases productivity by not having to log in to different applications and manage the silos of data trapped within them. When you get the same functionality with one solution that you used to need many solutions to get done, then you are improving on the business.

Getting your projects up and running quickly, while reducing errors, and managing new and old systems while a change in employees is happening at the same time, means it is much more difficult to get your systems going the way you want them to.

With the proliferation of Cloud software solutions, that are very innovative and exciting, the number of applications that each worker is expected to use each day has skyrocketed, to the point where most people find they are spending a good portion of their day just managing data in applications, instead of focusing on the business, customers, partners, employees that drive the business.?

Today's companies need to take advantage of rapid advancements in Cloud software solutions, while at the same time learning how to build and integrate them into one system. This is a very tough problem to solve, even for hardened software vendors and developers.

Today's companies are forced to be part-time IT people, just to deal with the IT issues around getting their core job done.

Just a few short years ago, it seems it was much easier to work with Cloud software, and all of a sudden, it has become unmanageable for most businesses.?

This poses a dichotomy of having access to amazing tools, but being unable to take advantage of them in an integrated system, resulting in silos of data, resulting in excessive data management, too many apps to log into each day, and slows productivity to a crawl, frustrates workers, and results in major barriers in just getting your job done.

This was not the promise of the Cloud software movement but is an expected outcome, as new software is created and older, legacy systems that were pre-integrated, but not Cloud-based switch to Cloud offerings, got purchased, or went out of business in the creation of the Cloud CRM movement, and subsequently spawned the rest of software moving to the Cloud, resulted in old offerings that were trusted for years, becoming obsolete.

Before Cloud CRM, businesses would use spreadsheets and word documents to manage leads, customers partners, revenues, etc. Applications were built using Microsoft Access database applications.?

Contact managers, accounting systems, ERP, and HR software were installed on your computer, or the business ran servers and managed the entire software system. Most times software didn't share data with other people in the office. Integrations were only something a software team could do, and had very low success rates over time.

Fast-forward to today and that all seems very archaic, as legacy software was quickly replaced by Cloud CRM, ERP, HCM, and onward, creating amazing innovations along the way.

However, it has also created a problem of too many applications, costing too much money, and are too complicated to use as an integrated system, and taking up too much time out of productivity that, if not managed properly, often results in failure, and since it is so easy to switch and try out the latest new Cloud offerings, it leads to businesses trying many different systems, and never landing on one platform that spans the organization, and is pre-integrated out of the box, and self-service customizable to manage future change, and that you have built a team that can manage.

Our solution, the Fast Track program is a fixed-cost solution to make a plan, configure the CRM, import the data, rollout, and train all the users, as one package. We innovated this concept and have been practicing it for 20 years.

The Salesboom platform spans many departments, from Sales, Marketing & Support, Quoting, Project Management, ERP, and Human Capital Management.?

Integrated with all your favorite apps.?

It is fully customizable and point-and-click, but we also set up and train our customers, and everyone gets a dedicated CRM consultant that leads a team of experts to manage their success with us.

We provide a full requirements analysis of your needs and create a short-term, medium-term, and long-term plan for rollout, training, and consolidating of software, to ensure we fit in with what you are currently doing, augmenting your business processes with new and valuable solutions, while simultaneously, working on the next phase of the rollout, so that you have a plug-and-play team of seasoned professionals, combined with software that is easily customized and integrated, and the result is a better solution, that people enjoy using because it makes them better at what they do and saves a lot of time.

The total lifetime costs of any software project are 25% in the initial development, and 75% in the maintenance and support of the software project, regardless of its CRM, ERP, etc.?

That 75% of the cost comes in managing the change in the software, building customizations and integrations, as your IT team changes over time, the knowledge on how to maintain the system vanishes and the value of the overall system declines to the point it becomes unusable. This means that having an experienced team with a platform they can control, will always be a better value to you.

Most companies try many different platforms before they rest on one for more than a few years. This is because it is so difficult and expensive in both time and money, to get up and running successfully on most Enterprise Cloud software.?

The reason for this is that the end customer is left to build and manage a team that can successfully implement and maintain the software over a long period which is so difficult to do for the end customer since their time is focused on trying to improve the business, they don't have time to be a software implementation experts at the same time. This results in software that was not set up properly the goals are misaligned with customer wants vs needs, and training is not adequate to gain the value out of the system, and the end up hopping to a new vendor, searching for the right solution.?

This costs so much in wasted time, energy, and productivity and causes so much disruption, that it can cause employee turnover, and further harm the situation. What is ironic, is that the problem the software is meant to solve, ie allowing businesses to do more with less time and money, results in the exact opposite result if not done properly.?

This leads to excessive 'trying out the latest trends. We focus on understanding our customers and providing a tailored solution that is unique to their unique situation and update our software and processes quarterly, to innovate constantly for that customer and understand their business.?

We are like having an extra player on the field, that augments your capabilities, instead of detracting from them.

A software system that is properly designed with change as the core concept, is the right solution.?

Most software, including SaaS and Cloud systems, require coding and IT resources to fully customize and integrate, even if the offerings are offered by the same vendor. Most customers are fooled into believing they can fully customize and integrate self-service their business workflow and processes, only to find out it is easier said than done, and invariably don't end up using the features they signed up for, or it takes too long or is too complicated, they just give up and move on to another system, or revert to their old systems.?

The problem is no real change has taken place after it.?

You might learn more and know more for the next round of software evaluations, but the problem will always remain because most software vendors grow by acquisition, meaning they find hot companies and purchase them, then they have to be integrated with the mothership system, which is a production system serving many customers, and if you introduce a bug, then it affects everyone, so the integration is long and painful and gets put on the customer to handle.?

However, the customer is too busy to handle this and it is not in their wheelhouse, which is why they were seeking help from the software vendor in the first place.?

This round-and-round continues forever, with the customer expected to manage all this change when they should have one singular focus - the customers, partners, and workers that make the business grow. Software should augment what you are doing well, and improve on those things that aren't.?

Most software vendors sell apps and the professional services responsible for your success are farmed out to a partner network, leaving the end customer to hold the bag, leading to excessive failure rates in Enterprise software rollouts.

At Salesboom, we took a different approach. Our offering is unique in that we provide a combined solution for our customers, and work with them, to ensure success.?

We haven't grown by buying up other companies and integrating them, but rather by building our platform, workflows, and process that spans CRM, ERP, and HCM, is pre-integrated out of the box, is self-service customizable by the customer and/or our professional services team, and is integrated with all your favorite apps that you use today and those new ones that will pop up in the future.?

We set up and train our customers in-house and over 20 years of handling businesses of all shapes and sizes, across all industries, with constant improvement quarterly have resulted in a system that is much easier to customize, integrate, setup and train, and leads to more of a partnership with our customers. As you grow, we grow, as it should be.?

We are not beholden to investors or public markets dictating our quarterly goals, resulting in many of these software acquisitions to feed the growth machine dictated by investors.?

This results in a more customizable experience that can be tailored to each specific customer's unique workflow, instead of an off-the-shelf app that you are left to deal with. We instead take the success of each customer into our hands, together changing as the business changes, constantly adapting to new advantages and techniques, and sharing them with our customers, and onward.?

This continuous cycle of listening to customers, and building and maintaining the solutions to their wants, needs, and fears over a 20-year timespan is very unique in today's software vendor lineup.?

This allows us to deliver a better solution, faster and at lower costs, with constant innovation in change management.

Login fatigue is real.

The sheer number of times you have to log in to apps to get your job done is wearing on your employees, resulting in lost productivity and focus, as well as increased frustration, and reduced ability to do a good job, by having to constantly log in to view data, export it, import it, re-key it, all because there are too many apps to manage.?

The solution is a constant analysis of what apps can be consolidated, or replaced by one system that does more things, as well as integrating with those apps you can't live without, so that the databases are synched and workflow rules run across apps and real-time alerts are sent out, with knowledge about your customer consolidated into one Customer Database of record.?

Real-time integrations and synching of data reduce the need to login and manage data as separate silos, and frees employees to better help customers by providing a more clear picture of the real-time information that has been gathered.?

Many times this data is entered by your customers and not by employees, so if your employees have to spend too much time and effort looking for the information, they can make mistakes, burn relationships with customers, and frustrate employees resulting in increased turnover, and worse.?

On the flip side, giving employees a pre-integrated solution that easily brings in knowledge and presents it easily in real-time, frees the employee to help customers on the spot, with the most updated information, which leads to a better outcome each time. New amazing apps come and go every day and will only increase in the future, so the problem of choosing the right apps and consolidating them into one integrated unit is a constant challenge.?

Salesboom has been helping our customers manage these changes, and building integrated solutions for our customers since 2003 and has been a key factor in our staying on the cusp of innovation for over 20 years.?

We listen to our customers and proactively search for new solutions, integrate with them, or build new solutions if it's a better solution. This means we are platform-agnostic.?

No two companies are alike and so no two software stacks and workflows are alike.?

The best solution is one that is built from the ground up to be more nimble, to take advantage of new technologies quickly and easily, because it is in our DNA to be constantly managing change in software stacks, and building solutions that harness the power of the best stack, for each customer.

Consolidated Cloud software vendors don't always mean you must switch all users to a new vendor.

Now, with the ability to more easily integrate with most Cloud Software systems, it frees companies to use competitive software vendors, in the same organization.

For example, one department or division of the company might use a Salesforce Cloud CRM solution to reduce costs and complexities and to take advantage of better solutions to their problems might migrate some users to the Salesboom Cloud CRM platform, and keep some users on the Salesforce platform, and we integrate the two so there is a better overall experience for all users. A hybrid approach can be the best solution, but each company is different, so how each company consolidates its applications is unique and constantly changing.?

We have been consolidating and integrating applications for our customers for over 20 years and are experts in rapidly integrating and building new features for customers, across CRM, ERP, and HCM, so that they can consolidate and integrate the software with better ease and success, because we handle the heavy lifting for all our customers as part of our core offering.?

People are good at multi-tasking to a degree, but good software systems should handle the multi-tasking for the user, allowing employees to focus on improving customer experience with every customer touch point, and to hunt down new opportunities.?

These are the primary goals of all businesses, but poor processes, implemented with poor software solutions, can result in the opposite effect.??

In short, if you want to reduce your Cloud CRM Budget, reduce the number of vendors with a pre-integrated solution, and get proper setup, training and customizations to make it your own.

All the best and good luck!