Is Salesforce the 'Be All, End All' CRM?

Who is Salesforce?

SalesForce is one of the leading CRM platforms in the world

What is a CRM?

CRM standing for "customer relationship management" and enables companies to have a contact database which sales, marketing, and customer service can utilize to reach their department's goals and objectives.

For example, the sales team would use a CRM as a way to identify key accounts they will sell to, organize contacts by properties, assign quotas to sales reps, and to look at reports on both individual performance of sales reps and the overall team performance using reporting dashboards.

The marketing team would use a CRM to identify key prospective segments of contacts based on properties they want to market to, and using marketing tools, can run campaigns to those segments.

Customer service teams can launch surveys to measure customer satisfaction and use dashboards, and can monitor customer churn. In addition to being able to use the contact information to send gifts to show customer appreciation and to drive referrals.

Why is a CRM important?

A CRM and for larger companies, an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, serve as the backbone technology for virtually any company.

Is Salesforce the end all, be all, go to CRM?

The simple answer. No. It's not.

While Salesforce is a great platform and it's clearly evident just by looking at the company's enormous growth, just like any cloud-based software platform, there is no "one size fits all" scenario when making a software purchase.

Leaders in organizations responsible for choosing technology should be evaluating at three vendors who can potentially meet their needs. The evaluation process can be complex, but to help simplify that process, two documents should be created.

First, a cross-department needs analysis should be conducted, identifying the wants and needs of every stakeholder who's job function has a correlation to what CRM will be chosen.

With that information, a "requirements document" can be developed, which is a formal document that clearly states what requirements must be met by the CRM vendor if they are to fulfill the company's unique needs.

Once a requirements document is created, a "comparison matrix" worksheet needs to be developed, which is a formal document that's used to rank each vendor on the key requirements that have been identified.

For example, a key feature may be the ability to connect the CRM to an ERP system. If that need is met by the vendor, then it's appropriate to uncover which integration will create the least amount of friction and the most amount of value, i.e., an integration may be available, but limited to a one-way sync instead of a bi-directional sync, or the integration only updates weekly instead of under five minutes.

Even a small delay between syncing data between a CRM and an ERP can delay key information management needs to react quickly enough to market conditions, a product launch, or other key initiatives.

What Salesforce alternatives are out there?

For small, middle-market, and small enterprise firms, our recommended "go to" is HubSpot Sales Hub, which includes a CRM and a suite of sales engagement tools. Not only is it more intuitive than Salesforce, but in most cases, it's more cost effective.

HubSpot also has a range of CRM solutions for all company sizes—a free CRM for startups, a starter CRM for companies that are established and don't need advanced features, a professional version for companies that are serious about growth, and an enterprise version for companies with large teams who need access to an advanced set of features.

Features like permissions, splitting sales teams into territories or organizing the teams by vertical or product, advanced revenue reporting, and lead assignment, all need to be identified during in the requirements document and scored accordingly in the comparison matrix.

For companies that need more features from their CRM and cannot afford HubSpot, there are alternatives in the market such as Active Campaign, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, and Keap.

To get a better understanding of how these platforms compare to each other before you conduct your internal needs analysis, there are free websites you can visit such as G2 Crowd and Capterra that provide in-depth side-by-side feature comparisons and are loaded with thousands of real customer reviews for each platform.

Ultimately, choosing the right CRM for your company will come down to your very unique needs and how close of a match rate you can get to fulfill those needs with the technology you select.

No CRM will perfectly match what you're looking for and it's a good idea to separate your needs into "nice to haves" verse "need to haves" and if it's not entirely black and white, then you can create use a scale of 1 to 5 on the level of necessity that exists for each feature.

Now what?

If you're actively looking for a CRM, comment below or reach out to me at [email protected] and I'd be glad to walk you through the evaluation process. If you're looking for an ERP system, I'd recommend speaking with Chris Doig who wrote the book on software selection.