We Blog CRM

The economy may be going slow but Salesforce.com, the poster boy for SaaS, has reported an impressive 52% increase in revenue for the first quarter that ended on April 30. It has also increased its customer base by 6%.

Salesforce.com has reported impressive figures that have been achieved on the basis of a strong and growing customer base in the US and in Asia. It added 2.600 more companies to its roster in the quarter and reported revenue of $ 247.6 million leading to a net profit of $ 9.56 million.

In Asia, Salesforce.com can count on Nippon Telephone and Telegraph in Japan as a major catch and in Europe it was Areva, a nuclear power company in France, for which Salesforce.com had to face competition from SAP.

iEnterprises has launched Mobile Edge Express, a SaaS product aimed at mobile users who wish to maximize the productivity of their IBM Lotus Notes applications, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, and SugarCRM to their BlackBerry® smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM). The company pitches the product as being ideal for SMBs that can download the pre-written application without any upfront hardware costs and licensing fees. The download takes less than 10 minutes.

According to Verticals onDemand, as many as 15 life science companies have been added to its SaaS CRM user-base. The ProStrakan Group based in the UK has selected VBioPharma to market its products in the US.

“I already knew the pluses and minuses of most of the major pharma CRM vendors from previous experience,” said Paul Bidawid, Vice President of Managed Markets & Supply Chain at ProStrakan.”SaaS is definitely where we’re heading.”

Matt Wallach, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Verticals onDemand, said SaaS technology is “much more flexible and cost-effective than client/server systems of ten years ago, making it attractive to pharma and biotech companies.”

AdventNet’s Zoho CRM has come out with an Enterprise Edition that is a low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering. It offers sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules. It aims to fulfill the requirements of corporate customers who demand organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

Learn more about it here.

Although hosted CRM companies are mushrooming by the day and the march of SaaS seems to keep moving forward onerously, helped now by the promise of Storage-as-a-Service, the jury is still out on whether SaaS CRM is a good fit for all or can hosted CRM harm your business.

Perhaps the question can be answered better if we have clarity on what CRM offers the best business value.  The type of CRM activity, whether operational, collaborative, or analytical, often decides whether the particular CRM modules should be in-house or hosted. The company approach to data security is another contributing factor.

Hosted CRM offers the following benefits -

• Faster time to value.
•  Easy deployment.
• Frequent updates.
• Cost-effective.
• Often the only alternative for SMBs.

On the flip side -

• You need regular high-speed internet connectivity.
• Over time, the TCO can shoot up.
• Shifting to another vendor may not be easy.
• Data security is always a nagging worry because its not in your control.
• Customization and integration is not always easy.

Efforts by companies to get their staff used to mobile CRM are running into an unexpected problem. Company people are not comfortable with the idea of using their mobile devices for complex business applications; they are happy using it to check emails and run not-so-sophisticated programs. Sales people apparently do not want to turn their mobile devices into handheld versions of their PCs.

Add to that the fact that the mobile CRM market is constrained by small screen sizes and limited storage and memory plus weak computation power and you being to get an idea about why mobile CRM still has not been able to take off.

“A lot of business applications that are done in house have to do with analytics,” notes Saswato Das, a spokesman for SAP’s business applications unit. “If you want to run something fairly sophisticated that requires a lot of memory, that requires a lot of computing power, a handheld today is not the best place to do it.”

Pitney Bowes is a global provider of physical and digital mailing products and services; the company service techs rely heavily on mobile applications to execute their jobs properly. Mobile devices help the techies get to the job sites, stay in touch with the clients, and ensure that they are carrying the correct inventory with them. Pitney has made its ERP and CRM information available to its mobile staff via the Antenna Mobile Platform (AMP) and its AMPower Service application developed by Antenna Software.

In the words of Paul Weston, Pitney’s VP of CRM systems “[Today] our guys riding around in vans, they can’t work without [the application].” “It’s how they get their days’ work. When they finish a job and want to know where they’re going next, they get that location from their mobile devices.”

Read more here.

Its almost halfway into 2008, so what have you done till now to get your business online? How involved is your IT department in getting you in touch with your real customers who prefer to purchase online?

Kim Nash discusses three ideas that can make a big difference to your online CRM initiatives in 2008.

DataForceCRM, a provider of online sales tools is offering its online sales software and CRM product for free to all those who register at their site. The software is open source with no user fees attached. The software will be hosted on a dedicated server for each company; fees include hosting and training fees. Features include -

Easy Outlook Calendar, Contact and and Email integration
Powerful Marketing and Lead Management
Deal Closing Sales and Sales Management
Delight your Customers with Support and FAQs
Quickly Quote and Generate Orders
Check Inventory status and build your Product Catalogs
Gain Eye Opening Analytics and Flexible, Powerful Reporting.

InfoStreet Inc has announced the arrival of Version 2 of its web-based CRM application suite, StreetSmart. The offering is aimed at SMBs and is significantly cheaper than competing products, it costs around $10/user and allows your business to track leads, gain customers, and manage your business as it grows.

InfoStreet has pitched its CRM as being extremely sturdy and affordable.

The StreetSmart CRM has the following salient features –

•  Easy access via the web that empowers the field staff

• Ease of customization so that your CRM requirements are met

•  Email-based notification to designated personnel regarding information updates

•  Tracking of business opportunities

•  Easy import of current data