My company is thinking on getting a marketing automation tool but I think that maybe the solution would be migrating to salesforce to solve some of these issues. We have been using Sugar CRM and multiple customized tools for our sales, marketing and software licensing process. We sell 2 desktop software that is not SaaS but requires membership management with USB dongle authorization (users get free upgrades and tech support). We also have a new hardware product with a lot of components that we make ourselves and requires in person technician installation. Our process became very complex and we are making a lot of customized tools. The problem is that we spend a lot of time maintaining tools that are not our core expertise, so we are being left behind in new practices such as marketing automation, user analytics, etc. We have a lot of manual processes despite being a tech company, we can't grow. Is Salesforce the solution? We have these issues that we need to solve: 1-Manage user membership, each user has a USB dongle and our system needs to hold information such as activation period, product level (we sell different versions of software like the old adobe creative suite model). We also need to manage payment, right now we are using sugar with heavy customization (which prevents us from updating it), a SQL database, a custom PHP e-store and members only area. 2-We don't have good business, operations and sales analytics. 3-We need to allow our system to be more integrated to use marketing automation, but we can't afford the big players such as hubspot yet. We are using Mailchimp for our email marketing. 4-We have a problem in cashflow, so we can't spent a lot of money in different tools, but we need something that we can use now as a base. I thought about Salesforce because it's a platform that has so many out of the box plugins and apps so we would just install those things instead of wasting time creating things from scratch or maintaining old systems. Another reason is the ability of creating business apps with the lighting platform with clicking and dragging, which could be interesting for non programmers (I haven't tested this yet). We have an "engineering culture", so usually it's ok to build new things even if it's not for your area, the problem lies when you need to throw cash to test new software.
You're definitely thinking in the right direction as far as standardizing on a single tool to automate your processes and migrating away from some of the custom solutions you're currently using. Maintaining a bunch of one-off solutions that only solve individual business processes is costing your organization a lot of money that you should be spending in more strategic areas. Also, like you said, you're probably falling behind your competitors in the space because you can't keep up with the changes they're making to their sales and marketing automation systems fast enough (whereas most SaaS applications like Salesforce have scheduled automatic updates to keep their customers up to date).
Here's the rub though - is Salesforce really the right tool for what you're trying to do? Possibly. Based on my knowledge of Salesforce, it does look like it will meet a lot of your needs at a high level. That being said though, I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending a specific tool at this point because your individual business processes might have nuances would require customizations to be made within Salesforce.
So my advice would be this: before you start looking at the technology, put together a detailed set of your requirements and thoroughly map out your business processes (i.e. How do you use each tool today? How do you want to use each tool in the future? What are the specific areas where you feel like you're falling behind your competitors? etc...). Then from there, you can reach out to multiple vendors (Salesforce should definitely be one of them, but check out Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, NIMBL and a few of the other CRM software companies). You can show them your requirements and ask them to put together a proposal for how they would solve them. Then you can decide which tool will give you the most value for your money.
You'll probably will have a slightly bigger expense up front to stand up a new tool and then configure it, load data into it, train people on it, etc... (even if it's SaaS based, there's still work that will need to be done before it's usable by your business).... But standardizing on a single platform and eliminating as much of a need for overlapping tools and custom development as possible will save your organization a lot more money in the long run. Good luck!
Answered 9 years ago
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