SalesForce.com versus Microsoft CRM The Hybrids are Coming!!!

In the automobile industry, hybrid vehicles are revolutionizing transportation. With a basic gasoline engine and a secondary electric engine, these cars are saving a lot in transportation costs.

Buyers are taking great interest in these vehicles not because they are cheaper, but they are finally reliable, nice looking and capable of great performance. Examples include the Toyota, Lexis, Honda, and Saturn models of hybrids.

I consider the newly emerged partners of both Microsoft CRM and Saleforce.com ,to be similar to Hybrid Manufacturers that have formidable functionality that they can add on to the base products that we have become familiar with.

With their new features, releases, and partner products, we now have a robust generation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software products that challenge legacy systems from other vendors. Eventually, the Hybrids may even replace many corporate implementations. What is causing this revolution? It is actually a series of evolutions of both software and vendor partners that made this possible.

CRM systems have come a long way over the last couple of years. CRM hosted solutions are now the available for both Microsoft and Salesforce.com. What many people don’t yet realize, is that the add-on products have made these two vendors (Microsoft and SalesForce.com) are very powerful. The hybrid sales, service, and field sales and marketing “engines” of software that can be added into the suite, are very good in terms of functionality and robustness.

For example, supporting hundreds of users, deploying to multiple locations, and having sales, service and support functions in one set of software used to be the domain of companies like PeopleSoft or Oracle/Siebel. However, these enhanced solution sets can now effectively challenge the mainstay commercial packages who offer CRM.

Let us start with Microsoft CRM version 3.0. One of the first things people notice that is missing from Microsoft is a great customer service system. There is a neat company called Neocase that makes products as a Microsoft Gold Partner. Neocase produces a customer service and trouble ticketing system that integrates with Microsoft CRM. You get an integrated view of customer activities, and a measured set of events, response times and service agreements. This product is great for people with field service, support and other similar performance-based agreements.

C360 is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner that sells add-on products to Microsoft CRM and all of their products are Gold Certified. Between their data quality tools, productivity packs, alerts, relationship seller, and more, you can get a real full-ticket CRM system “tricked-out” as they would say on television. Clients rave about the products as do the software vendors who find them easy to install and upgrade.

There are a myriad of additional products for Blackberry Integration and enhanced hosting and reporting using Microsoft Sharepoint. Suffice it to say for purposes of brevity, that implementing CRM without looking at Sharepoint for shared scorecards, collaboration and other information with clients is like not having the whole picture. Sharepoint and a Blackberry integration, makes Microsoft CRM a highly valuable product for those that need to drive sales and sales support functions throughout a company. These products are the Hybrid Energy System that help you get the most out of your CRM vehicle.

Microsoft’s CRM products now work very well under the Dynamics framework of products and they are highly compatible and beneficial for companies running Great Plains, Solomon and other similar Microsoft Solutions.

SalesForce.com also has some mighty software partners who can provide a substantial force of application power behind its product lines. In this article, we will explore two products that turn on the marketing and lead development engines to make a sales team in any company, a high energy and throughput one.

Salesforce.com uses a tool called AppExchange ® as its “glue” to integrate applications. One great vendor to consider for enhancing SalesForce.com is FormFactory ®. FormFactory ® for AppExchange ® is an Application that enables Salesforce.com users to create and publish dynamic forms populated with live salesforce.com information.

These forms are useful as follow up collateral and selling material. FormFactory ® has a Form Builder, allowing end users of all abilities to present enterprise business data in professional business forms without any programming or coding. FormFactory ® also has customization capabilities to help automate form creation in one click for sales reps, marketing managers and executives.

Since integration of new systems with existing systems is a costly undertaking, several companies have developed approaches to solving it. A company called Nimaya is another great Salesforce.com partner product that will help with mapping of systems and linking them. Another approach is using hardware. CastIron Systems helps SalesForce.com companies utilize their existing contact and customer databases and systems with Salesfore.com applications.

It looks like a brighter future for the software as a service model using both Microsoft.com and SaleForce.com. Both vendors have more complete, feature-rich and more robust solution sets to replace or supplement legacy sales, service and contact management systems.

These enhanced “hybrids” of systems that use a main product, along with enhanced software interface and feature engines can now cost-effectively be thought of as replacements to many legacy applications in major corporations. The cost factor on a per-seat basis of software has fallen almost 10-fold over the last 10 years alone. For example, I was costing out CRM software at almost $2000 per seat in the mid-1990s. Today, I have seen it much, much lower! Hardware costs have also dramatically fallen, so that putting more people into customer relationship management is easier to do.

Hopefully, these applications will continue to be designed with the customer in mind, great service and satisfaction principles, and with diligent software design methods.This way, the same quality of solution can be available to everyone for a much more affordable price.