Advantages of Customizing your CRM system
Model your software to your Business for high user adoption and high payback
Often the word "custom" is scary for software buyers. And it should be. A recent new CRM customer for our company needed a custom solution. This was for vtiger crm. The vtiger team development team quoted $2,000 to do this. We were hosting this person, and he asked us to do the change. We did this for him in one half day of work and for less than $300.
Value Added Resellers will Kill CRM Return on Investment
When a Microsoft VAR is in your office, leave your wallet in the car. When a salesforce.com VAR lurks, move your wallet to your front pocket. These creatures stalk your company looking for blood to flow through holes in the CRM system that they can bandage. An bandage it is. Updates and the administration of custom solutions are hard, and the CRM vendor will not provide this. The customs are expensive and take too much time.
What Can be done to CRM to Increase User Adoption
When I speak about customs, I speak about removing the shipping address or removing a part of the workflow like potentials or adding a api or integration to an accounting system. These are simple. These are high value add to users and to companies that are used to working in there way.
CRM should let the Customer Own their Business
I remember a GM at a manufacturing company stating this, "Let us own our company." I asked meaning of this and he told me, "We been doing this for a long time. This is our business. Help us streamline and cut costs but do not tell us how to do our business."
Online CRM is Fits all into One Solution
Salesforce.com and Microsoft crm tell you how to do business. Standard CRM software tells you how sell to customers, how to support customers and how to view your reports. This is not right, the CRM Vendor does not let you own your own business. Hosted CRM by definition must be vanilla. The product roadmap is designed to enhance the tool yet is a long term plan. The road map will manage key function demanded by key customers and the small changes that will pick up user adoption and build value for most companies can not be road mapped.
Dedicated CRM Servers give Access to Code and Database
Now new open source CRM companies are delivering the CRM software to clients either by deploying on the customer sites or hosting on dedicated machines. In the past dedicated machines were very expensive. With new virtualization tools and with low storage and memory costs new companies can give customers a dedicated machine at affordable hosting fees. This approach gives the customer the path to modeling the crm precisely to their business requirements.