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.

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Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com are terrific marketing companies. Terrific marketing companies which have heavy, hard to use, and expensive CRM tools. The tools are hard to use making user adoption very difficult. Both microsoft CRM and salesforce have junior high functionality. The dirty little secret is in over 75% of deployment cases of these CRMs costly and extended CRM customization is needed to make the CRM fit the customer.
Most CRM Demands Costly Customizations to Make it Work

The VAR or value added reseller makes money on customers. Think about this. Where is the profit for a VAR to sell you CRM at 65 USD per month per user? The profit lies in adding functionality to your service and extracting dollars through your nose. This extraction is painful. Take a pain pill and lets look at your options
Base CRM is Too Heavy to Get Payback

Base CRM is commodity software. There is no exceptional value add unless it is niche focused for your industry....

Support System In Practice

Looking back at the start of our business, customer support a heavy task. I introduced products, attractive products with high demand, before I understood the support needs, and the support requirements on our staff.

Incoming calls from customers filled much of the inside sales day. If time is spent on support time for selling is shortened. This cut our new account growth. Now some salesman like this easy talk with existing customers and preferred to hunting new business. These salespeople were reassigned or weeded out.
I put a support plan in place. Here are the pieces:

1. I built a support portal using open source available tools integrated to our CRM
2. I created a wiki page using a jumpbox and VMserver
3. I created a help desk documentation page on our website using Plone.
4. We encouraged customers to use Forums on our sites to post queries
5. We added a new pricing for phone support...

The salesman is feeling it today. Feeling stress. The Friday sales conference call brutalized him. Brutalized the other guys too.

Boss said "Where the hell are the leads? You guys are not working, I see no new leads in the pipeline this week. If we dont get new business in here we will cut back"

Boy what a prince the salesman thought. "Any marketing budget boss?"

"No budget for marketing. How the hell can we market with no new business coming in?" said boss.

Strange, company wants new business but don't market. The sales manager must have attended business school backwards. The salesman wondered if the boss could spell b u s i n e s s s c h o o l.

Salesman picks up the phone. 7 am ct 8 et trying to catch a VP or Director at his desk back east. He gets voicemail one after another. He notes that receptionists make strategic decisions for major companies by knowing and telling him that the company bought software last year. What kind of software he...