Case Study – Small Business IT Services

The Challenge

Move from an aging and poorly-performing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program (Goldmine) housed on a dedicated server rented from a third-party provider to a state-of-the-art, cloud-based CRM + product. Identify and migrate gigabytes worth of data, and ultimately save money if possible.

The Solution

After conducting detailed research, we identified the Group Edition of Salesforce.com as being ideal for the number of subscribers required. There was a one-time cost to assess and migrate all the data from the old Goldmine server into Salesforce. After this initial transition, users warmed quickly to the new platform and Web 2.0-centric interface and features. Migrating to Salesforce also substantially reduced annual CRM costs.

CRM in the Cloud…Salesforce Group Edition

This post is about a year overdue, but as relevant, if not more so, than it would have been in Fall 2009.

Last spring/summer, our company leadership decided that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software we were using was falling behind the times and not getting prettier.  After months of research and several near-misses, we decided pretty much unanimously that Salesforce offered the best feature set (cloud-based, requiring no real company infrastructure, web 2.0-style easy-to-learn interface, little internal technical support required, integration with Outlook and Office via apps, huge user community, robust 3rd-party plug-in development).  However, the price per user was painful for a smaller business, and so we almost missed the boat.  But at the last minute we were turned onto the Group edition, which we had previously not been aware of.  With a significantly reduced subscription price and some blocked features (no deal-breakers), we excitedly worked with a 3rd-party contractor to migrate 10 years of data from our old CRM (Goldmine) into Salesforce.

And we’ve never looked back!

All those features we felt drawn to have taken some time to get used to, but Salesforce not only has a great feature set and interface, but also provides a guiding light to their “doctrine” around the sales process.  Let’s face it: though it’s great to have a robust set of data that captures phone calls, meetings, projects, and emails with existing clients, the main fruit of a platform like Salesforce is in leveraging it to get new business.  Though we are still working through the details of how to best leverage Salesforce’s feature set, suffice it to say we have been very pleased with all the features actually working for us like we hoped they would.  And we can’t always say this about every product we might turn to in hopes of features delivering on their promises.

For other folks out there in the SMB market wanting to have an affordable, intuitive, cloud-based, ever-improving system of capturing client/partner/vendor data that also excels at helping with managing the lead/opportunity/sales process, I can’t encourage you quickly enough to point your browser to the Salesforce pages and get your own relationship started.  Hopefully you too won’t be looking back as you move forward with this bright system!