Rightsizing your CRM System

CRM systems can cost a lot, in server costs, employee’s time, implementers time, and license fees.  Before you budget millions for your CRM system, make sure it is sized for your business.  You will probably want something more complex than a simple contact management system, but there is no need for a small-to-midsize business to spend millions of dollars on SAP, Siebel or Oracle CRM when they would only use a fraction of the overall features.  (There are many sophisticated oraganizations that can use these features, don’t take this as a blanket condemnation of “Big CRM”.  Just check the ROI, the return on investment - and look at the entire investment.)

I would encourage every company looking at CRM to first go to SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com) and download the free version of their (mostly) open-source product.  Install it on a simple desktop PC (maybe running Linux) and start to play with it - in the Administration screens it’s easy to change the screens, add fields, etc.  There are also online demos available but they expire very quickly and it’s easy to have your (test) customizations lost.

SugarCRM  is a remarkably complete product, and fairly easy to modify.  Many companies can use it with few changes; they also have a on-demand hosted service if you don’t want to run your own ‘live’ servers.  Since it’s open source, you don’t have the same worries as you might otherwise - if you don’t like their prices, host the server yourself and change the code as you want.  

I called the company "mostly open source" - they also have Professional and Enterprise versions with annual licensing fees that give you many more modules and access to better support.  Prices for these versions seem to be competitive with other vendor's offerings (those from companies that end in ".com")  With open-source (free) software you get less than Enterprise-level support, but then you don’t pay for support you don’t need. 

SugarCRM gets a significant portion of their customers at other CRM software company’s license renewal time - the other CRM company tries to add major annual costs for customizations the client already paid for once, and people get annoyed and start to look for alternatives. 

The moral is: make sure you aren’t paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, Euros, etc. for nothing more than you can get for free.