Really, are you sure ? I dont think so!!

1 Sep 2011

When we speak to salesforce.com subscribers, particularly the ones that are looking at adopting the subscriptions for their businesses and considering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) I am always surprised at the amount of confusion that can exist around their pricing particularly what is included with the various subscriptions.

Here are some things that you really should be aware of before you ‘jump off the salesforce.com cliff’.

One of my key decisions is to use my CRM data to send email blasts from salesforce.com, surely this is easy to do?

Well the honest answer is no, its quite a complicated and misleading process and one that comes with a number of strings attached. The most obvious caveat is that you cant send more than 500 emails a day or at least you can but you need to upgrade to the Enterprise or Unlimited Editions where you will get 1000 email allocation.

Its only £45 per user (only) I can get away with the lower priced edition cant I?

Again, whilst technically correct there are some things to note when looking at pricing for salesforce editions. Firstly, what has already been discussed above – if you want to send more than the allocated 500 emails per day then you need to upgrade.

Also consider if you need any level of integration, either now or in the future, because if you do need to integrate your subscription (that includes adding any of the app exchange addons) or just get access to any of the data in a one way link, you will need to upgrade to the Enterprise edition (at least) and that is going to cost you a minimum of £85 per user per month.

Lastly but in some ways most important is getting an understanding of what data storage quotas you get with the additions you are looking at, this article (Size DOES count after all) is a good place to look to gauge how important your consideration of data storage can be and also this article (How do we stack up) gives a comparison of what is on offer and how OpenCRM stacks up.

So to summarise : salesforce.com does have some attractive ‘low rent’ options but be careful that you appreciate what you are getting into. As we all know, its the people & opportunity cost when changing your CRM solution that can easily add up so getting it wrong can be very frustrating and costly, getting your team to ‘buy into the project’ once is a challenge, getting them to buy into the second iteration of your project with a new supplier could derail the project completely.

Why not take a look at what we do here at OpenCRM : Turning hosted CRM on its head.