What about SalesForce.com as a CRM
I recently had the pleasure of signing up for a free salesforce.com trial. They had an AutoResponder prompting me every few days of something new I can do to get my information into the trial system. I receive emails and calls as well from employees praising the cloud and drinking the coolaid. I then dug a little deeper to explore the intricacies of the system and how well it connected with other services I wanted to use it with.
It connects with Google Apps so that the SalesForce CRM can keep track of emails you write to prospects (leads) in your SalesForce CRM system, but it was a little more confusing than I thought and I wasn’t always seeing all the emails. Keeping in mind I wanted to be able to send emails directly from Gmail as well as from SalesForce.com, I mean surely if they are linked I could do that. So, I keenly contact SalesForce support to be given an answer that I would normally expect from an Open Source solution. When I drilled a little deeper the support person (more like sales support) gave me a couple links to read so I could WORK IT OUT FOR MYSELF..
I then also discovered that SalesForce.com sell their system on a monthly fee basis. That’s right it $49 per month, pretty easy on the cashflow you’d think, until you learn that you need to pay yearly in advance. The reason I was given was that they need to ensure that the sales people get paid… Wrong! You can see that this company is much more sales focussed than support.
Lastly, they only give you a 30 day trial. From what I have heard I would need to register all over again and do all the setting up from scratch if I were to trial it for a longer period! Why would you go through that every 30 days until you understood how the system works.
Give me www.xero.com accounting software’s model any day. Free trial for as long as you want, get to know the system, ask questions, no pressure and when you are comfortable with the system you only pay for it by the month. Maybe not the best practises from a sales/reward basis, but much feeling from Xero than from SalesForce.com. I’m almost tempted to pursue getting to know Sugar CRM or vTiger a bit better.