Evaluating your next CRM

Salesforce has built a reputation for being the #1 CRM Platform on the market. They continue to evolve and push the boundaries of technology, bringing amazing features to their customers. But Salesforce licenses are not cheap. No, not when you look at the up-front costs associated with purchasing licenses and implementation. Salesforce is not a cheap solution at all from that perspective.

All too often the immediate costs of purchasing Salesforce licenses can come as a shock. However, it’s the unseen and indirect savings that you should also consider when evaluating Salesforce as a CRM Platform for your company.

Salesforce Doesn’t Require Servers

Salesforce is a Cloud-based or SaaS solution. Meaning, your company will not need to purchase expensive servers to support it. Along with that, you will not need to purchase replacement hardware when components break, lease space to store it (or multiple spaces if you want the security of redundancy). You won’t need to hire expensive IT resources with hardware backgrounds to maintain it. The initial and long-term costs of running servers is in no way a cheap investment. The ongoing costs associated with them alone could easily compare to that of the subscription costs associated with Salesforce.

Quick to Market

Salesforce comes with many pre-built templates to help customers get up and running quickly. In truth, if you wanted to, you could begin using Salesforce from Day 1. When you purchase a Salesforce license it comes with standard features, layouts, and almost everything a company might need to begin tracking customers, opportunities, and more!

Having all this configuration already pre-built means you won’t be starting from scratch. Instead, you can focus your efforts on extending the functionality of what has been provided in order to meet your business’s specific needs.

As you begin to customize Salesforce, you will find that rarely do you have to get into code. Setting up features, reports, alerts, and all these things that make Salesforce a powerful CRM Platform often doesn’t require any code. What that means is flexibility and the ability to make Salesforce work for you as you need it to in a shorter amount of time vs. building out a custom solution from scratch. Community.

The Salesforce Community

One of the most overlooked values when evaluating Salesforce is the immense size of the community. Almost everywhere you go in the corporate world you run into Salesforce and people that know it. It’s everywhere! In most major cities you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who uses it. (For the record, this author does not condone throwing rocks at people.).

With such a large community in place it makes it easier to find resources to help you with your Salesforce implementation. You can ask questions online and almost immediately get answers. That’s something that can’t be said of many other technologies. Salesforce has invested tremendous amounts of money and effort into creating free resources for training. The results of which have contributed to the incredible growth of the number of people with Salesforce experience.

Just take a look at the rate of growth of the number of attendees at Dreamforce. This chart is only up to 2015.

Attendance has skyrocketed, making Dreamforce the largest conference of its type in the world!

With such a large community finding help for your Salesforce will be measurably easier vs. other solutions.

Conclusion

Certainly from the perspective of upfront costs, the initial investment into Salesforce is considerable. However, when evaluating Salesforce beyond the initial investment, the cost of ownership diminishes rapidly, making Salesforce far more affordable (and scalable) than most other solutions.

If you’re considering Salesforce as your CRM solution, keep in mind that Salesforce is far more than a CRM. It’s truly a technology platform capable of rapidly bringing to market many of your business processes in a very well-connected environment.