We’re deep in the doodoo (look it up). Thanks to COVID, in Europe, the USA, Asia & EMEA, economies are tanking. Profits are being battered. Jobs are being lost. Companies are going bust.
This is not a short-term issue. There’s huge uncertainty about the future. It’s batten down the hatches and optimise time. There’s an urgent need for companies to look at their spending and rationalise. That means cutting cost. Ideally, where possible, not function or people.
People are companies most costly asset. The keyword is “asset”. People contain the knowledge, desire, vision and capability to drive businesses forward out of recession.
Leadership Teams should be looking very closely at reducing their operational costs before they cut assets. Big ticket IT spending is a candidate. Especially Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Especially if they’re a Salesforce user.
Very few CRM applications come with the price ticket that Salesforce does.
Very few applications do less to justify the price ticket than Salesforce.
Salesforce’s functionality is commoditised. There’s no secret soup in Salesforce. It’s just another highly functional CRM in a group of other highly functional CRMs that include Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle CRM, SuiteCRM and SAP. They all do the same thing.
There is however an elephant in the room in that list. With one exception, swapping any one for another is an out of the frying pan and into the fire proposition. Bar one, they all have the same tired and outdated business model: Charging for commoditised business logic.
The exception is SuiteCRM. It’s free and open source. Open source software has no license charges. It’s the future of all software. Organisations can acquire, modify, deploy and operate enterprise hardened open source CRM software at a fraction of the cost of renting Salesforce. SuiteCRM is already used by some of the world’s largest businesses and non-governmental organisations.
CRM software on its own does not drive a business forward. It’s a tool that people use to create and close new business opportunities, to drive sales and marketing strategies and to service the needs of existing customers. To conceive and execute business visions, you need your people. Salesforce can’t and won’t do it.
A rough rule of thumb suggests that every 10 Salesforce licenses is equivalent to one average annual salary. Get rid of 100 Salesforce licences and save 10 jobs. Get rid of Salesforce completely, migrate to SuiteCRM and you may be retaining hundreds of jobs.
Migrating from Salesforce to open source SuiteCRM has an ROI measured in months and an ongoing cost benefit that will be measured in profits for years to come. It’s a journey we have made for customers numerous times. Once migrated, they never go back to Salesforce. There’s no need, no benefit, no upside. Just massively increased cost and greatly decreased support and service levels.
Contact us today if you want to retain jobs and maintain your current operational CRM functions.
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