We’ve been doing a lot of work over the last two years with Venture Capital. We’re equipping VC funded companies with best-of-breed CRM. We have an order book going forward two years with similar projects.

There’s one great reason why venture capitalists (VCs) love SuiteCRM. Cost efficiency.

VCs are generally very smart people with a singular focus on making money from their portfolio companies. The top quartile VC funds generate returns of > 30% consistently. That takes real talent.

Venture money is not long-term money. The aim is to invest in a company’s balance sheet and infrastructure until it reaches a sufficient size and credibility so that it can be sold at a profit, usually within 3 to 5 years.

VCs invest. They invest in the parts of their portfolio companies that are going to yield the greatest return on investment. They don’t waste money. VCs build lean machines. They don’t like fat. Fat is wasteful. They don’t do fat.

So, when it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, VCs understand that a strong CRM is a fundamental component of the information infrastructure in their companies and a positive asset once they are at exit point.

So when they do CRM, many of the shrewdest VCs understand that the choice is both stark and simple. They can run with the herd, implement Salesforce and add hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars per annum to OPEX and a hefty lump sum on CAPEX for implementation.

The alternative (and for many it’s the default, not the alternative), is to implement the world’s leading open source CRM – SuiteCRM. They understand that CRM is commoditised business logic. SuiteCRM does what Salesforce does. They are both enterprise-class CRM’s. One is hugely overpriced, the other is free.

So they engage with the SuiteCRM project. We work with them to model the software appropriately. We give them a CAPEX bill that’s fractions of the Salesforce one. We give them an OPEX bill for support and ongoing services that’s fractions of the Salesforce one.

And when it comes to selling the company, they have an enterprise-class CRM modelled to the company’s processes that they can include in the assets.

Lean machine, smart thinking.