Coming back into the fold and off of Salesforce.com

This past week I met with two different Microsoft Gold Partners to talk about their plans to implement Microsoft CRM. Both of these companies are very successful,  one of them has 11 offices in the United States. And both of them wanted to speak with us about how they can migrate to Microsoft CRM from Salesforce.com. I was struck by the fact that these two companies had nearly identical stories about their past and where they want to go in the future.

Of course I was curious what prompted these Microsoft partners to select Salesforce.com in the first place. They have been on Salesforce.com for several years and they originally selected the platform "because it was easy". The really nice thing about a hosted service is that you can just pull out your credit card and start using the software almost immediately. 

But now that they have used Salesforce.com for several years they want to really expand their usage and address some of the users complaints about Salesforce.com. Complaint #1? Due to the lack of a GOOD integration with Outlook, their sales people have to double enter contacts, accounts, etc. Complaint #2? They want to get better integration between their CRM data and the tons of documents and data they're currently storing in SharePoint. This includes using dashboards, document libraries, KPI's, etc.

Now we all know that Microsoft CRM can easily solve these two complaints and help these companies develop a really efficient CRM system and hopefully we'll get the chance to help these companies implement Microsoft CRM.

But the point of this story is just that we're getting more excited about CRM Live! Back a few years ago when these companies selected Salesforce, Microsoft didn't offer a competing option...but they will next year when CRM Live! is available. I know that will mean lots and lots of more companies will choose the Microsoft CRM Live platform instead of Salesforce.com, which is great for everyone involved with Microsoft CRM.

I also think that these experiences reinforce one of my personal opinions about the SaaS (Software as a Service) space. Lots of companies start with SaaS options like Salesforce.com because it is easy. No need to purchase hardware. No need to get approval from your IT department. No PO required. No capital expense approval process. It's ideal if you have 10 to 15 users. However, once a company realizes the importance of using a CRM system and they want to expand usage to 50, 75 or 100 users they consider on-premise solutions because the monthly fees get ridiculous.