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85,000 seats of Microsoft CRM sold in the last quarter
I saw in Information Week that "there were 85,000 seats of Microsoft CRM sold in the last quarter, which is roughly comparable to the sales of Salesforce.com." This stat absolutely blew me away for a few reasons:
- Microsoft is tight with publicly releasing details about the total number of CRM customers and the total number of CRM users, but through FY06 (last June 30th) they said there were 10,000+ customers and 400,000+ users. Since Microsoft released version 1.0 on 12/26/2002, it took us 3.5 years to reach 400,000 users. With those numbers as context, the fact they added 85,000 Microsoft CRM users in just the last quarter is amazing. In other words, in the last 3 months of FY07 they sold more than 20% of what it took the previous 42 prior months to sell. Wow. You can really see the momentum building behind Microsoft CRM.
- I am extremely encouraged that we added the same number of users as Salesforce.com considering everyone knows it is easier to sell a hosted CRM service like Salesforce.com to smaller companies. At their price point, Salesforce.com can add lots and lots of 5, 10 and 15 users deals relatively easily. Customers can pull out their credit card and go. Those types of smaller opportunities can be more challenging to sell with Microsoft CRM 3.0 since right now we only have an on-premise option for customers. The on-premise deployment (mostly) requires them to pay for the CRM licenses up front and purchase the system pre-requisites (like SQL Server) which is sometimes an issue for those smaller deals. Therefore if Microsoft CRM kept pace with Salesforce.com last quarter without a CRM Live option to offer customers, I expect that Microsoft CRM will start outpacing Salesforce.com for seats sold early next year when CRM Live is available!
All in all, this is great news for Microsoft CRM customers and partners like us.
On a side note, if anyone knows the new total number of Microsoft CRM customers and users worldwide through the end of FY07, I would love to see those numbers so that I can include in them in my future sales presentations. Please send them our way!
Posted by Mike Snyder on July 30, 2007 in CRM Competitors, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online | Permalink
Comments
I have spent a considerable amount of time this afternoon looking at Sonoma's website and your extensive weblog postings on "all things MS-CRM". I am very impressed with what I have seen here and feel even better then I did previously about guiding my very first client towards MS-CRM. I first heard of Sonoma, Mike Snyder, and Jim Steger when I purchased "the book" at a local computer retailer here in Cincinnati this past April. I have learned much about the MS-CRM product thus far from the 90-day evaluation copy that accompanies the book, and I am optimistic that my client prospect is going to render a favorable decision on proceeding with the implementation of the MS-CRM application in the weeks ahead. Thank you for being such an inspirational and passionate source of the wealth of MS-CRM related content that your website contains. I have subscribed to your newsletter today as well, and plan to visit your site frequently for the latest breaking news and ideas related to this very intriguing, complex, and powerful product.....
Posted by: Daryll Combs | Jul 30, 2007 3:27:48 PM
Daryll-
Thanks so much for the kind words! Please keep us in mind if you have any Microsoft CRM opportunities that we can help you out on.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Snyder | Jul 30, 2007 9:54:00 PM
