Lead Tracking, Sales Lead Management, CRM, SFA & Call Center Solutions

I thought I’d share a conversation that I had  last week.

Before we begin let agree on the terms:

• SaaS stands for software as a service. You access the application through your browser. You aren’t responsible for the underlying database or any of the infrastructure – servers etc to run it. You pay a monthly fee per user and that’s it. This is a very popular business model because of ease of deployment, consistent platform for support, instant upgrades etc.
• On-premise is exactly what it sounds like. The application is at your site. You can physically touch the server(s) it is running on. You are responsible for the firewalls, routers, hubs, LAN, SAN, backup etc.
• Hosted means it is hosted elsewhere. It could be hosted by your IT department or it could be hosted by a consultant. Typically it means that you own the software but it is running on servers someplace besides your physical location.

I was talking with a medium sized company.  They were looking at implementing LeadMaster.  They had about 50 sales reps and another 50 sales and marketing managers that would be using the system.  Nothing unusual there, we have thousands of customers.  But how they arrived at the decision to implement online CRM vs. a hosted solution is interesting.

The CIO of the company had allocated $500,000 and a development team to implement the Dynamics solution.  They had originally planned on rolling it out in 12 months.  The company had also created a customer requirements team to decide what features the system should include (contact management, lead management, sales force automation etc.  They also had a rollout team to be sure everyone knew how to use the system and a QA team to make sure the system worked like it was designed.

Here it is 18 months later and still no solution.  The project was 6 months behind schedule and more than over budget.  With all the committees the amount of time away from normal business activity was a serious drain on productivity.  There was what some people refer to as a ‘pregnant pause’ when we told them that most of our customers were up and running the next day and training typically takes about an hour.

I decided to do some math to compare hosted CRM vs. online CRM.  Tet’s use the original $500,000 budget as a point of comparison.  Using an average cost of $50 per month per license for LeadMaster for their 100 people it works out to be $5,000 per month.

For that same $500,000 they could’ve implemented LeadMaster for 100 months or a little more than 8 years.  But wait, not only were they way over budget on the $500,000 but there were other costs because of all the committees and task forces, not to mention the opportunity cost because people were tied up with those meetings instead of revenue generating activities.

It safe to say the true cost was at least double or $1 million.  They could’ve licensed LeadMaster for nearly 20 years for the same cost.  But wait, it gets better.  Because they wouldn’t have had to spend the entire $1 million today they could’ve invested that money back into the business to grow the company.

Yes, there are many good reasons to look at LeadMaster.  Not the least of which are immediate implementation and ease of learning.