“We’re now seeing new SaaS based CRM vendors announced almost every week. Over the last couple of years hundreds must have introduced new freemium services. They all offer something different and are making a lot of noise about competitive advantages.
The result is lots of people talking about CRM in one way or another. The concept is getting lots of air time and more people are discovering CRM in the process.”
Ten years ago Customer Relationship Management was an emerging concept. At the time most IT people were focused on the the millenium bug and potential collapse of information systems everywhere.
Post survival of Jan 1 2000 the major consulting companies changed their pitch and started promoting CRM to their ERP clients. Sieble, the original CRM business, roared to the forefront of IT Strategy talk only to later fall gracefully into the waiting arms of Oracle.
But the direction was set – we were going to get religion about CRM eventually.
The industry lead was taken up by salesforce.com with it’s innovative SaaS technology and aggressive business strategy. The Force challenged accepted software business strategy with it’s minimal spend on product, major spend on marketing, and domination of Paid Search.
The Force’s success to date has proved a number of contentious philosophies:
1) No matter how hard to implement, CRM will become a (if not the) dominant business process.
2) Software as a Service with applications based on remotely hosted web pages is a legitimate technology for both vendors and users.
3) There’s a fundamental shift downwards in cost of software and infrastructure.
4) Internet marketing is a legitimate and effective strategy for selling software.
But the Force did something else in the process. It opened a barn door for other vendors to flood through. It made CRM something everybody needed, and set an example of how to do it.
It made CRM main stream.
We’re seeing new SaaS based CRM vendors announced almost every week. Over the last couple of years hundreds must have offered new freemium services. They all offer something different and are making a lot of noise about competitive advantages.
The result is lots of people talking about CRM in one way or another. The concept is getting lots of air time and more people are discovering CRM in the process.
This is great news for smaller businesses:
1) They’re finding out about the need to focus on customers.
2) They have lots of choice as to the solution they choose.
3) Costs are zero, or close to it.
4) Ease of implementation/use is a major point of competition.
It’s also great news for all the new CRM vendors -( it’s as if millions of ants are working together to move a fallen tree).
There isn’t any way Force, or Oracle, or Microsoft can cope with the competition they’re getting on every front, from more competitors, than they can shake a stick at.
All of the minnows can take bites out of the big fish without fear of retribution.
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