CRM Packages - Market Research

At Blue Fish, we have used Salesforce.com for about 5 years. We didn't do a full evaluation of the options, we just went with the product that our sales guy was familiar with at the time. Over the years, we've evolved how we use it.

We use salesforce in two primary ways:

1. To track sales person activity across our sales force - This is the classic use of a CRM, and it amounts to a management tool. We have quotas and metrics that we track, and the CRM allows our sales manager to keep tabs on the activities of the sales reps and the status of the pipeline. This adds little value to the sales reps but a lot of value to sales management.
2. As a repository for contact information - We try to keep all the contact information related to a lead, prospect or client in the CRM so that if a salesperson transitions the account or leaves the company, we have access to the relevant contact info. This adds value to the sales reps.

We don't really use salesforce's marketing modules that much. Occasionally, we will create a campaign and attach leads to it when we send them an email or when they attend a webinar, etc. But we primarily use salesforce day-in and day-out for tracking sales activities

The things that are most important to us NOW are:

• Custom Reports and Ease of Getting Data out of the System - We do all of our management reporting in Excel, because it's easy for us to format it exactly the way we want to. Salesforce makes it easy for us to extract the contents of a custom report into Excel where we can use it to drive charts and graphs.
• Custom Metadata - We have lots of custom fields that we use to track aspects of our prospecting system, such as which products we think are relevant, what the prospect's decision making process is, etc.

The things that were most important to us WHEN WE WERE STARTING OUT were:

• A Sales Process Framework - Starting out, we were not sure what sales process to use or how to track progress. Salesforce has an out of the box process that was useful as a starting place, with default metadata, reports, etc.
• Cheap and Easy to Get Started - Not knowing if CRM was going to be useful for us, it was important that the initial investment was small. Salesforce didn't quite deliver on this. It was more expensive than I wanted it to be, and it was hard to understand how to use (I still feel like I don't fully understand some of the basic concepts).

The things I don't like about salesforce are:

• Too hard to understand
• It's kind of ugly
• Not very good for cold calling - there could be a special UI just for cold calling that lets the user get a list of people to call and with one click update the status (whether they left a message, talked to a secretary, etc.)
• Lots of clicks required to do some basic updating

To answer your specific question about ranking features, here are my thoughts (in order of importance):

1. Management information (i.e what are my sales team doing?) - Critical, most important
2. Simplicity of use ("I want to be selling not spending all day on this!") - Management won't know what's really going on if the sales team doesn't use it
3. Storage and easy access to customer sales information (& track against targets) - Critical
4. Customisation - Our sales process and the data we track has changed several times in the past 5 years. While we don't really need customization, we DO need heavy configuration (custom fields, custom reports, custom sales process stages, etc.)
5. Record customer activity (meetings, phone call, support cases) - We use this a fair amount to track sales activity, but not support cases (we use a different tool for that)
6. Quick and easy e-mail marketing - Ideally, this would be part of our CRM, but I've found that other services (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp) are so much better at email marketing than the built-in features in a CRM system. So unless you can do it as well, I wouldn't use it.
7. Package helping to guide you though the sales process (with tips etc) - I don't think our sales people would use tips like this, but our sales manager would use tips on how to define a sales process, create a sales compensation model, set goals, motivate sales people, etc. It wouldn't need to be integrated into the software, though - a blog or series of articles would be fine.
8. Sales force automation (i.e. workflow management) - Not particularly interesting to us; we are small enough and simple enough to do this manually
9. Easy Communication between users (i.e. spreading good news) - Not at all important to us; We have other methods of doing this that work for us.
10. Produce quotations - Not important to us; we have other templates for this