I realize I am responding a little late, but I just joined
the community so hope I can still be of some assistance.
In my humble opinion, most of the CRM solutions mentioned so far are not well
suited for today`s small business environment. Products like ACT!, Goldmine and
Maximizer have long been the dominant players in the small business CRM/Contact
Management space, but are falling out of favor for a variety of reasons.
Products like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and RightNow are more modern in the
sense that are web based and/or hosted by the vendor, but are extremely
expensive and in some cases require extensive training.
As related to desktop solutions, savvy small business people are slowly but
surely beginning to realize their drawbacks and the benefits of hosted CRM
solutions. When the PC crashes and your ACT! database is lost, unless you have
backed up your database regularly and recently, you are in a world of hurt.
More to the point, with so many small businesses being `virtual` in nature,
meaning the partners and employees are working from home or in separate
geographic locations, desktop CRM solutions simply do not provide the shared
visibility and access required for effective collaboration. Customer service at
ACT! is virtually non-existent.
As related to salesforce.com, the typical price points are simply out of reach
for most small business people. Salesforce STARTS at $65 per user per month.
However, the average customer pays closer to $100+ per month per user after all
the add-ons and extra cost items are included. In my opinion, salesforce.com is
great for Fortune 500 companies who have huge sales and marketing budgets and a
lot of internal integration requirements (ties to Oracle Financials or SAP for
example), but it is not at all well suited for the typical small business
person who may be a member of this particular online community. Salesforce
doesn`t focus on small business. I challenge anyone to get their customer
service group to help you implement your two or three user deployment of their
product.
Sugar CRM and the multitude of Sugar CRM resellers offer slightly lower price
points, but you are still looking at a minimum of about $45 per month per user
for their hosted solution. Sugar CRM is an open source product so you can get
it for virtually nothing from a capital expenditure perspective, but unless you
have an IT department or happen to be a PHP programmer, customizing it will
cost you dearly. They do offer a CRM `appliance` now, but this means you own
the hardware and have to have a place to put it. Where is your data center, in
your bedroom, your garage, or in your den?
RightNow`s pricing and product strategy is highly modular, so to get a complete
solution you could easily spend as much if not more for it as you would for
salesforce or Sugar. Although they rightfully compete in the CRM space, their
roots are in online FAQs and they are in my opinion best suited for large,
Microsoft centric customer service departments and inbound call centers, not
sales organizations.
I have looked at the Kyliptics web site but I have never heard of them myself
before seeing the posting here, nor have I ever spoken to anyone who is using
or has evaluated the solution, so I can`t comment in depth on the company or
product except for what I see on their web site. I see they are leveraging
leading edge technology (AJAX)
and open source infrastructure (LAMP). The latter of which would lead me to
believe their price point would be significantly lower than the other CRM
solutions discussed herein, but I did not find any information on pricing on
the site (why are they hiding the pricing information?). They also talk about
integration with accounting packages and multi-lingual capabilities. QuickBooks
(desk top) and QuickBooks online are two most widely used accounting packages
in the small business world. I`m not sure how a hosted solution will integrate
to a desk top solution, nor to another hosted solution provided by a different
vendor, but if they figured out a way to pull it off, that could be a good
selling point. I`m not sure what value the multi-lingual capabilities provide
to most US based small businesses. They say the project was started in 1999 but
they have only two customers and a handful of testimonials listed on their web
site.
In February 2004 my partners and I started AppShore with the objective of
providing the world`s most functional and cost effective online CRM and Contact
Management solution. We are most often compared to salesforce.com and Sugar CRM
by our customers. The general consensus, as witnessed by published
testimonials, is that we provide the functionality a small business needs but at
a fraction of the cost of the competitors - with absolutely outstanding
customer service to boot.
Check out AppShore at $9 per user per month and tell me if you see any
functional difference between us and the big guys. Your feedback is extremely
welcome.
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