Is Salesforce.com really a viable platform for a small business CRM? What does a small business – any business for that matter – need now more than ever?
Sales!
Not software. Not a repository of information. Not an online calendar. Not an online task tracking and generating platform.
Sales!
And where do sales begin? With advertising and marketing. With building a list. With creating a buzz. With generating word of mouth referrals.
How do you do all of the above? You advertise and market creatively and consistently and you offer something of value to your prospects in return for them giving you their information. You then communicate with them in a manner and with a tone they desire so a relationship and trust is built and forged and crafted over a period of days or even months.
But as a business owner you don’t get paid to educate. So you MUST be able to do all of this automatically.
That’s where I think Salesforce.com misses the mark for the small business crm market. Their Professional Edition runs $65/mo per user so for 5 users you’re looking at $325/mo. You can capture web leads and send mass emails, which is good. But you can’t do eCommerce and you can’t do drip campaigns or nurture sequences that are triggered and run automatically when certain events occur.
If you want to do that you must go to their AppExchange and bolt on a product like Exact Target or Vertical Response. Now you can add on another $20 to $100/mo depending on the size of your list.
Besides the money, though, you’re having to learn and integrate another system, which is EXACTLY what you do not want or need to do as a small business owner.
You need sales.
If you need to DOUBLE YOUR SALES, GUARANTEED, you need Infusionsoft. It will take some work to learn and get used to like any platform, but the nice thing is that this is the last platform you will ever have to learn and it is all-inclusive for the small business owner that wants to grow sales without growing staff.
If you are a 50-person company and larger and you need help on Salesforce.com I’m happy to help you as I have been using it for 5+ years and was certified on their platform to teach it an integrate for large enterprises in 2007. But if you’re a 1-50 person company with 1-10 salespeople Infusionsoft is your answer, or your money back!
Live Customer Service (951) 389-4101