RSMUS.comI saw this great graphic (below) on the Microsoft blog site today and wanted to share.
This graphic reminded me of an onsite client meeting I had today in Denver. I haven’t spoken to this (mid size) client for a couple of months. As we do with many of our CRM implementations, we took a “train the trainer” approach with them and they now do all of their own CRM customizations/reporting and only use us sparingly. It’s a company that has been using Dynamics CRM for about 3 years. They have a pretty brilliant marketing guy that started there about 6 months ago and he was firmly a SalesForce dot com guy. I found out today that he is now one of the biggest proponents of Dynamics CRM within the organization. Yes!
I truly believe that anyone that fairly stacks the 2 products (even SFDC Enterprise) side by side, will pick Dynamics CRM every time and that’s without even considering the price (or the choice to be online or on premise). For those of you that don’t know, Dynamics CRM online is about half the price of SFDC basic. Just like the infamous short term cable/satellite deals you see, SFDC will offer some short term, deep discounts, creating the illusion of value, but just try to lock them in to those rates long term. It won’t happen and as stated previously, you would still be getting an inferior product. I’m not objective by any means (though I have used both extensively), but don’t be swayed by their slick, national pre-sales guys that spend all of their time selling and doing demos, without even showing you their sales automation (it’s the social enterprise, where they rely on a bunch of 3rd parties and Dynamics has many of their same top partners). Meanwhile I’m just a billable consulting guy doing demos in my spare time (and trying to get better). From a purely subjective perspective, do you really want to choose a critical, long term (you can’t change your systems every year) system for your organization because you were swayed by things that are not important to you and your organization? If you are evaluating CRM products, you would be remiss in your due diligence if you did not look at Dynamics CRM. We (McGladrey) are a national (gold certified in Dynamics CRM) reseller. For a free demo, contact us using the information on the right side of the blog.
