While commonly known that Saleforce.com charges its customers for their data - you will cry when you hear this...
This morning I was talking to one of Navint's new Microsoft CRM customers. They are in the process of terminating their relationship with Salesforce.com.
It turns out that their contract with Salesforce.com requires them to pay $10,000.00 for a full cut of their data. The only thing they can get for free is a flat file of Account and Contact data.
IMPORTANT NOTE: With the introduction of Microsoft's customer relationship management SaaS offering (CRM Live), when you decide to "switch" you're NOT going to get charged for data that is rightfully yours.
And for those of you...
1) Responsible for doing vendor comparisons - please add this to your list of items to consider when calculating TCO.
2) Responsible for negotiating contractual relationships with CRM vendors - make sure to draw attention to such clauses so that you don't have to end up paying for what is yours.
PS - Maybe this is why Marc Benioff is so defensive regarding CRM Live.
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Just to clarify: There are many tools on the salesforce.com AppExchange that customers can acquire for a LOT less than $10,000 that allow the customer the ability to export the data themselves. Marc is sleeping well.
But... those tools still cost $$$!
I saw this post and since our firm consults on both salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM (and our prospective clients are often evaluating both competitively) I had to dig a little further into this. I tapped our principal consultant who has extensive salesforce.com experience. Here's what he had to say:
• If they have the Professional, Enterprise or Unlimited Edition (of Salesforce.com), there is a tool that is free which can be used to extract the data from Salesforce.com (the AppExchange Data Loader). This tool is a lot easier for the non-techie to use than anything available from Microsoft for data extractions from 3.0. Even so, it is a bit of a manual process to extract everything using the Data Loader (you have to do a separate “run” of the loader for each table – if you have a lot of customizations, this could be quite time consuming).
• If they have the Enterprise or Unlimited Editions: They also have access to the API. Using this, they can either write custom code or use a tool such as Scribe or Pervasive to extract all the data.
• In the unlikely event that they have the Team Edition (I think it is now called the Group Edition), then they cannot extract data themselves. But I have a hard time believing they would pay $10K to get their data in this case … they would only be spending about $1,000 per year for their whole setup in this case.
In the event that the customer doesn't have any in-house SFDC expertise available to them, they may simply be over-paying salesforce.com to do something that could be done a lot more cost-effectively depending on their situation.
I was able to implement a 3rd party tool to replicate all of our companies Salesforce.com data to a local SQL database. The process pulls over a complete copy of the data nightly as well as does incremental updates every 30 minutes. The product cost was $700 annually. We use it to write SQL Reports that we then link into the corporate intranet and it reduces the number of licenses we have to provide users for Salesforce. I think it saved about $120 annually per a user license, so we've justified the cost easily since we were already up to 35 users in Salesforce.
That being said, I am eager to see what Microsoft has to offer as I'll be attending a Microsoft CRM Launch at the end of March.
Nice observation... thanks for updating us...
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