Clients and prospects who have worked with us know and appreciate the great lengths that we take to avoid "sleaze" in our approach to promoting the products we represent (i.e., Microsoft Dynamics CRM).
To further the point, at Navint, we pride ourselves on a consultative, requirements driven style of selling. In other words, if at the end of the day the steps of our sales process (which often includes a side-by-side comparison of competing products) helps a prospect determine that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is NOT right solution for them, we will happily walk away from the table.
Ironically enough, this approach is exactly why: 1) those same prospects call us back, 2) our clients love us, and 3) Microsoft recognizes Navint as one of its premiere partners in North America.
Alright, enough with the self-promotion. On to the main point of this post.
In the past number of months while talking with prospects who are trying to decide on the best CRM solution, we have inevitably run up against Salesforce.com. And to be fair, as far as SaaS solutions go, Salesforce.com is a great product.
Yet, it's also important to note, that the vast majority of unbiased technology research houses (i.e., ones that don't accept payment by vendors in exchange for stellar reviews) have ranked Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 literally neck in neck with one another. For example, check our recent post on the Forrester Wave ranking of mid-market CRM suites.
Needless to say, what I find absolutely amazing are the lengths that Salesforce.com will go in trash-talking its competitor's products. (And in certain cases, I'm talking outright lies! Yes, lies.) What gets me is that a small number of our prospects actually end up believing this stuff (or at the very least, relying on such material, ask us to substantiate their decision to NOT choose Salesforce.com).
In response to questions like these, first I try to remind the audience that Microsoft leverages a partner channel in selling their products. In other words, Microsoft is very much aware of its limitations and biases as a software vendor and so it made the conscious choice to sell its business solutions products through a partner channel (who, not surprisingly, care little about software in comparison to satisfying their client's business needs).And if that point doesn't begin to get the gears turning, these series of questions usually do:- How might your day-to-day sales operations be affected by Salesforce.com outages? Will you be able to access and use your CRM data, if Salesforce.com data centers are hit by outages?
- Why is Salesforce.com investing more money ($50M) on automatic back-up capability (Mirror Force) than on cumulative research and development efforts during the first 61⁄2 years of the company’s existence ($41M)?
- How is the Salesforce.com guarantee on outages affecting the third-party applications offered on AppExchange and the uptime for these solutions integrated to the salesforce.com applications?
- How does Salesforce.com guarantee that third-party applications will still work when the core salesforce.com application is upgraded to a new release?
- How can Salesforce.com guarantee security of your data when they provide APIs to third parties to connect to the central system?
- Can they show that over the life of the solution that Salesforce.com will provide better long-term TCO than Microsoft Dynamics CRM? (Note: If they do, they are lying again.)
- What if you ever get sick of paying the per user per month Salesforce.com annuity? Despite their "No Software" promise, will Salesforce.com ever offer an on-premise alternative? (Probably not but you can be sure that you'll be charged to get your CRM data when you want to end the contract.)
- Salesforce.com's rather consistent application performance problem is another area to question but I should leave that for a separate blog post.
And for those of you feeling as sleazed out right now as I do - I'm sorry - but it had to be done. And by the way Marc Benioff, when Microsoft CRM 4.0 is released in August 2007 and offers its customers the choice of hosted and on-premise, Josh Greenbaum's words are sure to come true.
