I have always advocated a consultative and collaborative approach internally as the best approach for CRM adoption. As the CRM processes mature and confidence in and familiarity with the tool grows, you can consider adding more functionality and more importantly collect more information using the tool. Continue reading
It is customers and not your product, per se that will create your product, get it adopted, have it talked about.
It was brought home to me personally, rather forcefully as I watched the relative successes of two of my recent posts on my personal blog.
The first one, an account of a recent trip back to my engineering college, IT-BHU, went viral on Facebook and LinkedIn. It had 410 FB likes and 10 LI shares. It had 70 comments on the blog, triggered discussions on FB and LinkedIn groups. Even today, it pulls in tonnes of visitors. As someone, who blogs infrequently and writes on no particular topic in general, this was huge. On a few days, the visitor count was more than 500. Continue reading
I was in my alma mater, the Institute of Technology, BHU a few days back. They have recently mooted this great concept of Innoventure where students desirous of turning entrepreneurs get a chance to pitch their ideas to “more seasoned” entrepreneurs and VCs. The organisers were kind enough to call me to help judge the entries and jumping at this chance to go back to my campus, I said “yes”. Continue reading
Buying an inkjet printer: lessons when selecting a CRM
Allow me two minutes as I get to the point.
We have all bought a printer, from the very basic to more advanced. While we haggle the price down to the last Rs 50/- (~USD 1), we postpone the thought of the cost of printing - the ongoing relationship on even a monthly basis you have unknowingly signed up for.
Yes, right. I am talking about the cost of the print cartridge.
Okay, now to the point – why is all this relevant to CRM?
Simply, when you buy a CRM software, you are so “into” negotiating the per month license fees per user and beating him down on the customization, you fail to notice the one item on the table, which unnoticed today, will bleed you big going forward.
It is the storage cost.
In an earlier post, I have talked about The real cost of CRM implementation. Let me spend a little more time on how you will slowly start bleeding on so-called low-cost CRMs.
You buy a CRM (SAAS) for USD 25/- per license per month. Let us say you have 10 users. So, your outgo on license fees per month is USD 250/- per month.
But, you only get 500MB of free storage for your entire organization! Go above that, and you pay USD 4/month/GB.
500MB?? You will run through it in the first month with your ten users generating activities, mailing literature, quotes and invoices and so on.
Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation for how much file storage can really be needed.
Quotes pdfs: 10KB per file
Invoice pdfs: ditto
Literatures send on email as attachments: 500KB to 1 MB each.
How long will it take for you to reach your limit or free storage? 1 month? 2 months? Know this; more time you spend on the system, more will be the storage that will pile up.
Yes, the local media is having a field day..
There are 2 things that strike me as funny.
1. Mr Sanjeev Aggarwal, who filed the complaint, is a VC in the board of a leading VC fund, Helion Ventures and a successful entrepreneur. One wonders; how did he of all persons get suckered into something like this? Continue reading
Anwesha CRM Pvt Ltd is a software product startup based out of NOIDA. Our flagship product is Salesgenie CRM++, a next generation Customer Relationship Marketing tool, hosted on the web and targeted at the Small and Medium enterprises market. Salesgenie CRM++ is sold per license per month per user basis. Salesgenie CRM++ was recently among the 10 software product companies showcased at Nasscom product conclave 2010.
Anwesha CRM was founded and is run by Anindya Chatterjee (that’s me!).
Salesgenie CRM++ is now out of beta and we are looking to create the first team of sales and marketing people who will help take this product to the market.
Almost a year and a half back, I wrote a post called the “The real cost of CRM implementation”. I chanced to meet a Sales Director last week of a mid-sized enterprise who had decided to go with Salesforce.com for their company-wide CRM implementation. I asked her how the implementation is going. In one year, they have covered about half of her organization; so, they are still struggling to reconcile the “haves and have nots”. Continue reading
