Good marketing? Maybe. Good value? Perhaps not
I found this fascinating quote today:
Salesforce.com announced a contact management solution today specifically targeting the smallest businesses, nearly a decade after that product might have been a logical initial offering. Instead, the company started as a bare-bones sales force automation (SFA) provider at the turn of the century, a time when premises-based, standalone SFA had become not only commonplace but, in some cases, a high-end alternative to contact management products such as Act! and Goldmine.destinationcrmblog.com, GUEST-BLOG: Salesforce.com Gives Something Back to the Little Guy, for Just $9/Month | CRM Magazine Blog, Sep 2009
You should read the whole article.
Frankly to me this is just a over-priced rolodex with some deal-management thrown in. While it might be a good strategy to spread the net for new customers (who will soon get frustrated with the limited functionality and want to do more and thus hopefully upgrade); what is to stop those guys from upgrading to Zoho? Or Sugar CRM for that matter, who have been running an identical product promotion at an identical price point for some time now. See below:
Zoho continues to impress me with their accent on partnership building. Also impressive is the fact that not a week goes by without something happening. Last week they announced that from now on, you can sign on to Zoho using your Google Apps credentials. This week’s announcement is about their partnership with VMWare, where Zoho Apps can now run on VM Ware’s vSphere or other VMWare approved hardware behind the client’s firewall for those clients who want to use Zoho Apps but are uncomfortable with hosting their data on Zoho’s cloud.
I wish Zoho continues to improve on the user experience on their apps and that includes the CRM. The coming year will be a fight worth watching, as Zoho continues to make inroads into Salesforce territory.
