A monthly cost you should ask your CRM vendor about
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.