Salesforce CRM has no business in a small business. You get value out of the system when you combine it with other enterprise tools like service, email marketing, e-commerce, and custom apps.
Small companies should use smaller more agile solutions. There are a ton of them and they all work fine. There is nothing wrong with tracking opportunities, storing customer data in a single place and using quoting tools, but if your small company is forcing you to track phone calls and log the bouquet of your customers last flatulence, you’re in the wrong job.
Agreed. I will add that many big companies should avoid it too. The company I worked for in 2010-11 (Fortune 500) spent millions on SF because everyone else was... SAP was our ERP and it's CRM was a joke.
Our business was all BTB and very mature. There is very little to no lead generation as nearly all potential customers were doing business with us at some level. The name of the game was market pull through by generating more demand with our customer's customers and volume of sales by making out bound sales calls for inside sales team and being in the field working with end user's to create demand for outside sales.
Marketing was a very small group and was mainly in charge of trade shows and print materials. Quotes were generated by SAP because pricing and availability changed real time and honestly, SAP is awesome at quotes and order fulfillment.
The gist of it is, our business was a numbers game. For inside sales, the more calls you make and orders you process, the more money you make. For outside sales, you spend 1/3rd of your time with direct customers, 1/3rd with indirect, and 1/3rd in the office planning/training etc.
Salesforce ended up killing sales. Everyone was assigning tasks to each other and following up three times on every opportunity. Outside sales ended up spending 50% or more of their time in the office. Inside Sales lost 30% of their bandwidth as they spent more time logging information in SF than it took to just enter the order. They dropped from being able to enter 70 orders a day to 50.
It was horrible. I'm sure integration could have helped, but the reality is volume was way too high in a transactional business. Luckily within 4 months, the entire program was scrapped. Very rare for a big company to do that.... Although a few years later that same company went all in on thin clients vs desktops and when it sucked horribly, they scrapped it after a few weeks.
SF is not all bad. I know a guy that sells software to DMV's and he loves it. Of course he makes 1-2 sales a year and has 100 people to track within each opportunity. As the old saying goes, Salesforce was built, to help sell Salesforce.
