Build vs. Buy
So my travel was supposed to be finished until mid-June, but alas, I find myself this week in San Mateo, CA for 4 days of administrator training for Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a very robust customer relationship management Software as a Service platform. We’ve decided at Doba to move our CRM (marketing, sales, and service) operations onto this hosted platform over time. We’ve been testing it in a limited fashion for the last several weeks.
In the past 5.5 years, we’ve built A LOT of software that originated from our “internal tools” roadmap–software to manage sales processes, billing processes, marketing processes, service processes, etc. Over the next many months, we’re going to work towards fulfilling those internal needs via the Salesforce.com system rather than building our own software. In essence, we’re working to stop building software that isn’t our core business, and leverage other platforms and software that are out there.
Let me say this: I’ve told quite a few people that we’re doing this, and a few of them have said, man, that Salesforce.com is expensive. We can build our own tools better/faster/cheaper. To that I say: no you can’t. Not even close. In my class with me is the Salesforce administrator (yes, at larger companies, they separate out that role) for AMD. Yeah, this AMD. And several other large companies from around the country. Salesforce Professional starts at $65 per user per month. They have a Group edition that’s even less. For that much hard money, not even counting the opportunity cost and distraction factors, you can’t build 1% of what this platform does off the self. And even if you need to customize it (a standard objection to not building things yourself. The whole “customizing it will cost us more than just building it ourselves” argument), it’s still so much more efficient to leverage the base of other software.
So my advice? If you’re a software company, build software that you sell. Build your competitive advantage. Anything else your business needs to operate and function? Buy it. And Salesforce.com is a dang good place to start looking for the whole CRM world. What I’ve seen here at Salesforce.com training is extremely impressive. Totally changing my build vs. buy viewpoint going forward. If you need bookkeeping/accounting, you buy Quickbooks. If you need word processing, you buy MS Word. If you need anything related to full lifecycle (leads to accounts to opportunities to service cases to service solutions) CRM, buy Salesforce.
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Posted by Jeremy at 12:47 PM
Category: Doba, Specialization, Technology|
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I tell you what’s refreshing - getting on your blog and seeing a Utah dude who is actually talking about real business. Its refreshing to see someone blog about something useful like salesforce rather than twitter, Web 2.0, facebook or some other pile of crap technology that makes no money and adds no real value.
And people wonder why Utah isn’t taken serious.
Have you even looked at SugarCRM?
I’ve had a couple of people now ask about SugarCRM. So here’s a response I emailed to someone that had asked about it:
We did look into Sugar a bit. We’re a LAMP shop, and run a lot of other Open Source internal apps (mail, calendaring, etc.), so it sort of fits in the world all of us at Doba live in.
The trouble is that Doba is moving up-market (see beta.doba.com), so we really need a very solid Marketing and Sales platform. Leads to Accounts with Opportunities and then Customer Service on top of all that. SalesForce.com from what we saw really slammed SugarCRM in those areas. It might depend on your sales processes, and needs, etc.
But when you also considered the fact that SF.com releases major functionality updates 3-4 times a year–mostly because of the size of their engineering ability, compared to a much smaller operation at Sugar(http://www.salesforce.com/products/previews/summer08/ is what’s coming in a month or so), and the extremely innovative things they’re doing with the Force.com platform (VisualForce is a new addition and it will totally change how you can build UI on top of their platform), it really became more clear.
If you want extensive reporting, forecasting, lots of customization options, and tons of control over the app, SalesForce.com is hands down the choice.
It has its Pros and Cons, and the admin of the system can be pretty intense. The front end use of the system is defitintiely more intuitive than the admin, but once you learn how things are done, it’s not bad at all. And the out-of-the-box functionality is impressive, and if you need to, there are infinite ways to customize it and tie it into other systems.
We’re new with it, but after the last 4 weeks of testing it limitedly in house, and the last 3 days of admin training, I have no regrets whatsoever.
Anyway, hope this helps. I’m as much a fan of open source as the next guy, but with this, the choice was easy. It’s totally comparing apples and oranges in my opinion to put SugarCRM up against SalesForce.com