CRM solutions come in three sizes. There are several products designed for large enterprises, a few for mid-size companies and a myriad of basic low-cost or freemium offerings for small businesses. Despite the marketing rhetoric from Salesforce.com that they are the best solution for all sectors, the reality is they simply are not. It’s a great product chock full of a features and functions that, while suitable for large organizations, are simply overkill for most small to mid-size businesses. Many small to mid-size firms that have selected Salesforce have found it to be cumbersome, hard to use and simply too costly for the functionality they require. This seems to be a fair assessment. It does not mean that Salesforce is a bad product, but perhaps not the best one for every size business.
Salesforce is known as the number one provider in the space and as such, everyone wants to take a shot at them. I would like to defend Salesforce in perhaps an unusual way. You see it seems like each month there is a new article written about the best alternatives to Salesforce.com, but most of them hold little merit. Here’s why. The latest one I reviewed was titled Best Cheap Alternatives to Salesforce.com. This article listed a dozen or more products, some free and others that offer a basic low-cost out of the box solution for managing contacts, a sales forecast and a bit more. These are not cheap CRM alternatives to Salesforce.com, they are simply cheap CRM solutions. Not one of these offers a fraction of the functionality that Salesforce.com does. After reading this article you get the feeling that you can get the features of Salesforce.com at a fraction of the cost – but you can’t, and anyone with a brain knows this. So, what’s the point of this article? To me it illustrates how much the author does not know about Salesforce.com or CRM for that matter.
There are a few solution providers that offer a robust set of features that are similar to Salesforce and at a lower cost, but strangely enough not one of these was listed in this particular article. I am not referring to unknown start-ups here. How about Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Commence CRM or Sugar CRM? These are companies that compete with Salesforce.com every day, offer a comprehensive suite of functionality, are lower cost and have been providing services to mid-size companies for a decade or more. These are the best less expensive alternatives to Salesforce.com. To learn more about any of the above firms visit their specific web sites.
source http://www.commence.com/blog/2018/02/16/best-crm-alternatives-to-salesforce-2018/
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