Do you need a CRM?
Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) have a place in almost every organization that works with customers and partners. A fully featured CRM system provides benefit to just about everyone in an organization, especially those in Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing roles. Successful organizations will reach a point where they outgrow spreadsheets and simple contact management systems. They then require a fully-featured CRM that provides critical capabilities:
- Visibility into the sales pipeline
- A comprehensive view of interactions with customers and partners
- Ability to plan and execute marketing campaigns for lead generation and nurturing
State of the CRM Market
The CRM market is growing and very fragmented. According to a May 2023 Gartner Study, the CRM market leaders are Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft. Yet, these leaders combined make up less than 50% of the CRM market. Of the four leading vendors, only Salesforce and Microsoft have consistently gained market share over the last five years (SAP and Oracle have been in general decline for many years).
Behind these four CRM leaders are dozens of other vendors. Many are ERP vendors with bolted on CRM components to help sales teams with the quoting process as well as free and very low-cost CRM offerings. These other CRM vendors can meet the needs of some smaller organizations, but they often lack key features and are unable to scale as an organization grows.
For a full-featured CRM solution, the choice frequently comes down to choosing between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (CRMOL).
What if I Choose Salesforce?
Salesforce has been the CRM market leader for the better part of the last decade. Being the first mainstream and fully-featured cloud-based CRM solution has given Salesforce a huge market advantage, and they have used their success to bring a huge number of additional add-on features to market. The biggest knock against Salesforce is its cost. Their most popular Sales product retails at $165 per user/month, and their most popular Customer Service product retails at $165 per user/month. The cost to add on their Marketing product is $1,500 per organization/month. You should be able to save some money if you buy multiple product offerings.
Salesforce is certainly a safe choice. It’s not going away, and their constant increase in add-on capabilities will ensure that Salesforce continues to be a market leader for the foreseeable future.
What if I Choose Microsoft CRM Online?
Over the last three years, Microsoft has invested heavily in their CRM Online (CRMOL) offering, bringing its feature set to a level that closely matches Salesforce, but at a much lower price. Microsoft’s CRMOL Professional product bundles together Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing for a retail price of $65 per user/month. This is a dramatic difference in price when compared to Salesforce. In addition to price, some other things CRMOL has going for it:
- Office 365 integration makes it compelling for businesses already using Office 365
- The LinkedIn acquisition will certainly lead to integration with CRMOL and boost its appeal
- Dynamics CRMOL and Dynamics ERP are bundled together into a new fully integrated offering called Microsoft Dynamics 365 (hopefully eliminating the need to maintain customer information in different systems)
Microsoft continues to invest heavily in CRMOL and will continue working hard to gain market share. Like Salesforce, it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s likely that CRM Online will continue to add features at a rapid pace. For some organizations, this will be a concern, but for most, it will be welcomed.
If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, contact the DMC CRM team. We would welcome an opportunity to help you figure out if Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a good fit for your organization.
Learn more about DMC's Microsoft CRM services and contact us for your next project.