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1011 Western Ave, Suite 800 |
A Message from Entellium Chief Marketing Officer Natalee Roan:
Dear CRM Buyer:
Recently several prospects forwarded us a document sent to them by Salesforce.com which appears to provide objective information comparing Entellium with their solution (headline pictured below). Unfortunately, the inaccuracies and lack of integrity in this document requires us to respond.
Figure 1
Click here for an example of how inaccurate this document is [HTML file, 55KB]
With this document Salesforce.com directly questions our product depth and functionality, our professionalism, and even our corporate viability in an attempt to make Entellium sound like a risky bet. Even their features/functions comparison chart is 80% wrong in the Entellium column. I'm sure in your own business you too would respond if your main competitor put out false information about you in order to secure a sale, and in that spirit I ask that you consider the source and talk to us before determining its accuracy.
I'm actually new to the CRM industry, having spent the past 12 years with service companies like Sprint and Nextel. This document from Salesforce.com is one of many business practices in this industry that I find incredulous. Here are my impressions of the CRM industry - hosted or otherwise. See if you agree:
- These companies get you to sign long-term agreements and actually expect you to pay for a 12-month contract entirely up-front. Any other
time you see a monthly price, you pay by the month, don't you? Cable, wireless, utilities - but somehow hosted CRM companies get to market a
monthly fee and then charge a year or more before you even get started.
- Isn't this ironic: A "Customer Relationship Management" company gets to charge their customers for that relationship. Sure, they may offer
free service, but then - after you sign that long-term contract - out comes the up-sell to the silver, gold and premium support packages. From
my vantage point, the worst thing that ever happened to Customer Relationship Management is that it became productized into "CRM" so companies
don't have to bother living up to the words behind what they are selling.
- They turn the sale into a "features-functions" war rather than take the time to understand what you need. Even the way they arrange their
product line is designed for the consummate "up-sell." By design, they leave out 1 or 2 key features that force you to move to the next product
for a considerably higher price - and you can't mix and match the lower priced products with the more expensive ones.
- The few that market Service Level Agreements (SLAs) offer a mere few paragraphs with no teeth - and the largest of them all only offers SLAs
to a select few customers, despite numerous and lengthy down-times. Those CRM companies that do claim an SLA force you to keep track of uptime
and chase them for your money. They also say nothing about back-up schedules, downtime notifications, incident resolution times….all critical
items in Software as a Service, or hosted solutions.
- The industry seems to intentionally avoid standardization just to keep their high prices in tact, with hundreds of partners waiting to take a bite out of the unwary buyer. Somehow we've been trained to think that it's acceptable to have to pay yet more people to get a product to work as advertised. And they've pulled the greatest marketing ploy of all - to make you believe your business so special that this extra work is needed in the name of "customization". The entire industry is a feeding frenzy on the customer.
Let me summarize: Even with hosted CRM companies that advertise "No Software" -You buy more features than you can possibly use, on a long-term agreement that you pay for up-front, with no service guarantees if something goes wrong. Further, you wind up paying them to support their own product, and needing them or someone else to make the product work the way they told you it would before you signed on the dotted line in the first place. Is this acceptable to you?
Frankly, on behalf of the entire CRM industry, I think you deserve an apology.
Now this is how I think the CRM industry, especially hosted companies, should behave:
- All customers get an SLA with real teeth: Automatic rebates for less than 99.7% uptime in a given month, detailed back-up schedules and
incident resolution times - The "hosted" company actually has real money at stake if their service goes down.
- Premium 24/7 real-time customer support should always be free. All your users can reach a real person - in real time -
when there is a problem, or when they don't know how to do something. For this reason training should also be free for all your users.
- A solution should be built to serve 75% of most business requirements right "out of the box" so to speak, with easy customization that doesn't require an IT department. You shouldn't constantly feel up-sell pressures for additional products and services.
If this is how you'd prefer to buy CRM, then talk to us at Entellium. This is exactly how we do business, and I am proud we are having such an impact on companies that don't do business this way that they are now using underhanded tactics to compete.
So if you get any correspondence from a competitor discussing what Entellium is and isn't, we simply ask you to consider the source. Just talk to us first - then decide.
Respectfully,
Natalee Roan
Chief Marketing Officer
Entellium
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