Why choose Salesforce over cheaper CRM solutions?

If you haven’t yet decided on a customer relationship management (CRM) solution for your business you might wonder why Salesforce is the industry leader and preferred choice, especially if your on a budget. You might ask, “Is it really worth the high price tag?” The answer for most businesses is generally yes, but why? There are many good answers to this question such as feature richness and customizability.

One of the most widely reasoned answers to this question is the fact that Salesforce has many, many more features than most other CRMs. Inexpensive CRM solutions generally have only a few basic features such as storing customer information and can be very limiting in how these features are able to be used; this results in a solution that doesn’t really fit your specific businesses needs. Mid-tier CRMs do a little better at providing more features but still tend to fall short of fully matching the needs of your business. These solutions will usually seem good at first but after a while you’ll start to run into things that you need that just aren’t possible which will then lead to either purchasing extra software to meet those needs or possibly even abandoning the choice entirely. Finally, there are other high-tier CRMs that do offer many of the same features as Salesforce so then why not choose one of them? Well that leads us to the next topic of being able to customize your CRM solution.

While there are other CRM solutions out there which have very similar features to Salesforce, one of the main reasons that Salesforce stands out so much from all the rest, is Salesforce’s ability to customize almost every aspect of the system allowing it to exactly match the needs of your business. In most CRMs, if you ran into a situation where you needed to make changes to core functionality in order to make it fit your needs, you would most likely have to just deal with it. This is usually not the case in Salesforce. Salesforce has multiple tools that allow administrators to change the way it works and even has it’s own programming language underneath it all if you really need to make significant changes. The result of this is that Salesforce is able to fit almost any scenario, even to such an extent as being able to do things completely outside of the realm of general CRM functionality. For larger changes, Salesforce even has its own app exchange where you can purchase content that other businesses or users have built which then allows you to add significant functionality without needing to hire developers yourself.

So as you can see, Salesforce offers a great deal beyond that of a typical CRM and while it may seem advantageous at first to go with a cheaper CRM, the reality is that most of the savings that you would get from using a cheaper CRM will likely eventually be lost and possibly even get more expensive when your business starts to run into situations that the cheaper CRM can’t handle. So don’t settle for less, stick with the best.