Will the Next Major CRM Player Please Stand Up

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SaaS, Sales and Marketing, Strategy, Tech

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been around for decades. Over the past 10 years, Salesforce.com has risen to prominence as both the largest Software as a Service (SaaS) company in the world and the largest CRM company in the world. Salesforce.com has an incredibly powerful product that is now geared towards the enterprise and over time has moved away from the small and even low mid market segments. Also, at a price point of $65 – $125/user/month (retail), the pricing is more inline with what larger organizations can afford to spend. The product is the most robust and most well integrated with other applications.

Market wise, there exists an opportunity for a lighter weight, more end-user friendly CRM that’s in the $5 – $15/user/month for the small to mid-sized business segment of the market. It doesn’t need to be as comprehensive as Salesforce.com, but it does need to be fairly customizable, and just as important, integrate with a large number of third-party apps (one of the most challenging things). SugarCRM, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM have strong products, but all target the enterprise with products that are north of $30/user/month.

Here are some of the current contenders in the SMB market:

Zoho CRM
$12/user/month
Nutshell
$10/user/month
Nimble
$15/user/month
Capsule CRM
$12/user/month
Highrise (more of a contact manager than CRM)
$49/month for 15 users
Batchbook
$50/month/10,000 contacts (no per user fees)

So, the SMB market is clearly healthy with a number of competitors, but talking to other entrepreneurs, no system dominates. I believe over the next 2-3 years another CRM player will emerge as the leading SMB provider, and it’s only a matter of time before the winner becomes apparent.

What else? Do you use any of these products and who do you think will be the next major CRM player?

Comments

11 responses to “Will the Next Major CRM Player Please Stand Up”

March 22, 2013

brooktc

Checkout Close.IO

http://close.io

They started off as an outsourced, elastic sales team — think EC2 for sales prospecting. They recently released a software product and I think it’s the best out there and the API is straightfoward.

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March 22, 2013

Daniel Roberts

This is a hot button topic for me. I’ve tried most of the ones on that list. A Mint.com of CRM is inevitable. There’s no innovation in the space. With salesforce’s price point it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to gain SMB customers. Imagine a CRM that understands it’s customer. That startup CEO that just needs some SaaS help on basic blocking and tackling type sales stuff. Something that’s both a highly integrated CRM and helps the little guys create their sales process. Most of the small ones like highrise are little better than a spreadsheet. There’s no value in that.

There’s value in something that says “Hey scatterbrain, you haven’t talked to this guy in 3 months. It’s about time you delete him or I can send him this feel good form letter you crafted?” There’s value in a CRM that would let you query a client’s company from your phone and present pictures/names as flashcards.

The industry is ripe for a company that’s willing to walk a few miles in their customers shoes and solve their problems.

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March 22, 2013

David Huey

I’m a sfdc fan, but zoho is a decent replacement.
It’s similar in look and feel to google apps, which makes an easy transition.

I love Daniel’s idea about reminders.
Something that builds in the features of contactually & yesware could be huge.

The thing that will keep sfdc as a strong player for years is the app exchange. Once you start adding on features, the cost of change keeps growing.

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March 22, 2013

Ramin Zamani

Great post, David.

There is also a great deal of buzz around the rise of Social CRM and how it will transform the tradional database system approach of current CRMs. What are your thoughts about this concept?

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March 23, 2013

pfreet (@pfreet)

“fairly customizable, and just as important, integrate with a large number of third-party apps”

Well I think there’s your problem. Too many organizations want their CRM to do everything. They massively customize it and try to tie it into all of their other business apps and soon find themselves with an unsupportable custom app that gobbles up time and budget. Everyone hates it and salespeople won’t use it.

Instead, IMO, a modern SMB CRM needs to focus on simplicity. And doing one thing brilliantly well. Something that creates value for the organization because salespeople want to use it.

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March 23, 2013

Daniel Roberts

I forgot to mention Podio. We’ve just started trying it, but so far so good. Super customizable.

Paul, to speak to your point (because we’ve all seen feature creep in CRMs), as an SMB the customizable nature allows me to only track the info we need. Customization paired with strict methodology can actually decrease complexity.

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March 24, 2013

Friedrich Pétré

Hi David,

Thanks for your posts around the next major CRM player, very interesting.
I was very happy to read your CRM analysis since we at Howaboutsales are working hard the last 4 years to conquer the SME market with the value proposition you propose.
2 years ago we entered the market of financial services with custom made direct sales and account management tools for financial service providers. Big European banks and insurers like ABN Amro and OVB chose Howaboutsales for its ease of use, smart integration and interesting pricing.
Based on our learnings and customer feedback we are now developing our beta SaaS version for the SME market. Our plan is to run a pilot in two European countries at the end of the year, in 2014 we are planning a European roll-out.

Thanks for your inspiring and helpful posts and we will keep you posted on our developments.

Good luck with Atlanta Tech Village, a brilliant initiative we definitely could use in Europe as well. Let us know when you are in Amsterdam!

Friedrich
http://www.howaboutsales.com

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March 24, 2013

Miranda Aldridge

Thanks for your post. Zoho is great, we have also just become partners for CallProCRM that is growing rapidly here in the UK. One to watch out for in the future.

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March 24, 2013

Alan

I think you missed http://www.oprius.com from your list. I would like to know what you think of it. I have been following them for a few years and their product is pretty unique especially in the Relationship Builder.

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March 25, 2013

Keith Petri (@keithepetri)

Hey David, I have faced similar issues throughout the years and am still not content with my current solution (Pipedrive). From your list I have used Zoho, Nimble, Highrise, and Batchbook. I was not impressed with Highrise and Batchbook, but I have not been back in a number of years and am basing my conclusion on past iterations. Zoho is great for what it does, but as a company, they are stretched thin trying to solve every issue facing small business operators.

I tested Nimble at the same time as Pipedrive. I ultimately chose Pipedrive, even though Nimble had better current-client CRM tracking tools. While Pipedrive is more geared towards sales, it is easily customizable and can be used for current project management as well. Its biggest selling point is intuitive UI. I would highly recommend exploring it for your needs.

I might have to checkout Nutshell – thanks for the recommendation.

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March 26, 2013

Eric Langley

After being on Goldmine for 15 years I switched to SugarCRM last year after test driving most of the well known next gen CRM’s like Podio, Zoho, etc…

It’s Open Source (the community version is free for unlimited users) and fully customizable. However, the existing interface is dated and is in need of a face lift.

It has a good partner community with support from Pardot, Net-Results, InsideView and many other data providers.

One thing I would really like to see is the ability to Tag contacts, companies, opportunities or any thing else for that matter. Classifying things with database fields is old school and a pain.

~e

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