Today I will talk to a sales rep from Saleforce.com. But before I do, I read the article: Hosted CRM: A Great Debate or Much Ado About Nothing? (thanks to CRM Mastery.) At the very least, it will help temper my excitement for the benefits of an online CRM package.
However, much of what the article warns about ASP software doesn’t apply to me, which is probably why I felt I could look at Salesforce. The one lingering argument about cost over time should be worth discussing. Yes, over the years an ASP software will cost more, at $70 a month per user, versus $30 a year for maintenance for Goldmine.
But I should also factor in the savings in IT support and my time in supporting in-house software. This is especially true if we deploy to all our sales reps. Some of them have a hard time cutting-and-pasting. I don’t want to have to walk them thru a software upgrade or other fix.