Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Isn't Salesforce Web based, that is with nothing to download?

I see their "No software" ads everywhere.

If you go to the salesforce.com website you'll see that they have a free 30 day trial for download. I would suggest that you download that and play with it.

At one point, salesforce.com that a personal edition which was very reasonably priced. It is not easy to find it from the main webpage (I did a bit of Google searching could not find it, it is still available? Does anyone know I do find it?)

I would also encourage you to Google the marketing profs forum, since there been many many posts regarding CRM. For example, you could google the following:

crm skte:www.marketingprofs.com/ea

Just as a reaction to Phil, there is a lot of open source software that you don't have to pay license for that is very useful and developed and used by a large user base. It all depends on what you are looking for. There is an open source project Covide with a more European oriented CRM that might be usefull. Suger CRM is put together with Asterisk (open source pbx) in Elastix (an open source dedicated linux distribution that can be downloaded for free). Easy to install and with some effort not too hard to use.

The fact that you don't have to pay license doesn't mean that it is a completely free ride unless you have all the expertise to install and configure the system.

I hope the moderator will not remove this message. Naming open source projects is not the same as advertising and promote a business. The point of open source software is that you can make your own choice about the business assisting you with implementing the solution. If you are not satisfied you can simply change to another service provider.

Erik de Wild
Tripple-o
Open source Open standards Open mind

Hi, Kathy

Here's a link to salesforce.com free 30-day trial, plus you get a free copy of salesforce.com for dummies as an extra bonus: https://www.salesforce.com/form/trial/freetrial-bookoffer.jsp?d=70130000000...

Microsoft CRM 90-day trial available at: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7D418781-69AD-422...

I'm still waiting...and waiting...and waiting for Eloqua's LIVE CHAT to connect to ask them about a free trial.

Marketing-Riot

Dear Kathy

As you require hands on CRM experience for an interview, you would be nuts to download open-source software to see what it does. That way you would be ready for interview sometime in October. I really can’t understand why this is such a big issue for employers. Almost all will be prepared to train you on their own CRM system. If they don’t, it can take weeks to familiarise yourself with a package to a standard where it benefits you in a commercial context

As to the general debate about open source – I have no problems with the concept, but I do have issues with Sales and Marketing managers configuring their own CRM systems, never mind actually writing them.

Yes it’s possible and yes it is a feasible option for a company with sales management and programming resources which have some spare time on their hands. The problem is that it takes a huge investment of time to get the functionality of even a small CRM package such as ACT and the resulting software will have endless bugs in it until it has been thoroughly tested. SalesForce.com didn’t spend about 30 man-years on developing this software for a laugh but what makes anyone think that they can do a similar job in 2 weeks?

We’ve got about 450 CRM clients and I am aware of at least 11 people who have set out to craft a CRM system from open source and thus keep the development in-house. 10 of them were sales or marketing managers and in all cases after weeks of development time, they were either told to return to the job which they were paid for or in 3 instances they were dismissed. You wouldn’t dream of writing a spreadsheet or word processing application from open source software, so what the hell is so special about databases?!

Get your experience from a demo account on of SFDC – there’s nothing to install so all you need to do is configure it. To save time you could use one of their free configuration templates, but I would warn you that it is quite difficult to discern the intent of the features in a configuration from a demonstration – that’s why I won’t give people free evaluation copies of Maximizer or SymVolli. With Maximizer, its interface is so weird, no one is going to work out how to use more than a tiny percent of it’s feature. SymVolli is less difficult to understand, but as it is so easy to set it up as the customer might use it, we do just that and give them access on a web server.

Good luck and if you have any specific CRM questions please use my contact details in my profile – I’ve got about 15 years hands on experience with all sorts of CRM software.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt