Earlier this week we reported that Zoho CRM has launced Zwitch, an aggressive marketing campaign directed at Salesforce.com’s clients to encourage them to migrate to Zoho CRM’s platform, promising them 80% savings in CRM-costs.

To follow up the story, we asked Zoho Director of Marketing Rodrigo Vaca (follow him on Twitter) to shed some light on the background of Zwitch. Although he refused to give us the exact number of customers Zoho has successfully lured since the campaign went live on July 21, the director assured us that Zoho has “aggressive investment and growth plans for the CRM arena”.

• What makes Salesforce clients so special that a dedicated program was designed to lure them to Zoho’s platform?
  
• From our point of view, two things make Salesforce customers ’special’ for this kind of a program. Firstly that they are already familiar with the SaaS model, and most importantly that they are paying an exorbitant amount of money for functionality they could get at a much better value.
  When you look at Salesforce’s installed base, their customers spend on average north of $18,000 a year on their CRM with Salesforce. In these uncertain financial times, we know they can get a much better deal: not only get a better price, but the same functionality and even more.

• Do you plan to go on designing similar programs targeting other CRM providers’ client base? If public, who’s next?
• Sure, we plan to do this in the future as well – not only Salesforce in the CRM space and not only for CRM – but for other Zoho products in general as well.

• How many new clients do you expect from the Zwitch program? Now that the program is live for more than a week, does Zwitch seem to meet the expectations?
• We are so far pleased with the performance. But remember our Zwitch program is of course a means to the end, not the end itself.

• The comparison highlighted in the press release compares Zoho’s Professional Edition with Salesforce’s Professional package. Are the two packages 100% equal in functionality?
• We believe that for the most part, both editions equally address the CRM needs customers have.

• Is Zoho CRM able to provide all the functionality offered by higher level Salesforce packages? Is Zoho’s Enterprise package equal to Salesforce’s Enterprise package? What about Salesforce.com’s Unlimited package?
• It is dangerous to compare based solely on names. That’s why we invite our customers to make a list of the current, and potential future requirements, and then see what edition fits them the best. But perhaps the most important part is: what good is it to have the most obscure CRM report, when you’re not covering in the basics?
  The recent Zoho CRM + Mail integration demonstrates this well. Not every salesperson has the need for complex bells and whistles that high-end (read: expensive) CRM providers offer to justify their prices, but every salesperson out there needs to have a easy-to-use CRM+Mail integration story.

• Do you consider individual pricing, individual product development or customization when talking to potential new clients, who came from Salesforce?
• Our CRM product directly addresses the needs that most customers have when “zwitching” from Salesforce.com. We also have a network of CRM professionals who provide customization services for those customers that might need some help. That said, we pride ourselves in being flexible and striving to meet our customers’ needs.

• How high is Zoho CRM priorized among other Zoho products concerning development?
• Right at the top. CRM is a very important space for us. Zoho CRM is one of our products with the most history and where we have invested the most for a long time. It also generates a big percentage of our revenue. You can be sure we are fully committed to the CRM space.
  

Earlier: Zwitch: Zoho luring Salesforce clients full throttle

Salesforce

Salesforce is a listed (NYSE:CRM) on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor. According to the company, Salesforce is market leading among on-demand CRM providers. In particular, Salesforce.com is involved in offering Cloud Computing services to industries and businesses of all sizes. The company uses Cloud Computing to give its customers access to online software, with minor implementation and no on-premise installation or maintenance of software or physical servers.

Salesforce offers 4 editions of its CRM solution ranging in price from $9/user/month (Group package) to $250/user/month (Unlimited package). For a full edition comparison chart, click here.

Salesforce has garnered and continues to collect several awards, most recently (as of Aug, 2009) Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud was named a winner in Software as a Service and Cloud Computing category at the 2009 Product Innovation Award. For a list of the company’s awards visit this site.
<a href=”http://finance.yahoo.com” mce_href=”http://finance.yahoo.com”>Yahoo! Finance</a><br/><a href=”http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM/” mce_href=”http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM/”>Quote for CRM/</a>

According to Wikinvest, Salesforce.com derived 91.4% of its 2008 revenue from subscription and support fees associated with cloud services. Salesforce.com has experienced a significant rise in customers with its 2009 customer base at 55,400 or a 35% increase from 41,000 in 2008. In addition, Salesforce.com customers are relatively evenly split across small business (less than 200 employees), medium sized businesses (200 employees to $1B in revenue) and large businesses (greater than $1B in revenues)

Founded in 1999 by former Oracle exec Marc Benioff, the San Francisco based Salesforce went public in 2004. Its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API and its AppExchange directory of on-demand applications pioneered in the development of enterprise platforms.

Salesforce has currently ~2,600 employees, some 55,000+ customers, over 900,000 subscribers and an estimated value of $110m.

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Executive Team

The executive management team at salesforce.com is comprised of:

• Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO
• Parker Harris, Executive Vice President, Technology
• George Hu, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Alliances
• Kenneth I. Juster, Executive Vice President, Law, Policy, and Corporate Strategy
• Graham Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
• Jim Steele, President, Worldwide Sales and Chief Customer Officer
• Polly Sumner, President, Global Services and Chief Adoption Officer
• Frank van Veenendaal, President, Worldwide Sales and Chief Sales Officer

The new CRM application runs as a Java program under i OS, delivers Web- and Windows-based UIs, and provides close integration with the DB2 for i (DB2/400) database, as well as other Infor ERP applications. Instead of adapting the established Epiphany CRM application to run under the i OS platform, a new, fresh approach was taken, developed to benefit the company’s unique customer segment. Infor hopes that the fact that CRM i Edition was built specifically for i OS will mean a lot to those who rely on the platform to run critical business processes.

“Infor CRM i Edition helps our System i customers leverage their ERP data with new capabilities that will help them increase sales revenue, reduce sales costs, expand data visibility, enhance forecast accuracy, and improve customer service,” Kevin Piotrowski, Infor’s director of System i solution marketing was quoted as saying. “Providing innovation and support to our large installed base of System i customers is an important priority and commitment for Infor and a major factor behind our recent establishment of a business unit dedicated to our worldwide base of customers who use IBM System i,” he added.

Infor has been the owner of the System i industry’s largest ERP customer base since 2006, when a string of mergers has led the company to acquire SSA Global for $1.6 billion. At the moment Infor boasts with over 14,000 unique clients. Despite the solid client base, some experts have doubted that Infor would continue to innovate on the i OS platform and said that, the company opted to using maintenance revenue as a cash cow in the future.

Sceptics proved wrong in February, 2009, when Infor announced the launch of its dedicated System i division, headed by Mark Wright, to show commitment to further developments. Wright spent 18 years at IBM and his role as senior vice president and general manager for the IBM System i organization was to be responsible for strategic direction and leadership of all System i-based sales, pre-sales, product management, product development, and marketing, as well as working with Infor’s channel partners who sell and service software for the platform.

“Infor remains committed to the IBM System i platform, the continued development of our System i-based products and elevating service and support for these customers around the world,” corporate senior vice president Greg Corgan, said at the time. “In his role as general manager, Mark will work with IBM and our new System i team to drive product strategy and innovation, foster a more collaborative approach within the System i customer base, and provide greater overall value to customers.”

Infor CRM i Edition is the first full application launched by the department established in February. As Kevin Piotrowski, director of System i solution marketing for Infor put it, “Infor CRM i Edition is a “net new” application that was written from scratch using the Infor Development Framework (IDF), a development tool specifically for writing IBM i OS (i5/OS and OS/400) applications.

Infor CRM i Edition is already available. Pricing is dependent on the number of users and other factors. A license for an implementation for 10 to 20 named users would cost between $15,000 and $30,000.

Quickbooks is considered the #1 financial software used by US small and medium sized businesses. The new feature lets SprixCRM users to easily migrate their data between the two applications in both directions, to design and implement highly targeted and efficient marketing campaigns.

“This is an extremely powerful sales and marketing tool, especially for small businesses, as it provides a comprehensive view of customers’ overall health in terms of the relevant key indicators, without the significant capital investment and user training typically associated with alternative, custom IT solutions,” Jelinek was quoted as saying. “What’s more, since the system operates real-time, deviations in the purchasing behaviors of customers can be spotted and addressed immediately. In the proactive mode, customer trends can be identified and marketing campaigns developed to capitalize on areas of anticipated customer interest and growth potential, since SprinxCRM QuickBooks(R) Connector captures historical sales data alongside current activity,” Jelinek added.

Sprinx Systems, the developer and maintainer of Sprinx CRM was founded in the Czech Republic back in 1996. Currently they have offices in three major US cities: Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.

Sprinx Systems’ latest product announcement was the launch of its SprinxCRM Mobile for Windows Mobile earlier this year.

Although the CRM sector, and, hosted CRM services are reported to grow for the fifth consecutive years, despite all financial difficulties elsewhere (well, almost everywhere), competition amongst CRM service providers appear to get harsher and harsher as time goes by.

The above is especially true for smaller companies, as they need rather aggressive marketing (dynamic, and to the point as they usually put it), to stay in the ring. With its latest, Zwitch campaign, Zoho appears to be a poster child of aggressively expanding and rapidly growing companies, albeit Zoho is not so tiny anymore: its office suit has reached its landmark one millionth user more than a year ago.

Although Zoho might not be a newbie with its office suite applications, its ~380k unique visitors in May, 2009 make Salesforce look like a real CRM behemoth with its ~1.1m uniques (both figures are based on compete.com data). Especially considering that, CRM is just a very tiny part of Zoho’s application package, which includes a project manager, a calendar, an email, a wiki interface and many other features.

Okay, so, what’s the juicy offer Zoho is trying to lure Salesforce clients with?

Free, no-obligation assessment with a Zoho CRM specialist to evaluate needs and confirm Zoho CRM will provide benefits and functionality that are equal, or superior, to what they currently have with Salesforce.com;

Free data migration services;

A free, no-commitment, 15-day trial period for new users to try Zoho CRM with the data migrated from Salesforce.com, in order to confirm their decision to switch to Zoho CRM; and

Once a customer decides to switch to Zoho, a credit on their account for their time remaining on the Salesforce.com contract (up to six months).

A free data migration service seems pretty basic when you plan to lay your hands on your competitors’ clients: other than that there’s not much plus to it: services are equal, a trial period is usually offered to new customers as well (Salesforce, for that matter is offering a 30-day free trial for all new members), and offsetting the costs for the remainder of the Salesforce.com contract is also a minimum requirement if you are so directly targeting someone else’s loyal customers.

So finally, it all boils down to the question of price.

80%+ Savings of your CRM expenses, Zoho claims.

Which is true. Well, almost precisely.

It is pretty clear that, Zoho is a lot cheaper than Salesforce is. The 80% calculation is based on comparing two (almost random) packages: The cheaper package of Zoho ($12 per user per month) and the second chepest (Professional) package of Salesforce ($65 per user per month).

While Salesforce’s costs can be much higher than that (its Unlimited package costs $250 per user per month), and Zoho’s Enterprise Edition costs also twice as much as the one in the example, it is really difficult to match the exact functionality that are included in these packages to see the real difference in pricing.

And, another question remains: all CRM providers claim that the investment in their CRM applications, systems and strategies will pay off if used correctly. I was wondering that if this is the case, it may be worth investing a little more.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Developed for the OSX environment, Elements CRM provides help in managing contacts, clients, sales, inventory, products, documents and other data associated with customer support and customer satisfaction.

To ensure data security and protection all data is stored in “the cloud” (ie. on servers far away from the end user) rather than individual computers.

“Elements CRM builds on 5 years of technology and innovation with hundreds of refinements, providing an even more reliable and robust application than before,” the company said in a statement concerning the new release.

Amongst the new features available are analytics charts, a set-up wizard, PayPal integration, increased international support, asset management and a panoramic sales overview.

“We’ve listened to our customer’s suggestions and have worked hard to deliver those requests,” said Dale Jensen, Ntractive Co-Founder and CEO. “These changes represent a major milestone in the ongoing evolution of Elements CRM,” he added.

A free trial aside, Ntractive Elements CRM 2.0 costs $70 per user per month, and requires at least the 10.4.11 version of OSX.