Saleslogix CRM Software

One of my first Saleslogix prospects was a smallish middle market company that had an internal programming staff. At this time, Siebel was reacting to the emergence of this dedicated middle market solution by entering the middle market. They slashed the price to beat my quote. So, Siebel won the day.

18 Months later, I got a call from this former prospect asking if they could cut me a deal on Saleslogix. When I probed a little further, I uncovered that their developers had finally gotten around to making the necessary changes to the product only to find out that Siebel required some sort of SDK tool to make changes. When they asked how much that was, the answer came back $1 million.

The middle market is key to this industry because of it's size and potential, and Saleslogix has done a great job delivering the tools needed to solve middle market problems. Is it perfect? No, it is not. Let me run down some of the pros and cons I've experienced during my long relationship with Saleslogix CRM Software.

Saleslogix Pros

Price - Saleslogix is priced for the middle market and they don't need to put their business in jeopardy to sell it at a lower price too often.  There are cases made for its SaaS (software as a service) rivals that total cost of ownership is high. However, it's latest move to a .NET architecture is allowing them to deliver the software in multiple ways. The beauty of it is that customer will not lack the powerful customization they need, but will spend less time administering a remote workforce.

One the main things to keep in mind about price is this: if you are out to buy cheap software based on features, you will get cheap software with underdeveloped features. And most likely, you have decided to bypass the CRM planning process I recommend and do a bottom up approach. In effect, your new business strategy, if you have one, will be driven by a set of cheap, underdeveloped software features; most of which were dreamed up by a software developer.

Flexibility - Saleslogix CRM Software has always been extremely customizable. The internal customization has always been driven by scripting (Cypress Enable and then VBScript) but it always seemed to get the job done. For those hardcore developers out there, and there are some, there has always been an API, ActiveX controls could be integrated, .NET Forms were recently introduced, and version 7.2 has introduced a new .NET based architect for constructing very powerful web applications.

The most recent version now has disconnected web client users that synchronize when they are online which is much lower overhead than the current syncing environment. The direction they are headed is "develop once, deploy many" so development efforts for traditional clients can be deployed across not only the web, but mobile devices as well. This pretty exciting stuff for the middle market in my opinion.

Ease of Integration - Since Saleslogix CRM software runs atop SQL Server (and Oracle), it's fairly straight forward to integration other systems, such as accounting and ERP systems. While many of the die hard developers out there opt to write their own integration code, there are some really nice tools available that act as data pumps or business alerting systems.

The thing about Saleslogix CRM Software is that it runs on  a distributed database engine, which means that it synchronizes changes between the host, remote offices, and remote users. This requires certain data be in place for this to function properly. Therefore, any developer, or third party tool, must run all data through the Saleslogix OLE DB provider. The successful tools developer their own adaptors for Saleslogix which take care of some other eccentricities of Saleslogix as well. That makes it easier for client companies to put together simple integrations without the need of a consultant like me.

The Cons

Scalability - The product at this point is about to shed this con in my opinion. The technology is in place to make this software palatable by larger enterprises. However, before that can happen, the way the system and users are managed has to be totally overhauled.

Once an implementation gets into the hundreds of users, it becomes easy to see why this is a problem.  They've built in little utilities over the years to address some of these issues, but nothing comprehensive has been introduced. It's quite possible that Sage will keep this in the middle market because that's where they tend to operate. But even there, serious improvements could be introduced since the middle market tends to be fairly broad.

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