September 2, 2005

CRM Choice; Salesforce.com vs Entellium

CRM provider, Entellium is touting a customer "win" taken from Salesforce.com. Keep in mind that the product you buy must be the one for YOUR business, so Salesforce.com might be for you. However, it's worth noting the decision making process, Prepared Response, Inc., a developer of emergency response solutions for the public and private sector went through.

Some comments were:

"User adoption was a key decision factor for us," said Jim Finnell, CEO of Prepared Response. "Salesforce.com required much more from our users to accomplish everyday activity - the learning curve was steeper because there were more screens and tabs to have to learn. The team finds Entellium far more intuitive so it's easier for them to put data into the system, which makes a huge difference to the accuracy of our reports."

"The right CRM solution had to support different sales processes for the types of customers we sell to, and allow us to have different customer service level capabilities as well," said Finnell. "Our past experience with Salesforce.com didn't give us the ability to have true multiple sales or service processes - they handle it more by labeling, rather than having different business rules and activities or task sets for each stage in the sale. Their approach left our managers having to compromise on a single process. Entellium truly gives department managers the ability to design the process that works for their specific type of customer so they feel independently accountable and successful, but I get the information I need all rolled up into one view. With Entellium, everyone was satisfied because the flexibility was there."

If you visit Salesforce.com they will have many satisfied customers, I'm sure. It's good to read these competing customer stories to give you a better idea of what questions to ask a CRM vendor.

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