Many years ago, second-hand automobiles were called used cars. These days they are called pre-owned. In the same fashion, digital address books that were once called Contact Management applications now have a grand name of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.
In the beginning, contact management was a fairly simple affair. All the people that a salesperson would need to contact were listed alphabetically in a file of some sort. In a way, Rolodex was the first CRM application. With the advent of computers, the file simply became digital and morphed into a digital address book. The digital address books became more sophisticated over time. People could add notes against a contact and note down the contact’s birthday. They could consolidate all contacts from the same client under a “master” client or account record. They could note down what telephone conversation they had with a contact and when. In short, the contact management application became a repository of information and transaction history for sales and marketing professionals.
As salespeople acquired more electronic gadgets, and their bosses required more graphical reports of their activities, more and more features were slapped on to the contact management applications. The features included calendars and the ability to share them with colleagues. They also included features to keep track of possible opportunities for a salesperson and to track how well he capitalized on them. Of course, elaborate reporting features that would tell the boss how his salespeople did also made their way into the applications.
Somewhere along the way, they also acquired a new name – CRM. Today, any self-respecting sales professional uses a CRM application. For most part, CRM applications are not as popular with small businesses as they are with larger ones. Most small businesses can make do with Outlook’s Contacts. The more sophisticated users upgrade to Microsoft Office Small Business Contact Manager, GoldMine or ACT!. But not many need a full blown CRM application. Those who do, rarely bother because CRM applications from industry leaders Siebel and SalesForce.com cost thousands of dollars.
If you are small business with a one-person marketing crew and wished you could afford a state-of-the-art CRM application, you are in luck. SalesForce.com has a version just for you – SalesForce.com Personal Edition. SalesForce.com probably meant it to be a teaser edition that you could use to check out the application’s functionality before you decide to cough up big bucks. It is a terrific option and it is absolutely free. It is kind of difficult to find the link for it on SalesForce.com’s web site even if you go specifically looking for it. So here it is: http://www.salesforce.com/products/personal.jsp
Although Personal Edition is free, it is not a crippled, maimed, or a teaser edition that would ask you to upgrade at every button click. It does not limit how many contacts you can enter nor does it tell you upon clicking buttons that the feature is only available in paid editions. In fact, except for a few differences that I will go over in just a minute, it has all the functionality of the next edition that is one step up: Team Edition.
Team Edition comes with five licenses, as opposed to a single license for the Personal Edition, and also comes with five times the storage space. You can buy additional storage space with the Team Edition, but not with the Personal Edition. Of course, the Team Edition comes with support, whereas the free edition does not. Other than that, there is no significant difference between the two.
The Personal Edition gives you a single license. You can’t try to beat the system by opening two free accounts because your two users can’t collaborate. If you have the need to collaborate with your co-workers, you must upgrade to the Team edition and buy five licenses, whether you need them or not. The Personal Edition gives you 5MB of data storage. It may seem little, but it really is not. When I uploaded all my contacts, they used up only 3% of the system storage. The Personal Edition also gives you 5MB of document storage space, which may or may not be enough depending on what kind of documents you want to keep there. If you use it for storing contract templates and current documents, it probably is more than enough. Sales people are not supposed to have storage requirements like, say, photographers. But if you outgrow the 5MB, you can’t buy additional storage. Other than that, the Personal Edition is a full featured CRM product with outstanding reporting capabilities.
A very nice feature of SalesForce.com is desktop integration with Outlook and Microsoft Office. You can download the desktop clients and install them on your desktop. The Outlook client creates SalesForce folders in Outlook. Every time you start outlook, it synchronizes Outlook data with SalesForce.com calendar, tasks and contacts. Effectively, you have all your information in SalesForce.com available to you when you are not connected to the Internet.
Although, Personal Edition is not eligible for support, you may never need it. When you sign up, a representative calls you or e-mails you to find out if you have any problems and need help. The online help is excellent. You can even take online classes on-demand. They are free too.
It is easy to upgrade from your current contact management application. Personal Edition can import data in ACT!, GoldMine, Outlook, CSV files, and Excel file formats. That pretty much covers any contact management application you may have.
Notably, SalesForce.com Personal Edition does not have irritating advertisements of any kind. Except for an unobtrusive “Upgrade Now” link in a corner; your user experience is just like that of a person shelling out a thousand bucks a year. Yes, another minor inconvenience that you have to put up with is that if you send an e-mail through SalesForce.com Personal Edition, it appends a message that says “Powered by SalesForce.com” to the e-mail. (But that actually works quite well for me. People often treat it as a status symbol – somewhat akin to the “This message was sent from my BlackBerry” message that BlackBerry popularized. After all, if I use SalesForce.com, I must be in the big leagues!)
The only limitations of SalesForce.com, then, are:
- Storage space is not upgradeable
- Only one user license is permitted
These days, big software vendors are wooing small businesses in a big way. Microsoft Office Live and Google Applications for Your Domain have started providing respectable services for free. In fact, the paid editions of Microsoft Office Live have some CRM functionality built-in. It would be interesting to see if SalesForce.com does anything about the storage and licensing limitations to make their product more attractive to small businesses. I hope they do.
But even in its present form, SalesForce.com Personal Edition is a compelling option as long as you need only a single user license and you have a modest volume of CRM data.
So go ahead and sign up if it looks like this is for you!
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