Replace Salesforce.com with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Lately we have been doing a bunch of projects around converting people from SFDC to hosted dynamics CRM. I asked our sales team to get with a few of the customers and find out the reasons people have been moving so we can better understand what is driving the decision. Here is the compiled list they came back with:

1. Microsoft / Outlook integration – This was by far the number one reason! Customers felt that even though there are some ways to work with Outlook and SFDC – it is not truly there. We even learned that if you have an email you want in CRM as well as Outlook and it has an attachment on that email, the attachment is not added into CRM. I don’t know about you, but my sales team has attachments on a large portion of emails and this would drive me nuts.

2. Total Cost of Ownership – This came out a number of different ways – bottom-line was that people using SFDC enterprise were happy at the lower cost per month for hosted seats, and people using SFDC professional were looking to move to enterprise for the workflow capabilities they were lacking. This was also expressed in the fact that there are more partners out there in the MS world thus keeping rates lower.

3. Choice of deployment options – OK this one is hung out there all the time and the truth is everyone that has moved from SFDC to us is still hosted – so maybe they will always stay in the cloud but like knowing they have the option if they choose. Maybe we will see this change going forward as the economy strengthens – who knows?

4. Highly customizable – This came out in two ways – first was the abilities to connect with other systems and second was around being able to use in-house .NET folks to extend the capabilities.

5. Simple pricing / No contracts – Folks were downright angry about getting locked into multiyear contracts. Many had wanted to decrease the user counts as they trimmed the workforce over the last year and got stuck paying for seats that weren’t used.

I’d also like to toot our horn a little as another thing we heard was “working with PowerObjects is great compared to our previous experience.” While this was not a reason they moved, they said having a strong partner to work with instead of the software publisher makes all the difference in the world. I guess I’ll chalk that up to when you do one thing and only one thing you get pretty good at it.  If anyone is interested in having us do a migration go here and fill out the form and mention SFDC migration in the comments – we recently launch a fixed fee migration package.