The Savvy CIO

Some months ago we did a breakdown of the costs of Zimbra versus Microsoft Exchange. I’ve long been negative about the costs of Exchange. The price doesn’t scale down at all for small companies, and scales up far too quickly for larger ones. But the previous breakdown was a hypothetical scenario. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what we all do when making a purchasing decision. But now there’s some real life data to turn to.

The University of Pennsylvania runs both Exchange and Zimbra. They have nearly 1,000 users on Exchange and over 6,200 users on Zimbra, and the same technical support team takes care of both systems and their respective user bases.

My primary complaint with Exchange is how time-intensive and difficult it is to support and maintain. Support and maintenance are entirely hidden costs at the point of purchase, and many unsuspecting buyers have been lured in with steep license discounts only to discover the ongoing costs were far more than they bargained for.

The data from Penn agrees. For Penn, supporting an Exchange user is over 9 times more time consuming than supporting a Zimbra user.

For 1,000 users, Exchange requires 3.2 full-time equivalent staff members to support. With over 6,200 users, Zimbra requires 2.2 full-time staff members to report. That’s right, 33% less time spent on support for six times the users.

When Penn analyzed the total cost of ownership for Exchange and Zimbra (licensing, hardware, maintenance, support, etc.), Exchange came out at $7.50 per user. Zimbra was under half the cost at $3.00 per user.

Adam Preset, an IT technical director at Penn, discusses their deployment: read more »

It’s the classic CRM problem.

Management puts massive amounts of time, energy, money, resources and excitement into a new CRM system. They’re giddy with the possibilities of sales forecasting, reporting, customer satisfaction, and all sorts of information that will help marketing and sales to be more effective.

The big training and launch take place, there’s a flurry of activity…and a week later 20% of the sales reps aren’t even using the thing.

CRMs don’t work unless sales reps use them. And sales reps won’t use them unless there is something in it for them. Entering call reports at the end of each day doesn’t exactly get a sales rep fired up, and there’s no direct line between that thankless work and the next commission check.

When deploying a CRM, you need to keep your end users in mind.

The system has to be easy to use and valuable for reaching the goals of the reps (not just the goals of the company).

Here are some ways we’ve seen it done in our work with SugarCRM:

read more »

Every business person knows it is cheaper to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. Customer support is often thought of as a necessary cost of business, and a cost that grows as your business grows. But good customer support is also the lowest cost means available for gaining additional sales of any form.

To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.

A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.

Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support: read more »

Traditional email programs that are disconnected from everything are still the centerpiece of many a businesses’ communications. Each staff member has their own Outlook or Mac Mail or Thunderbird pulling email down from a server somewhere and storing all of their own email, contact information, company directory and calendar.

Everyone is on an email island.

Staff members have their own internal ecosystem (emails related to people related to appointments related to tasks), but there is only one way information comes in our out: through an email.

Usually staff members are also managing a separate “phone island” with contact phone numbers and voicemails completely disconnected from their email.

This is a fractured and frustrating setup.

Every person is managing two (phone and email) critical but separate communication islands. And those islands are separate from everyone else in the company as well.

There is a better way: moving email and phones from islands into a communication hub.

Here’s what I mean: read more »

Highland isn’t a software reseller shop. We do custom solutions.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM. read more »

Every business wants to sell more. The most common use for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is just that: to help sales.

This usage is so central that many systems and vendors have a unique name for it: Sales Force Automation system, or SFA for short. (Because technology always needs more acronyms.)

Here are five key ways a CRM (or SFA) can aid your sales staff in identifying, responding to and closing sales opportunities.

Gain Customer Insight

A CRM centralizes key customer information that helps sales identify when to act. Vehicle Specialties uses their CRM to show sales reps account revenue history for the past 24 months. With visibility into buying patterns, reps know when a particular account is becoming less active and can then reach out to identify and respond to a developing issue. read more »

There’s a logic often employed when launching a CRM: If you build it, they will use it. If you build it with a lot of features, they will use it a lot. If you build it capable of everything they could ever want or imagine, they will use it for everything they could ever want or imagine.

But it’s not true. Increasing the capabilities of your CRM at launch actually decreases the chances your staff will use the CRM.

So the one thing we tell every CRM client, whether they want to hear it or not, is less is more.

A CRM can do a lot of great things for your business, but only if people use it. Want to make sure no one uses your CRM? Load it up with so many expectations and features that everyone is completely overwhelmed.

Here’s a snippet of a CRM request we received a few months back: read more »

It’s easy to see CRM as the silver-bullet to solve a host of sales and support related problems: organizing and overseeing sales staff, centralizing company information, improving accuracy of forecasting and planning, among others.

Yet successfully deploying a CRM takes much more than just turning on the technology.

Without some foresight, care and planning, business leaders can actually sabotage their own CRM, dooming the project to poor acceptance and eventual failure.

The most common forms of sabotage?

read more »

We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
read more »

Data centers used to be the domain of huge online giants, like Google or eBay. But as accessibility has increased and prices decreased, the data center has become a viable alternative for small businesses who want to trade in the capital and maintenance costs of a server (and security, backups, etc.) for predictable monthly fees that cover hardware, maintenance and support.

How are small businesses using the data center to their advantage? read more »