How to Survive Without Salesforce as a Small Business

Salesforce is an important part of doing business, once you hit a certain scale. Even small and mid-sized businesses would benefit from its tool sets, but those tools come at a cost. For lean businesses, that cost is one that’s not affordable. Freemium applications exist, but often fall short of the tools required. True alternatives to Salesforce often focus on doing a few things very well, such as integration with Outlook or creating an affordable solution to IT.

As you scale, where and how you allocate your money makes a big difference.

Get Specific About What You Need

Salesforce’s cost isn’t high, nor is it particularly modest. At $25 for the basic package, you seemingly get a lot of value when it comes to lead tracking. That is, until you review the plan’s finer details.

For the price, you can utilize a lot of smaller services to fill in gaps. For example, if you’re not blasting thousands of emails each month, MailChimp can offer a free alternative to Salesforce for outreach. For the price, Microsoft Dynamics CRM also offers top notch reporting and automation that rivals what you get with basic Salesforce.

Integrate with Your Existing Services

Because Salesforce is the size that it is, it’s bound to integrate well with most major office applications. Outlook is a good example, where contact integration really paints a picture of the status of a deal. However, careful inbox management and some outside tools can help.

Oracle is designed to partner well with Outlook and is highly customizable. Synchronizing data for leads helps sales teams coordinate better. So, the key takeaway is to assess what your team might need.

You also need to look at the products your team uses to coordinate. If you’re primarily driven by Microsoft, like a large organization, then integration with Microsoft products puts some limitations on what you can do. Smaller organizations can utilize something like Google Apps to get started because they are cost effective, but the drawback is that they may not scale well into the future.

Manage Leads Better

Salesforce is very much the umbrella or shotgun approach, attempting to offer a fair price for many services. If what you really need is better lead management, then there are definitely options.

There are several applications offering a degree of lead scoring to try and indicate how warm a lead is. Many of these applications offer mobile sales tools as well, so professionals can provide detailed summaries of products out in the field for potential clients.

Visualization is also important. Managers often need to report on the progress of a deal in the works and don’t have time to consult a thread of emails for nuance. Something as simple as a timeline feature can be useful for providing that snapshot of progress.

Become a Better Task Manager

Another important component to Salesforce is its ability to provide task management. Once again, the benefit is in the single sign-in rather than the application. Simple to-do lists are done better via Google, Wunderlist, and a host of other applications. Company-wide work might be better suited to a system like Agile, which can use a number of applications built around its principles.

Final Thoughts

Salesforce offers the benefit of simplicity, but it’s hardly a behemoth doing everything right. For customer engagement, task management, and internal auditing, there are tools available to smaller businesses at a more affordable price.