I first heard about Zoho from a customer of ours who had hired an affordable offshore team to create a custom implementation (along with some n-tier middleware). He was more enthusiastic that he’d lucked out with his offshore development team, but as we discussed CRM aspects we agreed on a subject that had been bothering me for some time:
Salesforce is Overkill
By an unscientific estimate, I believe our org used about 20% of the functionality Salesforce has to offer (I’m not quite sure how to factor mission critical plugins into that equation). And we’re not the only ones. I see more and more articles each day about SFDC’s alienation of small businesses.
At the time of this writing (and prices do change) Salesforce had moved us into a Lightning Professional usage tier, at $75/user/month. The only value we were deriving from this tier (as opposed to the $25/u/mo Essentials) was the ability to customize page layouts, a developer sandbox, and premier support (which was excellent).
By comparison, Zoho was offers a near identical feature set at the Enterprise level for $35/month. Reducing our overhead by >50% is nothing to scoff at and warranted further investigation. Never one to fall victim the sunken cost fallacy, after about a week of aggressive research, I decided to move our org over to Zoho (the other serious consideration being SugarCRM, which just did not seem to be as mature a product).
To make the final call, I needed to answer some basic questions:
- Can mission critical functionality be replicated?
- Can existing data be imported with minimal losses?
- Can users continue on without balking even though the UI may be different?
- Can the migration take place with minimal effort on my/my team’s part (~1 week)?
- If all of the above holds true, can costs be reduced significantly enough to make the effort worthwhile?
In the end, the answer was yes to all of the above, and migration was completed successfully. In Part II of this series I’ll go over how Zoho was able to meet each criteria.