“Would this be an Alternative to Salesforce?” is a question I am often asked about Profit Pro CRM.

Salesforce and Profit Pro CRM are no comparison, even though people would use them for the same purpose in their businesses. I’m certainly not about to knock a good product like Salesforce, because it does a fantastic job for the right business.

Most small business owners, however, are not the right fit for Salesforce. Having said that, it does offer a small business system that can be a very good system. Salesforce is a huge system and, in my mind, a system for huge companies. That’s just an opinion, and that’s what I’ve found.

First of all, when you are looking for a CRM, choose one that will show you the money, the profits, the leaks in your business. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Let me tell you something about CRMs in general. When you purchase a CRM, typically it is an empty shell…until you do additional programming so that it will give you the data you need to “show you the money”.  The initial offer cost-wise seems quite low, but then once you hire a programmer (if you do) or spend the time programming it yourself, you end up having a much more costly system than the original cost. This is probably the first step that business owners do not realize. Or perhaps they realize it, but do not know there is an alternative.

The second thing that happens then once the programming is done (if it’s done), is that you end up having a lot of extra bells and whistles. Bells and whistles can get complicated. What happens when something is too complicated? You probably guessed it, it doesn’t get used as it should.

So really, a difference between Salesforce and Profit Pro CRM is that when you subscribe to the Profit Pro CRM service, you will have the data necessary to help you make your sales and marketing decisions without extra programming required. Most of our customers do not buy additional programming because the analytics they need are included. There are some who wish for more, and we contract for that, but for the most part, you have a very ready-to-use program that is simple and quick to implement. By simple, I mean that most training sessions for the salespeople lasts about half an hour, and for the administrator of the account it probably last an hour with followup calls about a week later, a month later and then a couple months down the road to help go through reports. This means that within half an hour, most of your people are using the system.

Before I forget, I mentioned data.  What is the data you get as a subscriber to the system? Here’s a downloadable PDF that shows many of the key numbers necessary to grow your business. Profit Pro CRM includes all of that plus more.

Why is all this lead, sales and marketing data and analysis included as part of the subscription? Simply put, it was the driving force behind the creation of this. We were a roofing and remodeling company, and we were spending a lot of money on advertising and had salespeople. We were tracking all the sales and marketing with pencil and paper because there was no program available to do it for us without us having to spend another $30-50,000 on programming, and not only was it time-consuming, but it was expensive to hire the personnel to do that, and by the time we got the monthly reports, they were obsolete anyhow. Because of all that, we created a system that would give us the key data necessary for being able to tell whether or not our marketing and salespeople were working for us. All of this then morphed into a full system that many different businesses could benefit from as well, so we took it to market.

One of the key elements we keep in mind when adding anything to the system is, “Is this necessary to business growth, and will it lend itself to complicating the system in place?”  We want to keep it simple so that it will be used.  You know, the ol’ KISS method…Keep It Simple, Sam!