Limitations of SFA/contact management tools
My company provides lead generation and sales consulting services to
emerging technology companies. From a CRM perspective, it is a many-to-many
relationship among our customers and their prospects with multiple
cross-overs. Although Salesforce.com has a one-to-many architecture, I am
currently using its contact mgmt. and SFA functionalities, jury-rigging it to
meet our needs by naming each client campaign as an opportunity and
associating all activities and touches of the prospect to the opportunity
(rather than to the account). This method is database intensive, and I lose
the ability to use opportunity management as it was intended. Is there a
CRM tool that is based on a many-to-many architecture? I've seen CRM
software for manufacturers' but that is based more on hardgoods and
quotes, rather than services and leads. Your suggestion is much
appreciated.
You have run up against one of the customization limits of many of the small
market, hosted CRM solutions. To solve your problem correctly, you are
going to have to move up to a more robust CRM solution -- something like
Pivotal, E.piphany, Onyx, PeopleSoft, or SalesLogix. You need the ability to
define your data model and relationship rules. The work-arounds you
described can work for a while, but in the long run you will remain
disappointed and will likely not satisfy your firm's business goals.
This was first published in September 2003
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