Saleforce is smart to jump in with their “gateway-drug” pricing for core Contact Management. Their new offering targets a universal issue – organizing your rolodex – and markets to those who might not think they want the bells, whistles and complexities of Salesforce’s full product.
SugarCRM, and others in the space – (Act!, GoldMine) – are foolish to have allowed Salesforce first-mover advantage on this front. They’ll be more foolish still not to counter.
I call out SugarCRM as the base price-point of their very-capable platform is $0; they could offer (and should have been offering) core Contact Management at even less than $9 / user / month that Salesforce offers. Their product does Contact Management well – as they’ll tell you, completely devoid of sexiness (and Sales Reps appreciate sexy) – and their licensing flexibility is very business-friendly.
Upselling opportunities from providing core Contact Management are myriad:
- Initial installation and configuration work
- Moving all “siloed” Contact information (FileMaker, Act!, spreadsheets, other custom databases) into the one new centralized Contact Manager
- Hooks into your company’s web site, Facebook pages, twitter feeds and other marketing efforts
And Contact Management certainly is the gateway drug to additional CRM and SFA wants: once you have your base rolodex setup well, organizations will want to take advantage of simple ways to actually manage the communications with those contacts, track activities around them, and report on which of their contacts and activities around those are actually producing positive results for their organization.
If SugarCRM isn’t ready to take on this kind of market with their Services teams, it’s a great opportunity for 3rd-parties to come in and do it using Sugar’s own open source platform.
