CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management, a methodical approach for handling interactions between your company and its customers. A robust CRM system is an indispensable tool for developing and fostering relationships with current and potential clients. Selecting the right CRM can help boost a growing business to the next tier of success.
The key to successful CRM implementation is adoption. How easy is it for your employees to pick up and use? A slow, clunky interface can lead to people in your organization opting to ignore your pricey, new CRM software entirely! In fact, low adoption rates are the primary cause of CRM implementation failure. Ease-of-use should be the first thing you consider before forking out the dough for a fancy CRM solution with a million gadgets and gears; what’s the point of a tool that nobody knows how to use?
You should always keep these 3 things in mind when shopping for the right CRM solution for your business: customization, integration, and ease of implementation. Here we’ll be comparing how the two most popular CRM solutions, Acumatica and Salesforce, perform regarding those three key points.
1. Customization
Salesforce – Salesforce is sometimes said to have the more aesthetically pleasing user interface and customization is slightly simpler for users. Its permissions systems can be time-consuming, requiring administrator intervention for granting permissions and providing definitions for just about everything. Salesforce makes reporting easy, allowing for the conversion of reports into performance indicators and key analytics. User dashboards can also be set up by role or by user.
Acumatica – Acumatica makes it possible for users to design custom dashboards for each individual role. For example, a sales manager is responsible for monitoring company sales in real-time so their dashboard could be customized to allow for immediate access to sales data. Sales representatives would need a custom dashboard for tracking sales leads and potential business opportunities.
2. Integration
Salesforce – Salesforce’s greatest advantage is its AppExchange platform. Salesforce’s considerable market share has attracted a large number of app developers to its AppExchange platform; the amount of integrations and apps custom-made for Salesforce is massive. However, vanilla Salesforce is essentially a basic CRM tool. To unlock the full potential of Salesforce, you’ll need to dedicate extra time and money looking into and purchasing the right apps and integrations for your business’ needs.
Acumatica – Acumatica is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution that was designed from the ground up with CRM tools. Unlike its many ERP competitors, CRM is not a module designed as an afterthought. Acumatica is equipped with a suite of tools that are made to ensure marketing, sales-to-delivery, quoting, customer information, and post-sales support is always accurate and up-to-date.
Acumatica also consolidates all customer records into a single, unified database. This allows each and every member of your team to access to all invoices, support cases, and quotes.
3. Ease of Implementation
Salesforce – Salesforce is a great solution for big companies with large budgets. Salesforce can fulfill the complex integration needs of large, well-established businesses that can afford to spend some extra money to customize their CRM solution with integrations and apps. Small- to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) may find Salesforce difficult to implement. It requires an experienced and dedicated admin which can take time to find and can be costly to keep on payroll.
Acumatica – Conversely, Acumatica is an infinitely scalable ERP solution that is suitable for virtually all businesses, regardless of size and company-specific needs. Feedback from sales teams shows that they frequently find Acumatica much easier to use and integrate into their daily work. Both Salesforce and Acumatica are cloud-based, but only Acumatica provides a true all-inclusive cloud solution.
Are you in the market for a CRM for your business? ASC can help. We are an ERP and CRM consultant based in Solana Beach with years of industry experience in CRM consulting and implementation all across the United states.