Say you own a small or medium-sized business and you want to improve the efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts to prospective and current customers. Chances are you have been inundated with attractive offerings from main stream players such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Oracle who have targeted you as a prospective customer.

Despite the allure of going for a big name provider, it usually is not worth it for the SMB to sign up for an expensive CRM solution. The following four reasons detail the significant drawbacks of brand name CRM software:

1. These solutions do offer a dizzying array of functions, but they are built on complex platforms that make them difficult to use. Some providers have removed features in order to appeal to the SMB market, but this doesn’t change the underlying complex architecture and decreases the solution’s value.

2. You wouldn’t buy a fleet of 10 large delivery trucks for a tiny bakery business and you shouldn’t purchase brand-name CRM software that offers more functionality than you’ll ever need. Enterprise-level software is great for large and complex firms that are managing high transaction volumes and need to conduct business in multiple currencies and different languages. They  are designed to support a large number of users and to integrate with a host of other systems adding to the complexity.

3. There is comfort in buying a brand name, but it doesn’t always lead to results that effect the bottom line. A Merkle Group Inc. survey found 63 percent of CRM campaigns failed both the organization and the management that put the solution in place. The 352 executives in the survey all worked for $1 billion plus US-based companies.

4. As a SMB owner, you have consumers that choose to purchase your product or service in spite of brand name and possibly entrenched larger competitors. Why did they choose your firm? Maybe you offer custom services to fit individual customer needs? Is your support staff better trained, or perhaps you offer advanced high-level product training? Whatever the reasons are just remember they chose your firm and you shouldn’t overlook the smaller CRM players who can offer better service and value.

Software such as CRM is supposed to provide you with tools to engage a wide variety of stakeholders. It’s as simple as that. If you aren’t an enterprise-level firm then you don’t need an overly complex CRM solution. Touting a brand-name solution won’t help you win new customers or build partnerships; it will simply drain your budget and require too much training. You would be better served to focus on both short and long-term objectives and pick a solution that will help your business meet those objectives right out of the box.

About The Author

Larry Caretsky is President of Commence Corporation, a leading provider of online CRM software for small to mid-size businesses. Caretsky is considered an expert in the field and has written numerous white papers on the subject of CRM including S.T.E.P, a proven methodology for the successful implementation of CRM software and a e-book, Practices That Pay – Leveraging Information to Achieve Selling Results. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany and holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from Long Island University’s C.W. Post Center.