Difference between Cloud CRM vs Self Hosted CRM

What is a Cloud CRM?

Cloud CRM is the CRM software that is deployed on the CRM vendor’s cloud infrastructure and is available for use to you from the public internet. You can use cloud CRM application from any place, any time, and any device.

In this case, the customer only pays for the subscription cost of using the application while the infrastructure, enhancements, upgrades, deployments, as well as backups, are taken care of by the CRM service provider (also called CRM vendor).

In case you are looking for Cloud CRM, you may check out our CRM 

ToolsonCloud Sales CRM, Sign up for a free trial and instantly experience yourself

 

What is a Self Hosted CRM?

Self Hosted CRM is usually installed on a company's own server infrastructure and is available only on the organization’s network unless they have hosted it on a server accessible from the public internet. 

Usually, in the case of self-hosted CRM, the customer buys the complete CRM solution and installs it on their own server. In this case, the customer bears the cost and responsibilities of maintaining the server infrastructure as well as doing CRM maintenance tasks such as software upgrades or enhancement. 

Difference between Cloud CRM vs Self Hosted CRM?

1. Accessibility

Cloud CRM being on the cloud servers is accessible over the public internet, so we need not worry about being in an office network with a VPN connected device. It can be accessed from any place and any device, 24x7.

Self Hosted CRMs are usually hosted on a private local computer or a server. It requires you to keep the server always up and running in order to access it anytime. Since the local computer may not be accessible over the public internet, you might be required to create a VPN connection from your device to your office network in order to access it from outside the office.

2. Capital Expenditure vs Operational Expenditure.

Cloud CRM providers mostly charge a minimal monthly subscription fee which becomes your operational expenditure. It doesn’t require you to spend any upfront capital investment for implementing a CRM. This converts your capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX).

Self Hosted CRM comes with a huge capital expenditure cost in the beginning since you may be required to buy the hardware infrastructure required to install the CRM. This is usually on top of the usual license fees you pay to buy a self-hosted CRM. In addition to that, you may be required to invest in the operational expenditure of running and maintaining the application in terms of the server running cost and IT staff cost for CRM administration.

3. Software Maintenance & Upgrades

In cloud CRM, the software upgrade or patch installation for bug fixes is taken care of by the CRM service providers. This takes off the workload of the customers who can focus on their core business activities. 

In self-hosted CRM, the software upgrade is usually released by the service provider but installing the upgrade or patch becomes the responsibility of the customer or the CRM implementation partner appointed by the customer. This always adds up to the cost for customers and affects their work due to application downtime. 

In the case of self-hosted CRM, sometimes the data of the customers may result in incompatibility with the upgrade or patch provided by the software provider. This may cause issues with CRM usage and may be required to be fixed manually by the customer. But in the case of Cloud CRM, this responsibility is taken care of by the vendor.

4. Latest Market standard features

Cloud CRM vendors try to stay up to date with the latest trending technologies in the sales and marketing stack and keep improving their software. This ensures the software is always equipped with all the latest features as per the latest market trend. This ensures the customer is not left behind due to technical incapabilities.

Self Hosted CRM tends to get lesser upgrades from the vendors constantly. If any new features are added, mostly they come up with an additional price tag in the form of software version upgrades which costs you a fee. If the CRM is not upgraded with the latest features, the customer is left with outdated CRM software which ends up wasting more time for their team instead of saving time.

If you are interested in trying out a cloud-based CRM, head on to our website and

Try ToolsonCloud Sales CRM today. It’s Free!

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How CRM helps in Deal Tracking?

Being a Sales Professional, when you are involved with multiple B2B sales deals, the only way you can taken them to closure is by regular and effective tracking. Most of the people start with tracking it within an excel workbook. But soon they realize they cannot make out anything of that data or are unable to find any relationship between multiple data sources and tables pilling up in so many excel based tracker files. 

Moreover, the time taken to do data entry of all those deal histories eats up more than 3-4 hrs of your productive work hours per day. 

What an ultimate way to dissipate your precious time! Isn't it?

 

How does a CRM help in Deal Tracking?

• You can get a view of all the active deals in various stages and view it visually to know where to act at that moment.

• Closing sales consistently requires that you build a steady pipeline of opportunities and follow up with the prospect for closure. CRM helps you visualize your pipeline in real-time so that you know where are the opportunities getting stuck and need your action.

• With you having a visual view of how your pipeline looks, you shall understand whether you need to put effort towards building your pipeline or need to spend some time on the the so many deals which are getting stuck in negotiation stage of the sales pipeline or if you need some more efforts on the multiple deals lying idle since you missed to follow up after the first contact you made.

• Better visibility on the Deal Value shall give you the insights to take call on which opportunity should be taken on higher priority than the one with lesser Deal value based on the way you operate your business. It differs from the way businesses operate, Some prefer to try the hard but big deal value opportunity, while some prefer trying to grab the low hanging fruits with low deal value first, so that the risk remains low since you iteratively get the revenues confirmed in small small deals.

• With the Estimated Deal close date, you get the visibility on which opportunity is taking more time that expected and where the deal should be expected to be at this point of time if the expected date of closure is within 1 week. Time is money, if you don't close the deal on time, some other vendor shall close the same deal and you shall lose it. Hence this shall keep your team informed on the expected timelines.

Hope you found this post useful, do comment below and let us know.

If you are a Toolsoncloud CRM user, do take some time to write or share about your experience on your blogs or social media handles.

If you are yet to try out ToolsonCloud CRM, what is it are you waiting for? Try Toolsoncloud Today!

What is Sales Velocity & How to calculate it?

What is Sales Velocity?

Sales velocity is one of the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of your sales performance. As the name suggests, it tells you how fast are you generating revenue. It denotes how fast your leads are moving through your opportunity pipeline to actual conversion.

Measuring Sales velocity can help you understand how fast is your sales process to close deals. How certain process change in your team is affecting your sales performance. It can also be used as a benchmarking median score for comparing individual reps' performance so that you can try to mentor your team accordingly.

How to calculate Sales Velocity?

To calculate Sales Velocity, you need to have 4 data handy:

1. No. of Deal Opportunities

2. Average Deal Value

3. Win Rate

4. Average Length of Sales Cycle

All the above data can be easily retrieved from your CRM. If you are not using a CRM yet for your sales. Do try ToolsonCloud Sales CRM today.

Once you are ready with the above data, you can just plug in the data to the formula of Sales Velocity.

Sales Velocity = (Opportunities x Deal Value x Win Rate) / (Length of Sales Cycle)

How to improve Sales Velocity?

As you can infer from the formula, there are 4 levers to improve your Sales Velocity. Try pulling any one lever and it can skyrocket your sales velocity.

• It can be increased by increasing your opportunity pipeline.
• It can be increased by increasing your deal size.
• It can also be increased if you try channelizing your efforts to increase your deal win rates.
• It can be increased if you try accelerating your sales cycle to reduce the sales process duration.

Hope you liked reading this post. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Btw, ToolsonCloud CRM can help you with sales team performance reports and metrics. Do check out sign up for your free ToolsonCloud CRM account and boost your sales productivity.

Free Sales Activity Tracking Excel Template

Dear Readers,  After a wonderful response on my last two post on various sales tracking excel templates, In this post I would like to share with you another excel template for Free. This template helps you track various sales activities or tasks which you would most probably have if you are following a well organized Sales process in your organization.

Free Contact Management Excel template

If you are looking for a Free excel template for managing your Contact List, you have come to the right place. In the previous post, we shared our free excel template for managing your sales leads. Some of you got interested on how they can manage their contact list in excel. Go ahead and read more on this.

You may need to manage your contact list at one place for various reasons

 

1. You may want to organize your customer contacts.
2. You may want to organize your prospects' contacts.
3. You may want to organize various contacts of your vendors
4. You may want to organize contacts of your affiliates, distributors and channel partners.

You can use this contact list template to manage all of them. Feel free to download this template from here:

[Download Link]

Link will open in Dropbox, you can click on download button to save it.

Though this contact list template can serve your purpose well if you are just looking for organizing contacts. However if you are looking for a solution to organize your complete sales process from organizing your contacts to tracking your leads, deals and sales tasks, then you should better go for a CRM.

If you are interested in trying out  a CRM for your business, Feel free to check ToolsonCloud CRM. It also comes with a free plan for startups. 

Anyways, let’s get back to the excel template which you just downloaded.

You may want to understand the terms and fields used in the template if you are new to this. Here is a quick overview of each of the fields to help you understand that.

• Company Name: Enter the name of your company beside this field

• Contact List Name:: Enter a unique name of the contact list to identify it from other lists. This is required if you are handling more than 1 contact list such as customer contact list, vendor contact list, prospect contact list. Giving a unique name will help you differentiate it from others.

• First Name: Enter the first name of the contact person.

• Last Name: Enter the last name of the contact person.

• Job Title: Use this column field to capture the job title or the professional position of the contact person in the organization where he works. For e.g. It can be CEO, Director, Sales Manager, HR Director, Procurement Manager, Assistant, Associate, etc.

• Organization: Use this column to enter the name of the company where the person works.

• Email: Enter the email address of the contact person under this column,

• Office Phone: You may use this field to capture the office phone of the contact. If you are selling to B2C customers, then this column may not be required in your context, so you can ignore  or remove this column.

• Mobile: Use this field to enter the personal mobile number of the contact. Try to keep mobile numbers and regular landline phone numbers in different columns for your ease. For. e.g. you may need to send bulk sms greetings or promotional messages on mobile phone. So if you keep both mobile number and landline phone number in same column, then it would become difficult for you to segregate later or may result in wastage of your SMS credits if you try to send SMS on landline phones.

• Address: Use this field to store the address of your contact. If required you may add an additional column for office address and residential address based on the context of your business requirement.

• Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter URLs: Use this field to store the social media urls of your contact. With time, business selling has evolved to be more of social selling. So it is high time you stay updated with what your customer has to say and believe by following on social media and engaging with them regularly in order to build a good customer relationship.

• Conversation Logs: This field has to be used to record your notes or conversation logs with your contacts. Try to put it along with a date stamp so that it is easy for you to remember the conversation in a timeline manner. I know this is a bit complex, that is also one of the reasons you should try out the contact management solution of ToolsonCloud CRM to better keep track of your conversations with your client in a more visual timeline way.

• Date Added: Enter the date when you first added the contact to this list. This helps you keep track of the age of your relationship with the contact.

• Added By: Enter the name of the person who added the contact in case you are having multiple users in your team who would be updating this sheet. 

I hope you will like using this template for managing your contacts. 

In case you are looking for a CRM solution to manage your contacts in a more streamlined manner, do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. Try it today, It’s Free!

Free Sales Lead Tracker Excel Template

Dear Reader, Greetings and welcome to ToolsonCloud Blog!

We have been listening to our reader's demands and many of you expressed interest in a Sales Lead Tracker template to organize your leads in excel. In this post we would like to share with you a universal sales lead tracker template prepared in excel. You can easily reuse it as per the sales process followed in your company.

How to capture leads and contacts from Website into CRM

If you have a website or a blog, sooner or later you will start getting enquiries from visitors who might be interested in the products or services you offer. If the enquiries are limited to a few per month, then probably it is manageable. However, once the enquiries start increasing you will soon realize that you are ending up doing a lot of copy paste work of the form data received from your website contact forms into an excel tracker manually.

Glossary of important Sales Terms

Hey folks, I keep hearing from newbie sales professionals that they get stunned hearing some new sales jargon every day and are sometimes left blank when they get asked about those from their bosses.

So, Here is the compilation of some Important Sales Acronyms that came to my mind instantly.

What is an Invoice and how to prepare one?

If you are a seller, you might often come across the term “Invoice”. If you are still unaware of it or have an iota of doubt on this topic, read on to know more.

How to get Organic leads using Social Media

A few months back, I along with my friends did a consulting project for a startup in order to get more lead inflows into their sales pipeline. In this post, I would like to share my experience as to how we did it and how you can also follow the same Lead Generation Strategy in order to develop your Lead Pipeline.

Attention Grabbing Advertising - Huawei Style

With so many similar products down in the market, it's difficult for Sales and Marketing Managers to grab customer's attention. Time demands innovative and attention-grabbing advertising approaches to get a share of customer's attention.

One such strategy can be learned from Huawei where it bumped in front of Apple store in Singapore and created an everlasting memory in the minds of the people there and everywhere in the world because of the news going viral.

Top 10 Sales Motivation Quotes of all time

Need some motivational pills for your team and yourself? Here you go! GET SUPERCHARGED!!!