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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Benefits of Saas Softwares for Businesses

Complete CRM Implementation guide

If you are a Sales Manager having a team of Sales reps working under you. Very soon you would realize, you are unable to get any meaningful insights out of your Sales Deal tracker Excel sheet.

You might be already facing various problems like the below ones:

5 features to look before buying a Sales CRM

Very often CEOs and CMOs of startups who are searching for a CRM for their Sales Team find themselves in a confused state. With numerous CRM applications available in the market, they are in a dilemma to choose from various available options.

To decide which CRM is the best for you, you need to list down the functionalities you expect from a CRM system. After my interaction with multiple people in sales on LinkedIn, I found a number of things which are being expected from a CRM.

Benefits of using a CRM Software

In the current fast paced business environment, a good CRM software plays a critical role in the growth story of an organization poised for hyper growth. In this post, Let us learn about 5 Key Benefits of using a CRM Software for your business.

1. Better Customer Segmentation and Personalization:

CRM Software helps you centralize your data by bringing all the contact information into one single platform. With all the data in a single place, you are now more equipped to segment your contacts effectively. 

With better segmentation, your communication with your contacts are now more personalized. This ultimately helps the organization improve conversion rate thus helping reduce sales cycle duration and increase revenue.

2. Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention:

Overtime, the CRM Software becomes a repository of your interaction with your customers from multiple sources such as past Email communication, Chat conversations, past Incident history, Interests, past Purchase history, etc. This data helps your Sales, Marketing and Service teams better serve the contact so that they can provide them more contextual solution to their problems. This helps improve customer satisfaction ultimately helping increase customer retention. 

More satisfied and happy the customers are, more are the chances of them referring your products and services within their networks, which ultimately increases your business prospects. Remember that a prospect is 20x more likely to buy a product or service from you if it is recommended by one of their friends. Your satisfied customers become your product evangelist and become your free sales army advertising about your products and services with free word of mouth marketing.

3. Automation of key Business Processes:

There are many business processes performed by Sales, Marketing and Services teams. Some of the commonly expected business processes are listed below.

• Sales: Lead Management, Account Management, Cross Selling, Up selling, Quote Management, Sales Activity Management, Invoicing, Report & Sales Analytics, etc.

• Marketing: Customer Segmentation, Campaign Management, Activity based workflow Management, Reports and Marketing Analytics, etc.

• Service: Request Tracking, Ticket Assignment, Knowledge base Management, Chat bot, Performance Reports, etc.

A Good CRM Software is equipped to automate all of the common business processes. This can significantly bring down the time taken to do the same tasks manually. Now, the team can achieve more in lesser amount of time.

4. Productivity Improvement of Sales, Marketing and Service Teams.

With the help of a CRM Software, your team members in Sales, Marketing and Service teams would now spend lesser time on data entry and operational tasks. This would help them focus on more important tasks. 

• Sales team can spend more time interacting with customers and closing deals rather than spending time scrambling through multiple mail chains and their rolodex. 
• Marketing team can focus on increasing customer engagement with more personalization instead of working on low ROI marketing techniques which is usually the case in absence of any organized data about contacts. 
• Service team can now focus on solving more complex customer issues rather than spending time on smaller repetitive queries whose resolution response can be automated.

5. Real Time Reports and Analytics

One of the primary reason why businesses fail is because they fail to take right corrective action at the right time. This usually happens when the leaders do not get timely insights on the whereabouts of their business and the KPIs which decides the fate of their business. 

In conventional organizations, they still tend to rely on periodic (Quarterly, Monthly or Weekly) reports prepared manually by an Analyst in their team. Rarely do they realize that by the time they would uncover certain issue in the numbers, the data would be stale by that time. 

Modern businesses need fast paced solutions to keep tab on their numbers in real time. Modern Cloud based CRM Software helps them achieve that by providing real time reports and analytics so that they can keep track of the status of their business on real time and take strategic action instantly to meet their business objectives.

I hope you liked reading this post. Feel free to share the post if you found it useful. 

Calculate your budget for buying a Sales CRM Software

Have you been lately trying to finalize a CRM software for your team but unable to figure out how much should you be spending for CRM?

As Businesses differ in size and type of deal value they deal in, It is complex for you to figure out the exact numeric estimate of how much of your allocated budget you must spend for taking up a CRM. Market is filled with CRM which charges from 9 USD per month per user to 500 USD per month per user based on the feature complexity of the Software and Value add provided by the service as per the needs of the Sales Team.

But How much should you as a Sales Manager be allocating your budget for CRM Implementation within your organization?

The answer is difficult and complex! 

But Let us try to find a simple solution to it.

Get an Estimate of Cost incurred by Sales Executive doing Non-revenue generating task:

• Get an estimated figure of the amount you spend paying your Sales Executive's Annual Salary.
• With that, try to find your hourly cost rate of your executives.
• Guess the average amount of time each Sales team member spends in a day doing manual entry of his sales figures into an Excel file to be shared to his Manager or to Reporting analyst who will consolidate it further for the whole team. This could be roughly around 30 minutes a day out of 8 working hours of the resource.
• Guess the average amount of time each Sales team member spends in a day trying to search or recall or figure out some of the past conversation history with some Client documented in some random email or document which is important for his follow up call. This could again be roughly around 30 minutes to 1 hour per day.
• Sum up both the time.

Get an Estimate of Cost incurred by Reporting Analysts doing Non-revenue generating tasks:

• Sales Reporting Analysts doing the task of Reporting and Measurement Analyst is redundant and detrimental for their career. Most of the time these resources are over burdened with the dirty work of following up with each sales executive and getting the sales figures, plugging it in spreadsheet application and drawing pivot tables, bar charts, pie charts, line chart etc and prepare a dashboard for the Senior Management. 
• By the time Analysts complete this task for a particular week, the next week very soon arrives and his task keeps repeating week over week without an end. This is unproductive since Sales Analysts should be spending time trying to get important insights from Sales numbers which can help them beat revenue targets instead of trying to become a data gathering guy of the Sales Team.
• Now get an estimated figure of the Salary you pay to your Sales Reporting Analyst annually.
• Note: Do this step only if your team's sales analyst is involved with the above non-revenue generating activities. If your Sales Analyst is involved with other productive work, you may skip this step, or try to find the hours spent by him doing these non-productive tasks and get estimated Salary getting spend on that part.

Get the Total Estimate:

Total Yearly CRM Budget = (Annual Salary of Sales Executive * (Total Time Spent per day doing Unproductive work/ 8 hours per day) *  Total Number of Sales Executives in team) + (Annual Salary of Reporting Analysts * Total Number of Reporting Analysts in your team)

The above amount would be the yearly estimate of how much should you be spending on your CRM which is going waste in the Salary of resources doing non-revenue generating tasks.

How much should you be spending monthly per sales staff?

CRM Budget per User per Month = Total Yearly CRM Budget / (12 Months * Total Number of Sales Executives) 

This figure would give you a rough estimate of how much should you be ideally spending per team member on a CRM.

Let me know your thoughts on this.