In the rush to move everything to “The Cloud” with the SaaS movement, are we fully considering the ramifications? Is it really the best move to put your clients’ private information in the cloud?

What is The Cloud and SaaS?

You’re hearing about it on blogs, in sales and marketing campaigns, and at the proverbial water cooler: a huge movement is underway with many products and services racing to “the Cloud”.

What’s the cloud? Basically, the term refers to cloud computing: the practice of accessing software and data through the Internet instead of from a local computer or server. Software as a Service (SaaS) is when the software you use to run your business exists “in the cloud” and is run by a service provider. With SaaS, you do not need to download, install or maintain the software – you just log in and work.

For example, Salesforce.com is a widely accepted powerhouse in the CRM industry – and it’s 100% SaaS. But at what cost?

Storm Clouds on the Horizon

In November 2007, many Salesforce customers faced the nightmare of having their customers’ contact info compromised when a phishing attack successfully hacked their servers and sent phishing emails and spam to those customers.

Another danger of SaaS is the risk of downtime. When a server goes down for a SaaS solution, it goes down for everyone on that service. In January 2009, thousands of Saleforce customers suffered the effects of a 40-minute collapse.

And what about the data? With Salesforce, although it’s internally stored in a relational database, you do not have direct access to it. You can request to receive it, but what you’ll get is a separate CSV file for each table or data type, and it’s left to you to figure out how to connect the relationships of the entities (e.g., which email history goes with which contact, at which account, etc.). And if you have customized your CRM solution at all, those data relationships are even more convoluted.

To SaaS or Not to Saas?

To be fair, these downsides and risks affect all SaaS solutions, not just Salesforce. And Salesforce is a fine company with good people, sound operational procedures, and certainly they’ve worked hard to guard against these risks in the future. There’s much to be learned and improved in the world of SaaS.

But given the track record of SaaS in general and the inherent risks involved, are you completely comfortable with having your clients’ private data in the cloud?

SugarCRM Offers a Choice

If you’re looking for a CRM (or thinking about making a change), you might want to consider SugarCRM as an alternative. SugarCRM offers you a choice: you can take advantage of the conveniences of a SaaS solution, or you can choose to host your own instance of the software locally – maintaining full control of the software and your relational database.

So with all these warning signs about SaaS, does that mean that SugarCRM’s Cloud option is a no-go? There are certainly pros and cons to weigh for each unique business solution, but it’s worth noting that even with SugarCRM’s cloud solution – unlike Salesforce.com’s – you have full, direct access to your relational database.

With the more flexible hosting services available with SugarCRM, businesses benefit from better performance, easier access for customization, and greater flexibility and peace of mind. No matter which SugarCRM solution you choose, you maintain control.

And that’s always good.

Combined with the new Summer 2011 (6.2) release of Sugar, many would maintain that it is currently the best support in the market.  But how does it compare with the original Sugar mobile CRM support?

• Mobile Lite is the new name for the pre-existing mobile support. Support for Android is now included but otherwise no new features have been added.
• Mobile Plus is now the newly re-branded Mobile Express platform acquired from iEnterprises.

And on another front, they spend more dollars executing email marketing campaigns. They’re using Constant Contact, Vertical Response, ExactTarget, or one of the other 50 email marketing programs to get the word out through their email campaigns. Again hoping that a visitor will convert by filling out a form and taking advantage of some new offer to become a hot lead.

“Be-Backs” and Website Window Shoppers

I first heard that term from my father, who by the way, was the quintessential salesman. Yes, he sold cars for a living. Used ones at that. And quite a few of them. I never saw him sporting the plaid sport coat and he hardly fit the stereotype but he did sell a lot of cars.

So who or what was a Be-Back? Well that was the guy who spent hours of time looking at a car and asking a lot of questions only to finish with “I’ll be back.” No name, no phone number, just I’ll be back. And in fact at the end of the day, the measure of success was oftentimes measured in the number, actually lack there of, of Be-Backs. And the problem with Be-Backs in the car business? More often than not, if that Be-Back did come back, you weren’t there.

So what is the point? Well most commercial websites have literally tons of Be-Backs. They’ll look today. Maybe again tomorrow, and even the day after. But they don’t fill out a form. They don’t become a “hot” lead. And without a lead, your sales rep has no one to call. And the part that’s tough to swallow is that you actually have a “warm” lead lurking out there. Lots of them.

Work The Math

Let’s say your website produces 100 hot leads per week. Or per month. Doesn’t matter. The average conversion rate for a well-oiled website optimized for conversions with a good offer supporting a strong value prop typically runs at about a 5-10% conversion rate. Other sites may run as low as 3-5%. Let’s further suppose that your close rate for those leads is, I don’t know, 30%? So that would mean 30 buyers.

Now what about that other 90+% of your website visitors? You know they’re looking for something you’ve got. And having a need is the strongest factor in qualifying any prospect. So for that 100 hot lead website, you also have 900 warm leads. Now they’re less qualified because that haven’t taken any other overt action than to just look and you still have to find some way to follow-up with them. But let’s say you have a way to contact half of them, and because they’re less qualified, your close rate is 3 times lower or just 10%. Multiply that out and you have the potential to increase your closed sales by 45 or 150%!!

How to Harvest Your Warm Leads

The trick here is being able to tie that visitor behavior to their identity and then alert your sales rep that they’ve gone warm. Clearly this doesn’t work if you have absolutely no previous identity information on the visitor or a way to find it but maybe you do…

So here’s the approach we take for our clients at ApexTwo. The solution hubs around something we call our Lead Capture Solution. This is a database-driven application that sit between the client’s website and their CRM that continually monitors visitor activity, notifying the CRM system at appropriate points in time.

What website platform do you have to be on? Doesn’t matter. What CRM? Doesn’t matter. We call this a “solution” because it is about 70% common platform (the database engine) and 30% customization to the client environment. We can usually integrate it with whatever you have – well assuming it’s something built within the last 10 year and has an Application Programming Interface (API). Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, SAP, Zoho, all have APIs.

Here’s How it Works

Here’s one example of how it works with an email campaign… You start with the list of emails you intend to campaign against. Could be your “house” list of prospects, something you’ve gotten from JigSaw, a partner mailing list swap? Just something where you have email addresses and contact information, maybe even a phone number.

We then set up your email program to tag the emails that go out. This means we need to use an email package that supports this but most all of them do. But here is where the magic comes in.

We place a little snippet of javascript on each of your web pages. Just like Google Analytics. But what happens with this is that when the visitor comes to the site, our Lead Capture Solution intercepts the click and logs the information. We then set “triggers” based on actions taken, pages visited, etc., that generate an alert to the sales rep.

From there, the Sales Rep goes to their CRM and immediately sees some initial campaign information (campaign name, search keywords, landing page, etc.), but then they can also click a link to see not only all of the pages the visitor actually looked at, but even their location, domain name and oftentimes the company they are with (even if you don’t already have that in their record). Now the Sales Rep can pick up the phone or email that prospect and suddenly they have the opportunity for a “warm” conversation.

No, It’s Not Rocket Science

Is this something only we could invent? Well, no. Is it unique in the market? Well not the concept. But maybe in the implementation. Meaning? You’ll find many “products” out there that address parts of the solution. Or products that address more of the solution but only for a few environments (e.g., Salesforce.com only). But what we do think is unique is our semi-custom approach. It keeps the cost down, but more than that, it provides you with unlimited flexibility for tailoring campaigns, landing pages, calls-to-action, special offers, you name it, all to your specification.

You can go here to learn more about our Lead Capture Solution or give us a shout and we’ll give you a short demo. Or if you’re doing something similar, or something very different, please shout it out for discussion in the comment box below.