Do I Want Software As A Service Or A Traditional Solution For My Sales CRM Needs?

As promised, today, I’m going to talk about the merits of traditional installations versus software as a service for CRM software, especially when it comes to sales CRM. Why do sales CRM needs matter specifically in this particular case? Well, you’ll just have to keep reading to find out, now won’t you?

First, let’s talk a little bit about the general concerns with CRM software, and the types of needs by way of resources and power that they tend to need. When you think about something that is draining on computing resources, your mind is a generally go to business solutions like CRM. Generally, you think of things like gaming, graphics design, simulations or other uses of complex math and memory needs when it comes to the sort of thing, right? How could CRM software be that hungry, aside from maybe a space to keep large databases?

Well, for a small business, CRM software isn’t that power-hungry in fact. It’s when your business grows, when you have a large staff consulting the software many times a minute across possibly multiple locations, that you come across a real need for power. At this point, most likely, you have a server running this stuff, with maybe just a portal on the user and, but even then, you’re going to work that server to death when your business become successful.

So, never think that your sales CRM software, or your general CRM software, aren’t going to have significant computing power needs in the future. So, getting that out of the way, let’s talk about software as a service versus traditional installations, their merits and drawbacks, and a little bit of advice when it comes to sales CRM.

Traditional installations…

Let’s talk about the one that everyone is most familiar with first. A traditional installation will come in one of two forms, that of either being installed on every machine individually, or on a server either local or at a provider’s data center.

When a traditional installation, you may purchase an individual version, or have a subscription where updates are provided at your leisure, and at your discretion. These often tend to be more expensive out right, as you are buying an indefinite license to use it, and you may have to have one or more sets of CDs or DVDs from which you install this software. The drawbacks are compatibility, especially in cases where you have to install it on a local server or on individual machines. If you are using a version of Windows, you probably won’t have any issues, as pretty much everything is available for Windows. However, if it is a per-machine installation, and you are using a version of Linux or Mac, you may be more out of luck. This also applies to servers, if it is your responsibility to install it. It’s actually harder to guarantee compatibility when it comes to random server configurations, in fact.

However, the biggest advantage to this is that you forever have access to the version of software you purchased, and when update rollout, you can either rollback if you don’t like them, or simply refuse them altogether. This is something that Microsoft could learn when it comes to Windows 10, forever forcing updates on people whether they want them or not.

Software as a service…

Software as a service is a different animal. With software as a service, you access the same instance of software, from pre-much anything with a browser, as every other customer. This means that the specifications are guaranteed to be the same, while configurations are indeed unique your account as are your data sets, but you are also guarantee compatibility for pretty much any device that can render it.

This has its positives, including no need to set it up, no need to reinstall it if your systems go back, top-notch security, and absolute compatibility with any device with the affirmation W3C-compliant browser. The downside is that updates tend to be unavoidable, you don’t have permanent ownership if you choose not to renew your subscription, and browser interfaces, if you ask me, still royally suck universally.

A little advice when it comes to sales CRM software…

In spite of the downsides of software as a service, I would be the first to advise it when it comes to sales CRM, because it allows for the accumulation of a lot more business intelligence information that is very useful with customer journey, customer analysis, customer retention and churn combatting.

In other situations, I am slightly more reticent to recommend software as a service due to the issues I pointed out, but given the type of computing power needed for sales CRM to do its job properly, this is a case where I do think software as a service is more advisable.