Channel partners have queried the functionality and usability of the software giant's CRM application with one partner calling the product 'appalling' when compared to its competitors.
At the Australian launch for Microsoft CRM today, Alex Simons, Microsoft CRM product unit manager at Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), said that the CRM application – which has been available in the US for about a year –- offered an easy SMB route to sophisticated customer relations management and business process integration.
However, Archie Wilson, Asia-Pacific vice-president for Microsoft platform partner FrontRange Solutions, said the level of functionality offered by Microsoft CRM compared with that in rival CRM applications was 'appalling'.
'They couldn't even demonstrate campaign management. They had to demonstrate third-party bolt-on applications. I'm not trying to bag Microsoft but it seemed really odd,' he said. 'It was very underwhelming.'
Marketing campaign management was commonly found in many CRM applications, including those by FrontRange, Wilson pointed out, and was critical in improving marketing performance, which was traditionally difficult to track and assess.
If the point of difference was that Microsoft CRM was easy to use and deploy, Wilson asked, how come the only customer case study the vendor had trotted out had taken six months to get up and running -– much longer than the '20 or 30 minutes' to set up and 'four to five hours' to train staff that Microsoft claimed?
A six-month mid-market implementation for 20 seats that took six months might cost $150,000. The software would cost about $20,000, he said. 'There were a couple of issues that didn't quite gel,' he said.
Wilson said the go-to-market model had left something to be desired as well. Vendors need to work with the channel to create demand, not set up a system where the channel partner could lose the deal –- and hence the effort put into a potential sale -– at the last minute, he said.
'You've got to get partners to drive demand, but you're not going to get partners to drive demand unless you protect them,' he said. Wilson pointed out that the average SMB sales cycle was about three months. Resellers could spend three months working on a lead, then find that the customer chose to buy from a different Microsoft partner. Margins were likely to be low on Microsoft CRM, which cost only a few thousand dollars per user. Thus, resellers would do better to bundle it with Microsoft Office –- so customers felt they were getting 'something for nothing', he said.
'You can't use [Microsoft] Navision or Great Plains channels, because we did that ourselves in NZ and had parallel teams, because it is very difficult to cross-sell,' Wilson said. 'Microsoft's go-to-market [approach] doesn't lend itself to driving these types of applications.'
Also, the fastest growth in two years had been for CRM service and support applications –- functionality that Microsoft CRM seemingly ignored in favour of sales force automation. ASP functionality tackling the burgeoning growth in web-hosting had also been ignored, he added.
Microsoft promoted its CRM software as the first product the vendor has built on its .NET business applications framework. Yet Wilson said Microsoft CRM was not built on .NET from the ground up. 'It's not particularly .NET in terms of architecture. It's what they call .NET-compliant rather than using the .NET framework,' he said.
FrontRange was gearing up to release its own .NET-based CRM application mid-year, Wilson said. 'So will Microsoft CRM disappear, or become popularly bundled with Office. Think back to the '90s –- that's what they did with SQL Server and that's what got traction,' Wilson said.
'My hope is that they hype the market to buggery and then we can ride the wave.' Antony Dutton, co-founder and marketing director at CRM specialist consultancy –- and FrontRange reseller -- Aaromba Technologies, warned that Microsoft CRM was not a one-size-fits-all box-dropping-type application.
'Customers who purchase the product will also need to purchase Microsoft Windows Server OS and SQL Server database software. Only one-fifth of SMBs own a server,' Dutton said. He said that Microsoft had already pulled the product once just before launch and then re-launched it.
Meanwhile, there had been reports of 'unhappy customers' from the US, Dutton claimed. The proof here would be in the initial deployments among Microsoft partners –- who would be likely to become the local guinea pigs for bugs and issues with the application, he said.
'On the other hand, Microsoft has spent millions on .NET and R&D. They can't afford for it not to be right,' Dutton said. He agreed that Microsoft CRM implementation was likely to be expensive, especially considering how many SMBs were still using Windows NT 4.0. 'At this point in time, for the mid-market, Microsoft CRM is still going to be 30 to 40 percent more expensive than mid-market CRM such as GoldMine or Maximizer,' Dutton said.
Microsoft's Simons did not compare Microsoft CRM with other CRM products on the market but said that Microsoft CRM made it genuinely possible for smaller companies to integrate business processes and manage sales and marketing teams more effectively. The vendor had worked hard to find out what SMBs wanted from CRM and give that to them. 'For example, you can look back at the end of a sales promotion and see how that went,' he said.
'It's about connecting your customers, connecting your partners and finally making sure that your employees have the information that they need to be effective.' Microsoft CRM integrated with Outlook -– the email client that most businesses used. It did not require moving from application to application to use but showed up as a toolbar within Outlook, Simons said.
The product would help SMBs focus on building systems to lift business productivity, making sales people and customer service staff more effective, consistent and accountable, cutting time needed to produce effective reports and integrating business processes. Microsoft CRM was 'easily extendable' and worked with many add-on partner applications for specific verticals, Simons said.
Will Arnott, executive GM of supply chain business development and marketing at Linfox, said Microsoft CRM had taken the $1.3 billion transport and logistics company -– which has 9,000 staff and 120 warehouses worldwide -- longer to get up and running than advertised.
However, that was not the fault of the software but a reflection of the time needed to train staff and re-jig business processes, he argued. 'Without customers, you don't have a business,' Arnott said. 'It's very important to maintain your relationship with your customers.'
Microsoft CRM had made information much more available across the whole business, which was an 'entirely Microsoft house except for the ERP system, which was SAP', Arnott said.
Microsoft sees partners as critical in further development and adoption of the software across verticals. The vendor claims to have built relationships with more than 16 partners to build applications around CRM, and around 80 to deliver the product to end-users.
Raj Ganatra, director at Australian ISV Verticls, said his company had built a product for event management companies that integrated with Microsoft CRM, which brought 'capability and flexibility to customers'.
His product helped event management firms monit
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