CRM for the Little Guy

Townsend & Styer Maintenance Co., a San Francisco-based janitorial services provider, was an operation with too few employees, too little budget and not enough time to implement a full-blown CRM system. Yet it also needed an application with more functionality than a simple SFA system. After researching his options, Matthew Townsend, a principal with the company, came up with a solution that bridged the gap and met his needs exactly: salesforce.com’s new Team Edition, a CRM product designed and priced for small businesses and workgroups.

Team Edition includes the essential features of salesforce.com’s Professional Edition in a less expensive and simplified package for up to five users. Team Edition enables sales teams to manage account and contact information, track opportunities and quickly compile standard and custom reports. It puts customer support information at the fingertips of customer service representatives so they can resolve customer inquiries quickly and easily. And it incorporates salesforce.com’s core security and zero footprint infrastructure to ensure that small businesses can keep their vital customer information safe.

“salesforce.com had everything we needed at an affordable price,” says Townsend, whose company has been in business for about a year. “The ability to pipeline and forecast our upcoming months enabled us to determine how to build our business – and lets us provide better customer support because everything is at our fingertips. Before, our system was really archaic. We had to run to a file cabinet to look up customer information.” Townsend says he has been using salesforce.com’s Team Edition for only about two months, but already he is extremely happy with its performance and plans to add more users in the coming months. Currently, three employees use the system.

Team Edition was released on Sept. 30 at an introductory price of $995 per year for up to five users. That price will be available through Dec. 31, 2002. As of 2003, the product will be $1,995 per year for up to five users. The Team Edition price point includes free basic phone, email and Web support for the entire year. Premium support, allowing a greater number of support calls per month, is optional for an additional $295.