Question
My company is thinking on getting a marketing automation tool but I think that maybe the solution would be migrating to salesforce to solve some of these issues. We have been using Sugar CRM and multiple customized tools for our sales, marketing and software licensing process. We sell 2 desktop software that is not SaaS but requires membership management with USB dongle authorization (users get free upgrades and tech support). We also have a new hardware product with a lot of components that we make ourselves and requires in person technician installation. Our process became very complex and we are making a lot of customized tools. The problem is that we spend a lot of time maintaining tools that are not our core expertise, so we are being left behind in new practices such as marketing automation, user analytics, etc. We have a lot of manual processes despite being a tech company, we can't grow. Is Salesforce the solution? We have these issues that we need to solve:
1-Manage user membership, each user has a USB dongle and our system needs to hold information such as activation period, product level (we sell different versions of software like the old adobe creative suite model). We also need to manage payment, right now we are using sugar with heavy customization (which prevents us from updating it), a SQL database, a custom PHP e-store and members only area.
2-We don't have good business, operations and sales analytics.
3-We need to allow our system to be more integrated to use marketing automation, but we can't afford the big players such as hubspot yet. We are using Mailchimp for our email marketing.
4-We have a problem in cashflow, so we can't spent a lot of money in different tools, but we need something that we can use now as a base.
I thought about Salesforce because it's a platform that has so many out of the box plugins and apps so we would just install those things instead of wasting time creating things from scratch or maintaining old systems. Another reason is the ability of creating business apps with the lighting platform with clicking and dragging, which could be interesting for non programmers (I haven't tested this yet). We have an "engineering culture", so usually it's ok to build new things even if it's not for your area, the problem lies when you need to throw cash to test new software.
Answer
I setup Salesforce for larger companies as a major part of my profession. I also consult with a lot of startups and small businesses and tend to steer them away from Salesforce for the time being. A SUPER BASIC Salesforce setup with a consultant will cost you at least $5,000. What you want to do is more in the tens of thousands (or more) unless you are lucky and a tool actually does what you want.
A lot of companies try to solve their business problems with a tool, but sometimes you need to start with just streamlining how you run your business and standardizing how you run your business. The more complex or unique you build your business the more money it will cost later to customize Salesforce to your needs.
What you might actually want to look into is a WordPress Membership management tool like iThemes Exchange or WooCommerce. You can have clients signup up for different recurring membership levels and have an account and then assign them a key. Possibly you could store this key in their product info so they could login to retrieve it. These solutions have integrated payment processing and will integrate with Quickbooks Online, etc. you might have to do some work though to ensure you can confidently store activation keys in WordPress securely.
If you are interested in going down either path and want to talk, let me know. I have a site called GrowthHeroes.com that helps people DIY websites, CRM, marketing automation, etc. It's still in the early stages but has some free public content.
