Print Management Blog
Wed, 18 Mar 2009
Apologies to all those honorable software vendors out there, but we have had a few instances lately where prospects have understood enough about CRM to think it would be good to join their new system to what they already have in other parts of their business, but have had a problem.
Although most suppliers are great and honest, the problem can come when you speak to the existing system supplier about what's involved to link them to a new system.
Some responses have been "It's expensive to link systems together", "it's complicated and takes a long time" or even "It simply can't be done".
Usually these are all wrong. The issues are actually as follows:
- You are a business owner not a software tekky, so you don't know when you are being fed a line.
- Some vendors have a vested interest in you not using technology that they haven't got yet, because they worry they will lose you for their system as well.
- They would rather push you to their part developed technology and use you as a test bed. Stories like "We have CRM (for example) coming soon and can do you a great deal" which stops you thinking about whether their CRM does what you need and starts you thinking that all CRM does the same job. It doesn't.
- They see an opportunity to charge you over the top for simple work so make it sound complicated.
The reality is that if your sales and marketing system is web based - not PC or network based linked to the web - 99% of the time linkage is cheap and easy because web based systems are designed to link to PC based systems. Of course languages like XML are better, but in reality your only question for your existing systems is "can we get data into Excel or import data from Excel".
At worst, virtually all systems still use an old fashioned file language called .csv. If you can get files into Excel you can get them to and from other systems. The people supporting your other systems might make a charge for writing an import routine, but it's normally a few hundred pounds tops.
Anyone suffered from this?
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