How to select a Hosted CRM?

Hosted/SaaS CRM vendors have made CRM affordable. You can go live within a day, can maintain without IT infrastructure, pay small monthly instalments and pay for what you need. Do you know what to look for before zeroing in on a vendor? Please refer to my earlier article "How to shortlist a CRM vendor?". The steps outlined there are valid but for hosted CRM you need to keep in mind something very specific to this type of services.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• well defined requirements

1. Go to website like http://www.business-software.com/crm-reports/hosted-crm.php and get published reports on top hosted CRM vendors. There are similar website but this one is good.
2. Apart from the functionalities you may check the following with these vendors if you think they are important to you. This way you will be aware of the hidden costs.
3. Ask for the hosted agreement and review the terms and conditions including the hosting infrastructure.
4. Check how much space you get for your project. How much you have to pay for extra space.
5. Check if you have to pay for accessing your archive data.
6. Will you get access to the administrative tools so that you can do the configuration and customization without paying for vendor/vendor partner professional services. Ideally there shouldn't be any cap on the level of configuration and customization. Some vendor will put a cap on even adding more than 5 fields. You want more? Upgrade to the expensive version with a high license cost.
7. Will you have option to bring your project on-premise? Vendors offering both Hosted and On-Premise solution will give you this option.
8. Check the procedure and cost of migrating to on-premise beforehand. The hosted and on-premise versions should be compatible and ideally with the same user and admin functionalities.
   
   If they are same the migration will be a cakewalk. The project and the database will be shifted from the hosted to your server. Please check if the configuration and customization done will be preserved when you upgrade or migrate to on-premise.
9. Some vendors offers discounts when you migrate from hosted to on-premise. Search for such "Host-To-Own" schemes.
   
   You can even get your entire recurring fees paid discounted on the on-premise price.
10. Check whether you will get floating(concurrent) license even in the hosted option. Normally most vendors offer only dedicated license in hosted version.
    
    With floating license you can utilize the resource better. User 1 and 2 use the application for 4 hours/day in different time. Will you prefer them to share 1 floating license or give them dedicated license(if not they are from the managerial cadre)?
11. Some vendors have different version with very limited features to unlimited features. While making a price comparison compare apple with apple and not apple with grape. This way you may find out that though vendor X has quoted you more than vendor Y, vendor X offering is only comparable(feature wise) to the most expensive version of vendor Y. Thus you will gain more by paying more to X.

Tips & Warnings

• Read the agreement and fine prints very carefully. For example what will be your compensation for network outages and service disruption.
• These are some of the points and not exhaustive. Apart from these do a proper evaluation of the functionalities according to your requirement document.