Back in the day when I was starting out with my first business, keeping costs down was a bit of a priority, and for that reason we relied heavily on open source and free software to get us going. We used OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, used Modernbill for our billing (it was rubbish, and didn’t suit us at all!), and used SugarCRM to accommodate our CRM requirements. However, with SugarCRM in particular, the cost vs reliability factor was throwing up all sorts of problems, and between Thunderbird clearing my inbox and the newest version of SugarCRM being a dog, something had to be done. Along came Google Apps and Salesforce.com.
About a year ago I started looking at all-in-one solutions for our email, CRM, and accounting. Nothing – at that point in time – was available, so I gave up and said i’d revisit it in 2008 at a point where I wasn’t too busy. As it turns out, I did it at just the right time – Google Apps and Salesforce.com had formed an alliance, and now email and CRM could be purchased under one roof as SAS (Software as a service).
The migration from SugarCRM to Salesforce.com wasn’t exactly hassle-free. Some of the data from SugarCRM was in a hoop, to use a slang term I quite like, but the intuitiveness and speed of the Salesforce.com interface made up for any issues we had. Moving our email over to Gmail was easy peasy, and the integration between the two products is near perfect. I’ve even created handy links from Salesforce.com to Google Analytics so our sales executives can access website stats and information with one click.
Salesforce.com integrates with Google Adwords too, so you can run CPC campaigns on Google and the Google Publisher Network, and track the effectiveness of each campaign by tracking where good and bad leads come from, and optimising your CPC campaigns to suit. Clever stuff.
We’ve also moved most of our shared documents to Google Documents – collaboration is easy peasy, and it allows us to export in most formats – .doc, .pdf, .xls – anything really. I can now convert leads, generate I/O’s, and email them to clients in a fraction of the time I used to, because it’s all done through my browser.
Next on the list – to move our accounting online too. There are a few options out there, including a company called Teamwork based in Carlow. I emailed them, but they haven’t got back to me three weeks later, so the search continues… Any ideas welcome 
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Great post. Take a look at Coda for your accounting app;
http://www.coda.com/products-services/Salesforce
It runs natively on Force.com
Eric
@ Eric,
Thanks for that and the comments. Do you have any idea about pricing for this, or if it would be suitable for Ireland as a tax region etc?
Coda is a European software company and their product is designed for multi-country, multi-currency deployments. I don’t work for Coda… but I’d be surprised if they had an issue with Ireland as a tax region.
any idea which edition of SugarCRM did you deployed previously?
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