Easy migration from Salesforce.com to BPA CRM

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BPA Solutions, the developer of BPA CRM, served as a partner of Salesforce.com

and a user, prior to the development of their trademark solution, BPA CRM. BPA Solutions was one of the first Salesforce.com partners in Switzerland in 2004, and implemented the system in many large Swiss organizations, over a span of many years.

Salesforce.com is a good system for a very specific type of user in large organizations looking for an outsourced CRM system. However, Salesforce.com is not adapted for many organizations looking for a cost-effective and integrated CRM system.

During their term with Salesforce.com, BPA encountered the reality that most of their customers were looking for a simpler and more economical alternative to Salesforce.com. Upon failing to find that “alternative”, BPA decided to create a CRM that met the criteria of both enterprise management capabilities, and easy end-user adoption.

BPA Solutions has selected the powerful and scalable Microsoft SharePoint Framework to develop its own CRM system since 2006. BPA CRM remains the only enterprise scale solution of its capabilities, completely built in SharePoint.

BPA has 800+ customers from every company size and industry, BPA CRM and its extended platform/ xRM apps worldwide. BPA has 50+ partners worldwide.

Main benefits to transition to BPA CRM

Lower cost

Many CRM projects fail because of poor or a non-existent return on investment; typically resulting from an organization spending a lot of money for acquisition and/or implementation of Salesfore.com, then failing to achieve true user adoption. Most of the CRM tools in the market like Salesforce.com are expensive. The pricing of Salesforce.com, starting with just 5+ users is $65/user/month and increases to $250/user/month, based on the choice of solution.

The cost of a BPA CRM on premise perpetual user license is at a lower cost than a year of Salesforce.com subscription for the same user. In the cloud, BPA CRM costs between $13 and $39 per user/month. BPA Solutions is the only enterprise-scale CRM solution provider to offer server licenses for unlimited number of users and CRM instances.

Pricing comparison in USD:

BPA-CRM-vs-salesforce-cost-savings
1
BPA CRM server license for unlimited users and CRM instances

2 BPA CRM server license for unlimited users, and CRM instances + dedicated server hosting (approx.)

Savings range between 60% and up to 93%. Savings as compared to Salesforce.com unlimited edition would be even higher.

Reducing complexity

Complexity kills user adoption. CRM users are not IT experts. A CRM system needs to be simple to deliver value. A CRM is worth the data it contains only if the average user can actually use it successfully.

Salesforce.com has an amazing sales team and marketing campaign, and provides good product demonstration. However, product marketing does not necessarily equal product value. Users won’t even use a CRM if it is too complicated.

BPA CRM delivers full CRM features and functionality at 20% of the cost, and has the best rate of end-user adoption for an enterprise CRM in the industry. BPA CRM will take the challenge of training your least technical team member, and having them willing to continue using the CRM with only one hour of training.

Fitting to your needs

The best CRM is the one that continuously fits to your needs.

You won’t lose any flexibility when moving to BPA CRM. You will even gain some additional configuration capabilities compared to Salesforce.com.

You don’t need to be an IT person, BPA CRM is completely configurable with no development needed even by non-technical team members.

The system extends to include other xRM apps like project, quality, risk and recruiting management using the powerful BPA xRM platform, or it can extended further with hundreds of features developed by third parties.

The SharePoint “ecosystem” is larger today than the one of Salesforce.com.

Winning with SharePoint

SharePoint is everywhere. 60% of US companies have SharePoint installed somewhere in their organization. SharePoint contains all ingredients to be the best CRM system:

  • SharePoint Foundation is free (if you are using a Windows Server)
  • Users like SharePoint, when they have BPA CRM, because it’s easy to use
  • Administrators like SharePoint because it’s easy to configure with no development needed, it’s easy to maintain and deploy.
  • SharePoint provides native Microsoft Office integration
  • SharePoint provides powerful search, BI, automation, document management, collaboration, social capabilities and much more
  • SharePoint provides connectors with external systems

It’s very hard for any other enterprise server solution to compete against SharePoint. With over 2 billion USD of sold licenses, SharePoint has become Microsoft’s most successful server product ever.

Take advantage of your existing licensing with Microsoft and free yourself from the constraints of a costly per-user license and a stand-alone system.

BPA CRM simply works better because it runs on SharePoint.

Where deploy is up to you

Shortly after having started to work with Salesforce.com, each BPA employee received a personal post letter from a large US company. No one at BPA had ever had any contact with that company before. We were not working with North America at that time. The only connection was the subscription to Salesforce.com. Every company needs to make sure that the CRM service you choose protects your privacy.

Data privacy is a hot topic. Lots of critical data is stored in a CRM system. No one would certainly take the risk to have sensitive data accessible by unauthorized persons. For this reason, many companies prefer having their CRM on-site, rather than in the cloud. On-site deployment also makes it easier to integrate the CRM with internal systems like ERP, invoicing, accounting software, and other systems.

BPA CRM can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, where you deploy is up to you

Easy migration path to BPA CRM

Preparing the migration

The main goal here is to identify how people are using Salesforce.com and important data to be migrated. Not all data has to be migrated but only consistent and actual data.

The simplest way is to prepare a document is with the lists, fields and views that are used. Screenshots from the different forms and pages will help to establish relations between lists.

It’s also important to know who is using the CRM and where they are using it, in which services or locations.

Map your typical marketing, sales and support processes to represent how leads need to convert to accounts, contacts and opportunities, and how sales people are managing quotes. What reports are used and who are preparing reports.

It’s important to know the overall experience of users with the system like pros and cons or what is missing. End users are not always considered when implementing a CRM system.

Last, understand the role of MS Outlook for end users, as well as the need to remotely access the CRM.

Other optional things to consider are ERP or database connections, workflow automation and permissions.

BPA Solutions and its partners can help you in the process of mapping your migration and end-user experience.

Preparing the BPA CRM environment

Creating lists, fields and views with BPA CRM is an easy and quick configuration work, because it is done in the browser.

BPA CRM is a site template solution, which makes it easy to deploy, and to create instances for different locations if needed. This drastically improves the user-experience as compared to working with a single CRM instance for all locations.

(Equivalent non-production licenses are included in the Software Assurance. This way you’ll get a free non-production environment to optimally prepare and test the migration process prior going live with the production environment.)

Migrating data

Salesforce.com has a tool to export all data in csv files. Documents can be exported using third party tools. We recommend importing a sample dataset in the BPA CRM non-production environment first.

Excel is a great tool to de-duplicate and clean data prior re-importing to BPA CRM.

Beware to import the key fields with lists so that all relations between lists will be maintained.

The good news with BPA CRM is that you can mass import data with a simple copy & paste using the native datasheet mode from SharePoint.

Configuring details

After data has been migrated, functional administrators will configure pages to map process exactly to fit end-user needs. This is an enormous benefit of BPA CRM Solutions and xRM Platform.

Selected users from each department will test the tool during the iterative configuration process to ensure that end users will get all data and information they need to do their job.

Go!

You are up and running! Get working!!

ONLY the tool has changed and THE BUSINESS PROCESSES ARE STILL YOURS, just at a lower cost and higher rate of end-user adoption.

(Prior to launching BPA CRM for a service/location or the whole organization, we recommend that you have a product presentation for end users so you can explain about the new simple user interface. BPA Solutions and are partners are pleased to help with this process, and answer any questions you have.)

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