Growing a business while keeping customers happy and loyal on a very tight budget is the new competitive reality for most MSBs. They have moved well beyond “doing more with less”. MSBs are now being forced to make really tough decisions about business-critical programs, such as, whether to proceed or kill projects. Hanging on to their best customers while looking for new ones weighs heavily on all MSB executives. Increasingly fast-paced, globally competitive markets, and the effects of down economies make these tasks even more difficult. Resources for MSBs are tighter than ever with increased financial scrutiny, pressure to cut staff, and pressure to consider outsourcing of anything not considered core or of critical competitive advantage. Tolerance for risk, especially when it comes to customers, is at a new low. Speed-to-market and the ability to adapt to rapidly changing customer demands — traditionally competitive advantages for MSBs — have now become critical survival skills. Increasing customer focus and adopting customer relationship management strategies is one proven method to help MSBs with customer retention, growth, and increased revenues.
Mid-size businesses (MSBs) continually face a variety of pressures, such as the increasingly competitive global markets, the demands to reduce costs or outsource staff, and the urgency to retain customers and grow their companies. An effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program could be one way to meet these challenges. However, less than 20% of MSBs have chosen this route. One reason is that the poor economy is causing some companies to delay purchasing new technology. Another reason is the difficulties MSBs have had finding the right CRM solution. And other reason, no doubt, can be found in the stories of CRM projects costing millions of dollars and not delivering on the promises of increased growth, new customers, and greater profits. ERP or CRM systems have given enormous benefits to the big companies, that kind of huge system is not really fit for small business, even the current OnDemand solutions, because they are equal complex like traditional solution. Price is one factor to the Small Business, but other important factor is complexity, if the solution is complex then its not useful for them. Also most of the time the vendors who come to offer Small Business solution, they can not do much because of own scalability issue. Microsoft is very successful in offering easy and useful solution to the small business, but still business applications require some extent of consulting flavour. Most of the time Small Businesses can not generate useful reports, which are very key for the business and those key figures are then tracked manually. This dilemma and be resolved by using SaaS model and offering custom IT services using Economies of Scale.
