By Chris Bucholtz
The idea of free CRM has been around for a while (DataForce CRM , OctopusCity and Free CRM for example). The object is to use CRM as a loss leader and to sell services, add-ons and other things to make the CRM solution more useful. Yesterday, Concursive announced an offer that goes one step farther – a free year for 100 seats of CRM.
This offer’s different because Concursive has sufficient confidence in its solution, ConcourseSuite 5.0, to believe that this extended test drive will result in a fresh batch of paying customers at the end of 365 days. Michael Harvey, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Concursive, thinks the numbers bear this out.
He says that “90 percent of all the businesses in the U.S. are fewer than 100 employees,” so Concursive has a chance to reach a remarkable number of small businesses. “It’s the same system used by the Fortune 500 users we have, hosted in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.” The hope is that organizations will take the software for a test drive, then start adding data, and by the end of the year-long trial have the solution in full use.
Of course, a test drive is no fun if the car dealer holds you hostage and won’t let you get out of the car. What happens at the end of the trial? Concursive likes the first two of three scenarios the best: the customer converts to a regular SaaS customer, with a contract in keeping with the number of seats he actually has, or he trades in the SaaS application for an on-premise version of the same application (Concursive uses the same application for both hosted and on-premise customers). The third scenario – the customer says, “thanks, but no” – is less fun for Concursive but fairly easy for the customer. “We have export buttons built into the system’s modules that allows you to convert data into a .csv file at any time,” says Harvey. Quite naturally, as any good EVP would, he says that most users, once they have started to use the system with a full data set, will probably stick around.
There are some limitations – Concursive sets a threshold on the number of emails that can be sent and the volume of data that can be stored, “only to protect ourselves,” says Harvey. As of yet, those thresholds have yet to be reached by any of the 1000 participants in the early version of the program, which provided a free 5-user account.
Like the other “free” CRM products, add-on services and applications bring some revenue back to the developer of the system. Some services – Harvey mentioned a click-to-talk feature – can be purchased. Additional features will be offered in the months to come, and the SaaS nature of the product means integration will be virtually invisible to the user. I like this approach; it allows organizations to customize their CRM solutions to fit better with their unique vertical markets without having to spring for a CRM solution specially tailored for their particular industry.
Harvey said that the next challenge for Concursive – and for all CRM companies – is to successfully market to small businesses who don’t necessarily equate what they need with the acronym “CRM.” They might identify the need for an aspect of CRM, but they might not necessarily identify it as CRM. “I’d love for there to be a new term as additional capabilities and concerns become understood and widely embraced,” Harvey said. “I can imagine a new group of users who may never articulate to themselves that what they’re working on is a CRM project.”
That’s a big challenge, but if Concursive’s one-year trial can gather enough users perhaps Harvey will have sufficient market share to start coining his own acronyms – and getting them to stick.