Earlier this year, we at IBsolution, a German Consultancy and SAP Partner, started off an ambitious project – to replace Salesforce with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer. This would have been a challenge itself but we decided to challenge ourselves even more and to do so on a tight project timeline – in just 4 weeks. There were a number of reasons and they are by no means specific to us. Here are the most important ones:
Avoid excessive price hike
Having quite some sales experience myself I surely know what NOT to do with a satisfied customer who has been successfully using my solution for years: To come up with new prices that leave the customer no choice but to look for alternative solutions.
At the end of last year (2016), when the time came to renew our Salesforce licenses, we were hit by a massive, almost 50% increase. This made the decision to thoroughly evaluate other cloud CRM solutions in order to possibly replace Salesforce an easy one.
Keep your precious data
Replacing your CRM is like performing open heart surgery – you don’t want to rush it, you want to thoroughly consider your options in order to reach the best decision and keep your patient alive. But when you are facing an acute heart failure, you have to act. So we instantly put together a project team to evaluate alternative solutions.
Our short list included sugarCRM and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, two native cloud solutions that offer comprehensive CRM functionality. In addition to a fair and market-driven price, they would deploy quickly and allow us to migrate our existing Salesforce data, providing us with a 360-degree view of our customers.
Fit in your SAP landscape
Eventually we fell for SAP Hybris C4C, which was strongly swayed by C4C’s seamless integration with our existing SAP landscape. It enables full visibility into our sales and customer management – from the initial contact, during the quotation process, up to the commissioned order. We are also expecting to see even more effects in the future due to the transparency with which it delivers CRM KPIs and correlates them with relevant information from other sources such as Google Analytics - all analyzed in SAP’s Business Objects Cloud.
Stay cloud
Cloud is an absolute must for anyone looking to deploy a state-of-the-art customer relationship management system. We started our move into the cloud when implementing our Salesforce solution 6 years ago. Going back to on-premise? Unthinkable. We have gradually moved other business areas into the cloud as well. Therefore, the implementation of SAP Hybris C4C was anything but new and thus a very straightforward affair.
Learn more about the project itself in my upcoming blogs soon available here in the SAP Community Network.
