In a research study we did last spring of over 1300 small businesses we were not surprised to find that most of them did not use CRM because of the expense and the overhead of data input (two most popular reasons). When questioned further we found that most small businesses did not see CRM as critical, although tracking their customers and prospects was. The focus in small business is on the customer experience and not reporting to upper management (which is where most CRM systems excel). A focus on project and task management was seen as more important than reporting.

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Salesforce.com gained fame from being an early SaaS (hosted) application, and was initially focused on SMBs (small and medium business), but since has added additional functionality and overhead. Now to be fair, they also have added AppExchange which is a mash-up backbone that allows a wide variety of other applications to integrate with Salesforce and through this API transfer data, or search.

However, there are a number of other collaboration and mash-up vendors that are gunning for Salesforce’s top spot as the CRM vendor for SMB. Three of these vendors are LongJump, Zoho and Intuit. LongJump's development team is in Silicon Valley and Zoho's development team is in India, and not surprisingly, each takes a radically different approach to CRM than Salesforce.

LongJump

LongJump its self is a SaaS application development platform, and to demonstrate the ease of use of the platform, the LongJump team created about 15 of their own applications on the platform, which they now offer on a subscription basis. As you may have guessed one of those applications is CRM and LongJump is offering it for $20/month, compared to Salesforce, which is $65/user/month. LongJump’s CRM application includes Sales force automation, Campaign Manager, and Customer Support Manager and it still allows you to:
• Schedule appointments and share calendars across your team
• Capture and track new customers and prospects
• Set a reminder message for a follow up call
• View a forecast of your sales progress and activities
• Assign and follow up on tasks
• Manage all your accounts and contacts
• Share presentations, proposals, or other files
• Streamline customer support case handling
• View purchase history so you know what they are most interested in buying
• Create and file sales proposals
• Review past emails so your are up to date on the last discussions
• Enter contact information for new people you meet

To be fair LongJump also offers a collaborative application called OfficeSpace which allows you to:

• Share personal and group calendars
• Assign and organize tasks and projects
• Securely store and centralize documents and photos
• Collaborate using discussions

It is seen as a personal portal and a way to share tribal knowledge and is included in the $19.95/month subscription (a one year commitment) to CRM and the other sales applications LongJump provides. LongJump has also just added workflow capabilities to their office applications, and this too is included in the subscription package.

Zoho Suite

Zoho is also an Indian company and part of a larger enterprise called AdvnetNet, and offer a whole suite of applications geared towards the small businesses including: Zoho writer (online word processor; Zoho Sheet (online spreadsheet); Zoho Project (project management); Zoho Show (online presentation tool); Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice; Zoho Notebook (online note taker); Zoho Meeting (web conferencing); Zoho wiki, Zoho Creator (create database applications); Zoho Planner (online organizer); Zoho Chat (IM, and group discussions); Zoho DB & Reports (database and reporting); Zoho People (Recruitment and talent management); Zoho Mail (web based e-mail services); Zoho Business (beta); Zoho Start (online dashboard for documents). There are additional Zoho utilities for voting and polling
Zoho also works with Windows Mobile and iPhones, and now offers a CRM service for the enterprise (as well as SMBs).

They also offer plug-ins for MS Office, Outlook, IE and Firefox, and like 7,000 other applications have a plug-in for Facebook. Mytopia, a collaborative gaming environment that I was briefed on at the Web 2.0 Expo last week also works with Zoho.

Zoho CRM comes in 3 different flavors: the free edition which is limited to 3 users. The Professional edition $12/month) and the new Enterprise edition ($25/mo.) which offers better role-based security with an unlimited number of roles, groups and profiles. This new Enterprise edition is Ideal for medium sized enterprises with complex organizational hierarchy.

Intuit

At the Web 2.0 show last week we also talked with Intuit’s QuickBase group which will also be offering QuickBase as a SaaS as well as opening up the API to their large network of developers. They also have integrated with Adobe Flex U.I. to sit on top of QuickBase so developers can make really cool interfaces. Have also packaged up integration with QuickBooks data (as a component) which opens up the Quickbooks ecosystem to their 25 million users.

They too showed me a CRM application built on QuickBase using the new Flex front-end, that was build by one of the developers (Syntegration) that was trying to solve CRM for small businesses.

Currenly the new Intuit platform is in private beta, but should be launched this Summer. There is a current SaaS offering for Quickbase from Intuit which is $249/mo. for 10 users. But for these new developer applications you don’t even need the current Quickbase SaaS service, and according to Alex Chriss (business development leader)the application developers will be setting their own pricing. Because developers like Synergration, who's new CRM product will be called "Active Contact" are focused on small businesses, and the new Intuit Flex platform will be charging not by user, but by bandwidth usage my guess is that they will be charging about $50/small business/month for their CRM application.

Summary

Salesforce.com has been king of the hill for the last 5 years but there are a number of Web 2.0 alternatives that offer similar functionality at a much lower cost. For small businesses, cost is always an issue! Which of these new services will be successful? It is hard to say? Zoho is signing up users at the rate of 100,000/every 5-6 weeks and should pass 1 million users sometime this summer. Intuit, has 75,000 developers in their network (not to mention Adobe Flex developers) and 25 million Quickbooks users. LongJump is the newest and least well known of the three challengers, but they also have an interesting SaaS application development platform, and if they can create an strong eco-system of users and developers will be able to stay in the race for the SMB CRM dollars being spent this year.