SaaS for Handling Sales, Demo Requests, Leads, Follow up emails

I know similar questions have already asked but I think we need something slightly different:

Capturing user info from our website to the CRM directly via an API
Sending welcome, followup emails to demo users after their requests, and after the expiration of their demo
Other CRM, Leads management stuff
A way to either pull stats out of it via API or provide limited accounts to our employers so they can see all our demo, sales, leads stats in real-time
Not insanely expensive

Do you think SalesForce can provide this to us? Or do we have to write our own or tweak an open source application to do this.

Sales Saas CRM Demo

asked Feb 11 '10 at 02:59

The Dictator
2,305 points

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2 Answers

It's a good question; unfortunately the answer is complex.

"Salesforce" is a platform more than anything. Out of the box it doesn't do much; with customization, scripts, and for-pay add-ons, it can literally do anything.

There isn't an open-source tool which will do all this stuff out of the box -- again it takes customization, scripts, etc.. Is it cheaper to have zero-cost tool but write and maintain more code, or pay more money monthly but buy stuff that does most of this now? Either choice is OK -- that depends on your goals.

answered Feb 11 '10 at 05:09

Jason
16,231 points

I'm a big fan of outsourcing, if the ROI make sense. Obviously if it's too expensive or too much of a lock-in then that's a problem. But as I understand there is no such a service out there anyway. There are some promising ones but definitely missing bits, what I don't want is, rolling out our own system and keep updating and spending our valuable development time to internal issues like this instead of our product. – The Dictator 15 years ago

* Capturing user info from our website to the CRM directly via an API

Yes

Sending welcome, followup emails to demo users after their requests, and after the expiration of their demo

Yes, some email follow up; not sure if it covers all your scenarios.

* Other CRM, Leads management stuff

Yes

* A way to either pull stats out of it via API or provide limited accounts to our employers so they can see all our demo, sales, leads stats in real-time

Not sure about API, but can provide access to stats; integrates w/ Google AdWords, too, if I remember correctly.

* Not insanely expensive

I don't remember the cost, but to get some of the features above, you have to buy one of the more expensive account plans.

**FWIW, This info is based on experience that is several years old

answered Feb 11 '10 at 09:03

Brant Cooper
91 points