Part III: What should you look for in a CRM system for your startup?

I wanted to provide some additional info on my assertion that Zoho CRM can be cheaper than Salesforce – which is important when you’re adding your entire staff to the system in order to provide not only sales and marketing support, but also technical support and account management.

Zoho has done the numbers: http://www.zoho.com/crm/zwitch.html

They use 25 users in their example. Here’s my example: If you’re adding 10 people in your startup, including some who are part-time, like bookkeepers or outside marketing folks, and only use it occasionally, you’re going to pay $7,800 per year with Salesforce.com. And that’s with no add-ins.

For larger companies, that’s a fraction of the cost of a single system administrator or CRM support person, so it could make sense. But for a true startup, that’s just silly money to spend when you could be using Zoho CRM.

Watch here for more information on integrating Zoho CRM into your business process. We’ll see how it goes.