http://blog.cosential.com/?p=354 Cosential Product Blog Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:22:42 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://blog.cosential.com/?p=354&cpage=1#comment-578 sarahalsam Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:46:22 +0000 http://blog.cosential.com/?p=354#comment-578 I read Handel's post and now yours and thought it important to contribute to the discussion. You talk about getting a bunch of new business because firms outgrow or can't manage their internal CRM systems, but you have to ask yourself why they built them in the first place. It's because if I buy an "off the shelf" system, it's a tremendous outlay of cash and resources with challenging data migration, and then whenever I want to customize something so it works the way we want it to work, it requires a service call, a wait, and sometimes $1000 just to begin the conversation, after which I've often been told, "yeah, we can't make it do that". Not sure how often you have gotten a group of those of us who use them in a room to see what we really need. Saying that CFOs and CIOs are the decisionmakers sounds like a little bit of a cop out to me. It's hard for me to believe that you can't get input from key users because they usually include the CEO and the Managing Principal. I read Handel's post and now yours and thought it important to contribute to the discussion. You talk about getting a bunch of new business because firms outgrow or can't manage their internal CRM systems, but you have to ask yourself why they built them in the first place. It's because if I buy an “off the shelf” system, it's a tremendous outlay of cash and resources with challenging data migration, and then whenever I want to customize something so it works the way we want it to work, it requires a service call, a wait, and sometimes $1000 just to begin the conversation, after which I've often been told, “yeah, we can't make it do that”. Not sure how often you have gotten a group of those of us who use them in a room to see what we really need. Saying that CFOs and CIOs are the decisionmakers sounds like a little bit of a cop out to me. It's hard for me to believe that you can't get input from key users because they usually include the CEO and the Managing Principal.

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