Salesnet Eases Customization For Hosted CRM

Salesnet’s newly launched CRM version promises to make it easier for partners to tailor and rebrand applications for their own customers.

The Salesnet25 edition adds lead management and campaign management modules to the company’s existing sales capabilities. VARs can build a customized dashboard to track and analyze prospective deals. Also new is an integral e-mail tool to ease mass mailings with the customers’ existing e-mail infrastructures. A new WYSIWYG editor will help customers create mailings on the fly.

The updated services promise to make it easier for solution providers to rename tabs and entities within the application.

Salesnet, which targets SMBs, characterizes itself as a more channel-friendly alternative to Salesforce.com.

Entelegen, a British solution provider, began working with Salesnet two years ago.“We started off looking for an on-demand CRM solution for our own use and selected Salesnet over Salesforce.com, mainly because Salesnet seemed not only a better fit, supporting our established sales processes in a way that nothing else did, but the Salesnet guys seemed keener to work with us as a user and partner,” said Ian Hendry, director of the Windsor, U.K.-based company, via e-mail.

Hendry says the addition of lead and campaign management is a plus. Those are “normally the last two areas of any organization to see process automation. The delivery of a single system for producing leads and then managing the process of converting them to sales helps our customers to ensure they are getting a real ROI from Salesnet, a clear hard benefit to sales and marketing and one that is easily measured,” Hendry said.

Lisa Glinche, CEO of Sales Prodigy, a Castle Rock, Colo., partner, said the new version expands her target market. “Since Salesnet is now also a robust solution for marketing out of the box, it also increases our ability to sell to larger companies because of more customization and new application and administrative functionality,” Glinche said via e-mail.

Hosted CRM is a hot topic these days. ERP kingpin SAP last month finally unveiled its long-anticipated hosted CRM service with partner IBM. Salesforce.com, the San Francisco company that pioneered subscription CRM, has recently come under fire for outages. These widely reported snafus may cast a pall on overall software-as-a-service offerings.

Boston-based Salesnet president and co-founder Jonathan Tang said his company experienced two periods of intermittent outages for a total of less than an hour last year. Salesnet does not disclose the size of its user base, although Tang said it is small compared to the 399,000 Salesforce.com claims.Salesforce.com offers referring partners a one-time 10 percent fee on a year’s service for each customer they bring in and SAP, Walldorf, Germany, offers similar terms. Salesnet and Netsuite, San Mateo, Calif., are viewed as more channel friendly. NetSuite offers an ERP/CRM suite and a recurring 30 percent fee to partners as long as the account is active. A Salesnet partner can earn recurring revenue ranging from 30 percent to more than 50 percent for active customers, depending on volume. But the important thing, from a channel point of view, is that “the customer belongs to the partner,” Tang said.

For now, Microsoft is concentrating on on-premise CRM with its latest release, but is working on a version of CRM better suited for hosting. That upcoming “Titan” version of CRM will support true multitenancy, a Microsoft executive has said. Multitenancy, already supported by Salesnet andSalesforce.com, allows hosting companies to put multiple customers’ implementations on shared servers.

Salesnet’s own infrastructure is Microsoft-centric. It builds on SQL Server databases and .Net tools.

Salesnet customers include American Express Incentive Services, Sovereign Bank, Formare Technica and Tellabs.