Top CRM Solutions: BatchBlue vs. Salesforce

The purpose of CRM packages is to help your business increase sales by tracking contacts and leads. They do this by giving you a formal structure and toolset in which you can gather, centralize, and streamline your customer and prospect information—contacts, leads, and opportunities.

CRM took off in the 1990s with Siebel pioneering the market. Saleforce.com took the concept further in the 2000s by putting the CRM application online, in the cloud, as a software as a service (SaaS) offering.

The top-two vendors in the Comparz rankings are BatchBlue and Salesforce. It may seem surprising that BatchBlue is ranked above the more highly recognized market leader Saleforce (which claims to have 92,300 customers as of January 31, 2011). Let’s see why…

A big clue can be seen in the tagline that BatchBlue uses to describe Batchbook: “the social CRM built for small businesses and entrepreneurs.”

BatchBlue is a newer company, formed in 2006, with the aim of providing “useful, user-friendly software for small businesses, especially those with a limited budget or IT staff.”

As our reviewer noted, Batchbook offers a core set of CRM features comparable to those of competing solutions, its key differential being that it presents those features in a more modern way, more akin to social media applications than traditional CRM tools.

Salesforce, by comparison, describes itself as ”the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the Social Enterprise.” Indeed, Salesforce says its $125 per user Enterprise Plan is its most popular.

Like the famous phrase, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” our reviewer notes that “Salesforce offers the peace of mind of selecting the market leader.” Our reviewer also found that, “Salesforce offers the most flexibility in terms of serving all sizes of businesses from one user to hundreds of thousands.” Similarly, IBM is an enterprise provider, with limited presence in the small business arena.

In essence, Saleforce is a more mature company that is adding social media functionality to a mature product. BatchBook, on the other hand, was created as a social-media-oriented product in the era of social media. Thus, as far as social media interfaces and integration are concerned, BatchBlue is there, while Salesforce is striving to get there.

A small business vs. enterprise focus can be seen in the reasons BatchBlue and Salesforce are leaders. BatchBlue wins on price, functionality, and ease of use, while Salesforce wins on functionality and customization.

The enterprise vs. small business slant is reflected in Salesforce’s and BatchBlue’s respective product feature sets.  Saleforce offers a dizzying array of features in its various plans. As our reviewer noted, “Depending on your needs and ability to customize the application, Salesforce may be too confusing for the novice user of a CRM solution.”

For example, the $65 per user Professional Plan includes a base offering plus mass email campaigns, product tracking, real-time quotes, contract management, customizable forecasts, customizable dashboards, analytics snapshots, role permissions, and ideas community.

The $125 per user Enterprise Plan includes all the features of the professional Plan plus workflow and approval automation, sales teams, territory management, offline access, call scripting, profiles and page layouts, custom apps & websites, developer sandbox, and integration via Web Services API.

Salesforce’s five plans are priced at $5, $25, $65, $125, and $250 per user per month. You can try these out for free for 7-, 14-, and 30-day trial periods. Salesforce also offers special promotions, and is currently offering a $2 per-user deal for the $5 plan.

BatchBlue, by comparison, divvies its Batchbook offerings into a simpler menu of categories: contact management, social media monitoring, custom fields with super tags, communications tracking, e-mail forwarding, lists and reports, web forms, and sales (which includes leads, pipeline tracking, closed deals, terms, contacts, and communications).

Batchbook offers five plans priced at $15, $30, $50, $70, and $150, and offers free 30-day trials for all its plans. In addition, BatchBook offers a free "BabyBlue" edition that is free for individual users. If you’re a one-person shop, you can’t beat free.

Bottom Line: BatchBlue and Salesforce are ranked #1 and #2, so you can’t go wrong with either. Salesforce’s solutions are geared towards a midmarket to enterprise sweet spot of up to hundreds of thousands of users. BatchBlue's solution is focused on a more limited range—small businesses. For businesses of smaller size and smaller budget, BatchBlue gets the nod for a powerful, easy-to-use and fully modern social media feature set.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.