After evaluating several on-demand and traditional CRM products, Ventana settled on SaaS technology from Salesforce.com—a mix of marketing automation, analytics and other applications. “The benefits of having a hosted solution outweighed the benefits of the in-house solution,” King says. “Plus, the time to get it up and running was significantly shortened with a hosted solution.” Initial deployment and training took less than four months, King says.

SaaS technology gives Ventana the same features offered by traditional CRM software—including capture, storage and analysis of customer information—without incurring the extra burden of running its own servers, operating a network to connect branch offices and hiring a large IT staff.

“It’s just significantly easier,” King says. “We have a very good Oracle ERP system, but trying to keep it up to date across the organization and supporting it is a pretty substantial effort.” With SaaS, the service provider does all the work to run, maintain and update the CRM system.

Ventana also values Salesforce.com’s ability to provide multiple language interfaces on demand, facilitating work with offices worldwide and a staff that speaks more than 20 languages. “To change the language, you literally click a button on the screen,” King says. This contrasts sharply with Ventana’s on-premises ERP system, where adding a new language requires IT staffers to painstakingly design and test new modules.

For a government-regulated company like Ventana, SaaS can also save time and money by cutting red tape. “In a regulated industry, you spend most of your time validating and updating software,” King says. “That’s not your true competency; it really doesn’t add value to your business.” On-demand software drops much of the time-consuming validation onto the software provider. “We don’t have to validate the Salesforce.com tool, only the way we’re using it,” King says.

King feels that his SaaS-based CRM technology offers more features than most premises-based counterparts while creating less work for business and IT staffers. “We have much more operational flexibility, more current information about our customers and the ability to make more informed decisions,” he says.

King says the only significant “road bump” he faced was convincing end users to take full advantage of the system’s information management and analysis features. “Basically showing the field folks what’s in it for them,” he notes. “Once they could see that, then there was a lot of buy-in.”

Compensation Strife

Sales compensation management has something in common with CRM at some midsize companies. Even though calculating compensation for sales reps is a key process, especially for firms in growth mode, it may be ignored until it creates a true mess.