Sometimes, one way to leapfrog your competition is to choose software that outstrips the capabilities of your competitors. This can be relatively easy if you have an in-house development team, but is harder for companies who use off-the-shelf packages. And in these cases, it’s worth focusing on niche players to see what differentiates them from the competition.
Take lead management for example. AimPromote is a package in this area that is highly focused on the specific need of managing and organising your leads and keeping them on track for your organisation’s aims. There are a number of CRM packages out there that have a module that can do this job, however they aren’t dedicated to the task and this can be seen when you look at AimPromote’s feature list (which has a comparison against Leads360 and SalesForce.com). You can see that there are a number of features that aren’t offered by their competitors and this is the advantage their package brings to play. Leads Management is just one aspect of crm and this package is highly focused in this area.
It’s an interesting idea in that choosing the same package that everyone else uses reduces your exposure to risk, but also reduces your competitive differentiated advantage. This applies not just to crm software, but also other software and processes that your organisation uses. Goes to show how true my Risk Management text is: Risk is good, as it breeds opportunity!