Caleb Olthoff, CRM project leader at Absolute Performance, has written a recent explanation of why his company ditched Salesforce.com (News - Alert).

The company, Absolute Performance, provides application performance monitoring and management software as a service. Their sales team started using Salesforce.com in 2005 and their customer support team has used Parature since 2007.

“These systems have worked for us for the last few years, but main issues have been higher cost and lower productivity,” Olthoff said. “Our users have to go through too many steps to get to the final result. We also have to make frequent double entries. After winning a new customer we have to enter to Parature (News - Alert) as a new account. Customer issues are entered into Parature but the sales team has no idea of on-going issues with the customer account.”

Sounds pretty clunky. So a few months ago, to “improve our operational efficiency and reduce cost by selecting one system,” they Olthoff put together a list of necessary functionalities in a document (RFP) which was sent to vendors.

“After we received responses back from vendors, based on the answers provided, we selected four top vendors Zoho, ConnectWise (News - Alert), Sugar CRM and Soffront. Salesforce.com and Parature did not make this list since they did not have many of the features we needed,” he noted.

Olthoff selected Soffront due to these reasons, he said:

Ability to customize. Even though everyone offered some level of customization, Soffront came out at the top. “Also with Soffront we can do most of the customization ourselves.”

Time tracking module. Soffront was able to track and report time better than others.

Ease of navigation. “We found Soffront to be easy to use and navigate. We can configure different views to show all relevant information on one screen.”

Multi-table display and reporting. Others seemed to lack this feature.

Customer service. Soffront’s pre-sales team support “handled our needs in a timely manner. We were able to see demos, receive quotes and get set up quickly.”