SaaS CRM in India

Last week I had interesting conversation with CIO of global pharmaceutical corporation. This happened when we are trying to explain him on the advantages of SaaS CRM and Cloud. His points were simple and straight forward.

He says that company like theirs had invested in hardware and on-premise software for long time.

He asked us justification on why he should pay recurring charge for On-Demand CRM application. He would jolly well get proposed CRM functionality developed with in that money as on-premise software. He says in India he can get developers / support staff in much cheaper rates so its finding difficult for him to understand rationale on the recurring cost.

He suggested that SaaS software works well for SMB in India and not for large corporations like theirs.

When I look back I find it reasonable from his point of view.

I guess all SaaS vendors should come with proper ROI framework for these large corporations. I see generalized ROI templates but these would go well with these large corporations. These templates should be customizable for each company. That way as part of pre-sales exercise vendors would be able to show clear value add and ROI specific to each company. I am working on such template and would share the same once its done.