Chad Gabriel

When it comes to customer satisfaction, knowing everything about your customers and their interactions with your business is crucial to beating out the competition. But what do you do when everyone seems to be buying the same solution? Where does your competitive advantage come from?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems seem to be all over the place. Just about every big SaaS provider offers one. In 2008, when SaaS wasn’t even a cool new IT acronym yet, we had a big decision to make. Do we want to build our own or buy an existing CRM?

At the time I led our application development team, today they call it software engineering. I had a team of developers and designers that were capable of doing whatever we dreamt possible. My team consisted of two SAP ABAP developers, one web designer/developer, an SEO specialist, and an SAP security analyst. When the economy tanked in 2008 we decided to get very serious about being a process-based company and my team was at the very center of it. We pulled global teams together from every functional area in the business to document our current reality and design our to-be state for all processes and supporting systems. We knew exactly what we wanted these systems to do.

So what do we do? We considered many criteria including cost per user, functionality, reliability, usability, right-sized, reputation, the total cost of ownership, time to implement, and ease of updating to name a few. We evaluated four key players in the CRM space including Salesforce, SAP CRM, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. After running the numbers and presenting these options and my recommendation to our CEO, he looked at me and asked “what if we build it ourselves?”

Here’s how the conversation went…

CEO: "These are all very expensive solutions. How do we know we're getting what we need?"
Me: "We've closely analyzed and evaluated all of these solutions for the best fit based on all of these criteria, spending most of our time ensuring we're getting what we need for the business and our newly redefined processes" (or something along those lines).
CEO: "But if everyone can just go out and buy this solution, how does that give us a competitive advantage? What if we're paying for more than what we need?"
Me: 🤔
CEO: "You and your team are very talented. Let's take a closer look at whether this is viable and makes sense to pursue."

We took a closer look and realized we had the capability to build this on our own and to do a really good job at it. So we built it. We built a front-end for our customers and a back-end for our employees. We had everything we needed in the system: online ordering, payment processing, shipment tracking, order status, feedback mechanisms, product availability, screen popping for when customers called us, Net Promoter Score (NPS) integration, and, of course, analytics. It was responsive. It was ahead of its time. It was solid. It was custom fit to our process. We implemented it in six months. From scratch. Yes, we had a lot of nights that went into the early morning, but we ordered pizza, pumped up the jams, and had a ton of fun building it. My team and I will never forget what it took to pull off this monumental effort. In fact, it earned our IT department our first ever InformationWeek 500 recognition, which we went on to earn again in 2010 for our innovative practices.

We saved the business over $1M over the course of the 12 years our solution was used. It wasn’t until 2020 when it began being replaced by Salesforce due to the new flexibility, decrease in licensing cost for company’s our size, and new mobile usage requirements.

Image by Juraj Varga from Pixabay