The one customer relationship management (CRM) application that showed promise also held a problem for SoftSource Solutions.

A storage and data management company, Softsource Solutions liked the CRM package by salesforce.com: It would allow sales forecasting to be more consistent - a science instead of an art.

The irony was that Softsource would have no say on where its customer data would be kept. As the solution was totally Web-based, its precious customer database would be stored on the Net, on the servers of salesforce.com. But because business partner and client IBM regarded CRM very highly, director and co-founder Ho Chin Cheng also started to look seriously at CRM software two years ago.

In fact, CRM was something the 41-year old had wanted to adopt when the company came into being 11 years ago. But he stalled for fear of costs.

'From our interactions with our clients, we know many of them use CRM. And they spend millions on it,' Mr Ho said. 'We had also heard of a lot of failures, but the fact that companies continued to invest in it must mean it has value.'

The five-strong sales team had earlier relied on Excel to keep track of sales leads and prospects. At the time, the sales team was small - there were three sales persons - and it wasn't difficult for the sales director and management to keep track of the clients they were seeing. 'We called it management by sight!' recalled Mr Ho.

Different perceptions

Softsource provides storage expertise and management solutions, in niche areas like storage area networks (SANs), data recovery and archival.

Typically, it takes three to four months to win a client, and during this time, each sales representative submits reports in an Excel spreadsheet.

Sales director Spencer Siew explained that the problem he faced at the time was that team members had different standards for evaluating clients.

'One person's 25 per cent could be another person's 75 per cent,' said Mr Siew, who is in his 40s.

Another issue: high turnover of sales staff. And when people left, knowledge was not passed down.

Determined to improve matters, Mr Ho looked into contact management software like Goldmine and Act. Then, he received an e-mail from salesforce.com.

He replied, and was offered a free 30-day salesforce.com account. He liked what he saw. The salesforce.com staff also recommended that Softsource hook up with a partner of theirs, InterAktiv, which worked with Mr Ho and Mr Siew to cobble systems in place for the sales process.

Rolling out the new system took just two weeks. Then came the most daunting task of 'selling CRM to the sales staff', said Mr Teng Chuan Hiang, a partner at InterAktiv.

'The immediate perception is that management is watching over (us),' said Mr Siew. It took time and training but Softsource's sales staff were won over to the software's benefits, including being able to track all interactions with sales prospects. They could find out what solutions customers had bought.

And if any sales staff left, another could take over without losing ground.

The company, which made $6.5 million in 2006, and now has 26 staff members, is now in the final stages of getting the support and service staff to use CRM.

As to Mr Ho's fear of having precious company data in someone else's hands?

This is how Mr Teng from InterAktiv puts it: 'It's like a kind of mental barrier. The closest analogy is keeping your Rolex watch in a safe at home. But isn't it more secure to keep it in the bank's vault?'

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