Our reporter Qu Zhongfang reports from Beijing.
In recent years, what Fanxiang customers themselves really feel - or we look forward to the next three to five years of China's CRM (customer relationship management) market, an obvious trend is independent and controllable domestic substitution. Recently, Liu Chen, co-founder and vice president of the business center, said frankly that he was "both happy and a little apprehensive" when he first came into contact with the migration needs, and with the completion of customer migration, the products and service capabilities of domestic CRM SaaS have been verified again and again.
CRM is an important tool for enterprise management, which solves the refined operation and growth needs of enterprises for customers and markets, and is an important part of enterprise digital transformation. Founded in the United States in 1999, Salesforce is an international CRM giant, and domestic mainstream CRM service providers were generally founded around 2010, and have been exploring the development path of CRM SaaS in China for more than ten years. In the past few years, affected by the changes in the international environment, many multinational enterprises and local enterprises have migrated back to domestic CRM software, and domestic manufacturers, including Fanxiang Sales, have benefited from this and undertaken many large customers with such migration needs.
Lin Song, CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Fanxiang Sales, told the reporter of China Business News that in recent years, the cooperation orders for domestic substitution are roughly divided into three categories according to different demands: the first category is rapid substitution, especially some high-tech enterprises that have been included in the "entity list" by the United States, whose demands are to move quickly and realize translation of functions; The second type is that some large enterprises pay attention to real-time, cost reduction and efficiency increase, lean management, etc. in the second review, and replace them after comprehensive consideration; The third category is the business units of some multinational enterprises in the Chinese market, and the needs of this kind of migration are divided into two situations, one is that China needs to use a more independent and flexible system, which pays more attention to the user experience than a general unified system, and the other is that it takes a fancy to the industrial characteristics and localization functions of domestic CRM.
Migrate to a domestic CRMCauses
In addition to the factors of the external environment, Lin Song believes that another core element is that the domestic head CRM manufacturers have experienced more than ten years of trial and continuous investment in the industry, and the overall product and service capabilities have been well verified by large customer groups in many industries, forming a certain reputation and demonstration effect. In other words, from the first side, the overall strength of domestic CRM manufacturers has achieved rapid improvement.
Yizhou Co., Ltd., which will complete the migration and replacement of domestic CRM in 2023, is an intelligent manufacturing enterprise with three intelligent manufacturing industrial parks that radiate the world in Ningbo, Zhejiang, Shangrao, Jiangxi and Chittagong, Bangladesh, with more than 3,000 employees, including more than 400 overseas employees.
When asked why he wanted to change to a domestic CRM, Sun Fengjun, senior vice president of the digital communication division of Yizhou, explained that before 2017, Yizhou's business model adopted the provincial exclusive model, and there were about 20 exclusive ** across the country. In 2017, the strategic change was carried out, breaking the provincial exclusive model, sinking to the prefecture-level channel, and the difficulty of project management increased significantly, and some new problems were prone to arise between people and projects, including in the management of business opportunities. In this case, the initial use of the international factory system also exposed the shortcomings, mainly in the following aspects: first, the high cost, in the process of doing the subsidence of the prefecture and city, more and more channels are introduced, and the high cost of the products of the international factory brings certain pressure; For example, the support for fuzzy search is limited, and when the project registration name is slightly different, the system will often default to two projects. Third, there are often downtime and pauses.
Lin Song said that Fanxiang has accumulated many years of experience in domestic localized operation, and industry cases and best practices are becoming increasingly rich. For example, Fanxiang can respond almost 7x24 hours, and the interaction with customers is closer and more efficient. However, for many foreign software services, customer demands often require email communication, which takes a long time to get a response.
Corporate CIOTransformation in sizing
According to the needs of business management, enterprises select the specifications of hardware, software and technologies to be used, which is called "selection" in the industry, and the CIO (chief information officer) in the enterprise is often responsible for the selection.
Zhang Hui, head of technology at Swiss Re Consulting Shanghai, pointed out that the founders or leaders of many companies, especially those who have studied abroad or participated in many business schools in China, often use software tools from international companies. "If you don't seem to need it, it's not an international company." In recent years, this phenomenon of over-deification of international manufacturers has actually improved, and corporate CIOs tend to be more pragmatic in their selection, from the previous "don't buy the right ones, only buy the expensive ones" to "don't buy the expensive ones, only buy the right ones", and domestic software is becoming more and more common in the selection candidate list.
In Zhang Hui's view, the selection of enterprise management software needs to match the maturity of the enterprise, and the successful selection practice should be a strategic decision involving the whole business chain from top to bottom. CRM is one of the important management software of the enterprise, it involves the entire marketing system, from the general process of CRM selection, first of all, the enterprise should be established within the digital transformation and information management committee, the general manager's office meeting, etc., and the enterprise budget should be done in advance; Secondly, when it comes to the real selection, a selection team is often set up, including the general manager, the vice president in charge of marketing, the chief financial officer, as well as the middle management personnel who do sales management and quality management, and even the operation personnel and sales representatives at the grassroots level, so that we should pay attention to the strategic and management level and the operational level when selecting the model. In addition to the evaluation of technical indicators, we will also pay attention to the market share, implementation ability, integration ability with existing ERP system, existing industry cases and other indicators of CRM software. According to the score table of the comprehensive index, the enterprise selects the candidate service provider, sends a consultation letter to it, invites the service provider to prepare and discuss the corresponding plan, and finally completes the final selection through the comprehensive score.
It is not difficult to see that the reason why there is an opportunity for migration and replacement in the CRM field is the result of the joint action of the supply side and the demand side becoming more and more "mature".
It is worth mentioning that on December 18, 2023, Alibaba Cloud announced that the commercial versions of Salesforce's core sales cloud, service cloud, and platform cloud were officially released to the Chinese market. Through the cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, can Salesforce "grab" back the lost large Chinese enterprise customers and occupy a place in the domestic market? At the same time, what is the result of the head-to-head competition between domestic CRM manufacturers and international giants? Obviously, these issues are the focus of the industry in the CRM field in 2024.
Editor: Wu Qing Proofreader: Zhai Jun).