Deciding whether to choose a best of breed CRM solution or a comprehensive application suite has challenged the NFP sector for a long time. There is no single best application strategy for all organisations – the key to a successful CRM implementation is finding a solution that fits your business best.

With several of our clients currently reviewing the CRM marketplace, we thought it was timely to discuss the big debate – "Best of Breed" or multi-functional CRM suites?

It's clear that as organisations become more competitive, the demand is increasing for comprehensive, integrated end-to-end solutions. These solutions need to be tailored to deliver the data and information required to make business critical decisions and to achieve growth through profitable customer and stakeholder relationships.

So, as an organisation, which CRM solution should you buy? One that touts itself as being best of breed, or one claiming to do it all?

By definition, best of breed is the best product of its type. Organisations often purchase software from different vendors in order to obtain the best-of-breed for each application area; for example, a CRM system from one vendor and an accounting package from another. These applications tend to focus on the depth of product functionality, providing the best solution to a particular set of problems. You can expect them to provide more functionality.

The downside is that these software packages are unlikely to talk to most of your other best of breed software. Therefore, it's likely that you will need to spend money on either re-keying data from one system to another or creating the integration to synchronise the information.

Full-suite solutions, however, focus on product breadth. They provide a wide variety of applications that address many, if not most, of an organisation's needs. They consist of the core CRM system, but they also offer extended functionality in other areas, such as financials, order and inventory management, events management and ecommerce. You can usually expect each of these product areas to be closely, if not seamlessly integrated.

However, it is likely that they will not provide all of the functionality that you may want, as it is difficult to excel in every niche. You may also find, like so many of our clients, that you will have to spend money on adding functionality and customisations. Because of these customisations, future software upgrades may tend to be more expensive than you expect.

And because suite applications extend functionality beyond just CRM, the application has to be more things to more users. This is not in itself a disadvantage, but it is important to consider the additional users who stand to be impacted by the system.

So, the question is, what should you consider before making your decision about the best CRM solution for your organisation? From our work with various clients, these are our thoughts...

Integration

When evaluating best-of-breed versus suite application solutions for your organisation, it is important to consider your existing technology and infrastructure.

Best-of-breed applications weren't built to do everything, but they should support technologies to communicate easily with standard technologies. Customers focussing on functionality that is available only in best of breed CRM systems, will acquire those applications and then incur the system integration in order to benefit from the specialised functionality. Several of our clients have taken this approach.

Buying a best of breed solution could mean agreeing to an on-going costly process of integration with other enterprise systems and the maintenance that accompanies integration. System administration issues, such as software upgrades, may prove to take longer and hence, be more costly.

It is important to consider how you will deal without a single point of contact for support and problem resolution with multiple vendor integrated systems. What additional steps will you put in place so that resolution time frames don't prolong user downtime or result in a loss of user confidence?

At the same time, organisations must recognise that CRM suites may not be better integrated than the best-of-breed approach. No CRM suite vendor provides the ability to integrate with other vendors' applications, particularly other suite vendors. This is not surprising, as each supplier hopes to "own" all of your front office applications.

This difficulty, in essence, is in the architecture and product philosophy of these applications. Should you focus your implementation costs on configuration of your system, or on the potential costly prospect of building and maintaining integration points to other systems?

A Single View

Does every user need visibility to every marketing campaign, customer service record and all correspondence in a single location or a single holistic view? More often than not, best of breed solutions use multiple databases and provide piecemeal visibility of the customer relationship. Each vendor retains a core element in their own repository and the user must know where to go and review several screens to get the consolidated picture.

Rarely do they consolidate customer information in a single view for a complete picture or follow consistent practices with regards to the user interface and navigation, thereby, putting an increased learning curve on the user community.

Reporting across these multiple data sources may also be difficult and costly.

However, suite applications, by their very nature, do provide the one, consolidated view. Reporting is therefore very much easier and more often than not, in the end-user's control.

Flexibility

Your business is dynamic - what it needs today is not what it will need in 5 years to survive in a competitive marketplace. Your CRM solution should have this same flexibility.

Best-of-breed applications offer greater solution flexibility. They focus on CRM, leaving other aspects to be serviced by your own selection of business tools and processes. Selecting a best-of-breed CRM application leaves the door open to select a best in breed point solution (for example, an eCommerce platform) where you feel your business will most benefit from it.

By contrast, application suites can give you a broader solution out of the box if that's what you need. An application suite may buy you the integration to supported systems, and configuration of these integrated systems can be fairly rapid. However, because of the depth of integration between systems, you might find less flexibility in a suite solution to custom tailor the CRM functionality. If you were ever to outgrow a suite application, you would need to consider the costs of migrating to best of breed solutions or an entirely new suite.

Decisions, Decisions...

Some of our clients purchased their CRM a long time ago and are not looking to replacing it now. However, they still have to meet other business needs and so, they are spending time acquiring best of breed solutions and then carrying out the necessary integration. Other clients are looking for a new CRM solution, but don't necessarily want to replace their other systems, which they are happy with (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

If you are looking for the most functionality at the lowest price, then you are likely to favour going with best of breed software.

If you are looking for a "one stop shop", then you will likely go with a multi-functional CRM suite. Many of our clients are reluctant to go with this option because of the risk of being tied to one supplier. In either case, you probably do not need total integration. There is some information that needs to be passed between applications and some that does not. So, rather than full blown integration, look at an information management strategy that selectively exchanges data between applications. The cost of integration will be greatly reduced and upgrading your software applications will be a much easier project [translate that to less expensive].

Conclusion

The moral of the story? Choose a solution based on functionality, and check that integration really works. After all, you need a system that will work with current data and existing applications and that can adapt to changes, upgrades and new systems in your environment.

Comparing best of breed CRM systems with single vendor CRM suite solutions can become an exercise in weighing increased functionality with ease of system administration from stronger vendor accountability, user simplicity and smoother upgrade and evolutional transitions. But when evaluating any solution, it's important to first analyse current and anticipated business requirements, and build a strategy based on these needs. It's important to obtain the right balance between depth of functionality, product flexibility, and integration costs. By carefully considering your environment and evaluating solutions against realistic benefits, you will ultimately find a solution that meets the needs of your organisation while maximising the company's financial health.

Finally, when best-of-breed vendors merge, they are essentially creating full-suite solutions, providing customers with systems that integrate well and have a clear migration path. As this happens, it eliminates the need to choose between best-of-breed and full-suite solutions, because customers can have both. Therefore, it can be argued, that when two best-of-breed vendors merge to create a tight relationship between product lines, everyone wins.