Salesforce.com: What Your CFO Needs to Know

Finance departments must be involved in major procurement decisions, to make sure the business case is done properly. They need to set aside CAPEX allocations and understand the ongoing consequences for OPEX budgets. They need to know what the new system can do for them (if anything), and how the new system will integrate with existing systems of record in the company.

Whether your finance department is a one-man band or a big organization, they need to understand how SaaS applications (and particularly Salesforce CRM) change a lot of the financial assumptions. What issues do you need to think about? What new decisions will you have to make? How should you measure success? Here are some CFO guidelines for making better decisions. While much of this article applies to any SaaS CRM system, we've focused here on the specifics of Salesforce.com.

Making the Business Case There are two sides to every business case: costs and benefits. While analyzing the SFDC investment is way beyond the scope of this article, here are the three main factors that come into play.

TCO comprises three major elements: procurement, implementation, and operations. Let's look at them in turn:

Procurement:These are monthly fees that vary by the number and type of users, product version, length of contractual commitment, and willingness to prepay. Do not expect SFDC or any other SaaS vendor to discount as aggressively as enterprise software vendors do.

Implementation: You will almost certainly need consulting and other services to configure the system, convert legacy data, integrate with other systems, write custom code, test the system, deploy it, and train users.

The biggest cost of implementation will not be system customization: it'll be data and integration. Don't be surprised if cleaning up data and integrating with your existing systems costs more than your first-year license fees.

Do not neglect support fees during the implementation period. You'll need speed of access and in-depth expertise that is available only through premium support.

Ongoing Costs: Beyond the monthly subscription fees discussed above, the ongoing costs for SaaS are typically one-time costs for things like data recovery or purchase of an add-on (such as a data deduping tool).

The most interesting ongoing costs are related to people: follow-on implementation or expansion work, training costs for new users or administrators, travel and fees for "power users" attending technical conferences (a good investment), and consulting time for cleaning up data pollution problems that are almost inevitable in large systems.

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