As the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side.

The real point of this addage, though, is that this illusion is seldom real. For example, we have a lot of customers who have left Act! thinking they'd get better value, features, or ease-of-use elsewhere. Unfortunately, many have come back to worse off than when they left. Transitioning from one CRM to another is a costly disruptive process, that becomes doubley so when the business owner realises they've made a mistake. This has happened to many of our customers. Customers who succumbed to the internal pressures from new sales or marketing staff, or worse yet, to promises from eager CRM sales people.

I'm embarrassed to admit we experienced this first hand. In 2013 we paid a small fortune to switch from Act! to Sugar CRM, only to discover it slowed us down all day, every day. Little features like timeless activities that we'd use 10-20x a day with Act! were suddenly gone, and we'd scamble to work around their absence. Tasks that would run instantly in Act! were always executed with lags online. This experiment lasted about a month before I pulled the plug, and doubled down on Act!. Fast forward ten years later, we have six times the staff, many times the revenue, and we're all-in on Act!.

This is not to say Act! is perfect for every business. No CRM is. Sometimes one product is a better fit than others based on industry type, integration or deployment needs. However, when everything else remains equal, Act! stands up pretty well against the competition. It's one of the only top-tier CRM products with on & off-premise deployment options, free emarketing service, a robust Web API, a rich addon & support community, and is easy-to-learn. In fact, businesses looking to deploy Act! find it easier to recruit new team members with Act! experience since it has been around for 35+ years.

From a cost perspective, Act! is no slouch either. As the comparison chart below shows, Act! fares pretty well compared to the top players in the industry, with many of the competitors requiring a minimum number of users, and a maximum amount of contacts - neither of which apply to Act!.

When a customer comes to us saying they think they've "outgrown" Act!, we know they've been talking to a CRM salesperson. We have thirty employees spread across North America and India, and thanks to Act!, and Linktivity products, as well as other integrations, we have a very high ceiling for growth.

You can learn more about how Act! fares against the competition HERE, or contact our sales team for a free consultation. You can also click HERE to sign-up for a free 14-day trial of Act! Premium Cloud, and be instantly furnished with demo data that allows you to test the experience with real, non-production data that can be quickly purged when you're ready to move forward.