GB Advisors is a software re-seller for many companies in the world concentrating its sales efforts in Latin America, USA and Canada. In perspective Latin America is a very broad multicultural region with many languages, currencies and tax structures. I believe that any company that survives the perils of working in Latin America can exponentially grow anywhere else in the world.
Our organization has had ups and downs like any other small business making whatever possible to grow in this competitive region. To put in context we started 12 years ago in Puerto Rico, a small but upcomming island at the time with 4 million citizens. Said this, it is a limited market with lots of competition in the IT services area.
This is when we decided to make a change in our business and started selling software B2B. Back then we started using excel sheets and had only a few amounts of leads yearly. Building a sales department is a huge undertaken that any business has to invest for a while without any returns, it is basically an investment in the future. But we knew that this was a break or make moment for our organization if we didn't take action back then (2010).
Since then we outgrew the excel sheets and needed a way to better document, share and process our sales, we were growing and complexity started to kick in. We decided to try multiple small CRM systems in the market. We started with Act! though great reporting capabilities and well organized, but it became clear early on that we cannot modify our business process to adapt to a simple tool.
So we switched to SugarCRM. We decided to install Sugar and loved it for a while until we had to start maintain it and then the pain came in. It demanded more maintenance and at the end we didn't see the benefit in our small organization to be wasting so much time doing so.
This is when we decided to start looking at SaaS providers and looked at SugarCRM first but found their price to be high for the return we were getting in functionality, so it was discarded quickly. We looked at SalesForce and it was priced to high for our budget, also some additional functionalities added to the base price $$$$. We tested many solutions only to find they were either overpriced or under functional.
When we almost gave up I came across this open source software that also had a version online for customers called vTiger. It was an all inclusive platform that was priced right for us at the time, and when I say all inclusive I am talking about, sales, support & marketing. I was ecstatic to have found what I was looking for. No other platform could gives us that amount of features for the price.
So now the question was about how much I believe in a small upcoming company that I didn't know anything about. Many questions came up in my head like, what type of service they give to customers? is the platform updated enough? is my information available all the time? In my experience to have an answer to those questions its only a matter of time. So I decided to bet our time and investment in vTiger, and it payed off hugely.
Let me start by saying that vTiger is hands down one of the best customer service oriented companies I’ve interacted with, even when they were starting out! and this gives me very good levels of tranquility everyday. Additionally we see every two to three weeks improvements on the platform, I mean updates, bug fixes, and additional functionality. You know they (vTiger personnel) are at it, working hard to have the best business resources for their customers ASAP. We feel like an investor on technology more than a customer of vTiger, because we can see and feel the fruit of our investment.
Today we use about 60% of vTigers features and functionality and we feel that we are at 110% delivery with only 50% capacity in our resources. This is what vTiger means to us, the ability to grow without having to invest proportionally in more internal resources.
The amount of changes and customization's we've done to vTiger is outstanding and this is only possible because of the flexibility of the platform. Currently we have more than 50+ workflows, 100+ reports, 30+ custom fields, Email Marketing Campaigns and Autoresponders.
One of the highlights was the ability to share reporting information with our Manufacturing partners about our pipeline specific to each partner.
Next in our plans with vTiger is the migration of our quoting and price books system into vTiger.
In conclusion, vTiger has meant for our business the ability to grow our customer base without the need of growing proportionally internally. The highlights of our business relationship with vTiger has been:
- Configuration of the entire platform to meet of specific business needs
- Workflows and automation of business processes and rules
- Superb Customer Support
- All-in-one feature rich CRM platform priced like no other
GB Advisors has been a subscriber for 3 years and an avid user of the VTiger CRM for Business SaaS platform
