Salesnet and Qualte to Partner

This week Salesnet announced that users of its hosted SFA solution will be able to integrate with Qualte's online customer service solution. The announcement marks another step in the evolution of the hosted CRM model, as hosted sales and service solutions become more robust. "When you look at the scope and quality of Qualte's customer service solution, there's no comparison to anything any other hosted solution offers," says Mike Doyle, chairman and CEO of Salesnet. "And we feel our SFA solution has more depth than the broad but shallow solutions like Salesforce.com." Peter Kim, CEO of Qualte says that his company partnered with Salesnet because both companies were like-minded about not spreading themselves too thin. "Both companies wanted to focus on a best-of-breed approach and continue doing what we do best and not divide our own resources," says Kim. Doyle says the partnership with Qualte is just one in an ongoing serious of partnerships with best of breed providers which will allow Salesnet customers to fully utilize the benefits of ASP technology. "Our goal is to beat Salesforce.com at its own game," Doyle adds. "We will also be forging partnerships with traditional client-server providers of back-end solutions who realize the ASP model is the future of software," Doyle says. Karen Smith, research director with the Aberdeen Group, says that Salesnet is on the right track with this strategic partnership. "Nowadays, software vendors need to be looking into forming partnerships that will benefit their customers by giving them exactly what they need in the way of best of breed solutions," she says. Smith also says that as more and more companies seriously consider hosted solutions because they can be less costly, Salesnet will be a major competitor if it continues to partner with other companies to offer even more CRM services. The combined solution is readily available, Doyle says, and two customers, Transform and Pictage, have already been using the products in tandem for several months. "It was critical that we select fully customizable solutions," Bard Betz, CEO of Transform, a medical transcription service company, said in a statement. "We didn't want to go with an all-in-one CRM solution because we felt it would be too rigid to support our core business processes. By integrating Salesnet and Qualte, we have implemented a best-of-breed CRM strategy that we believe will deliver the results we need." Doyle says that the integration of Salesnet and Qualte can be completed in less than 48 hours and also enables companies to seamlessly share critical sales data with customer service.