Microsoft offers cash to lure customers from competitors

Open letter offers users $200 if they switch from Salesforce or Oracle

Microsoft has pledged to offer rebates of up to $200 (£126.50) for each user that makes the switch to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online from the Salesforce and Oracle solutions.

The announcement was timed to coincide with Salesforce's Dreamforce event, which kicked off today in San Francisco, and the offer is valid between now and 30 June, 2011.

Michael Park, corporate vice president in sales, marketing and operations for Microsoft Business Solutions, made the offer in an open letter. He explained that the offer can be applied for services such as migrating data or customising the solution to meet unique business needs.

"If you are looking for a CRM system that will deliver productivity for your people, offer flexibility to your business and work with your existing IT investments, you should consider Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online," Park wrote.

He claims that one firm, Data Reduction Systems, switched from Salesforce and has since saved more than 50 per cent in user costs and reached 100 per cent user adoption.

Another firm, Smead Manufacturing, saw a 75 per cent decrease in annual subscription costs and a 20 per cent increase in user adoption just one month after switching to Dynamics CRM Online.

However, despite firms making cost savings as significant as claimed in the open letter, Microsoft still feels the need to pay cash to entice users from its competitors.

Park continued: "If you are a Salesforce.com customer attending Dreamforce this week, we encourage you to ask the following:

"'In this economy, how can I justify paying two to three times more for an enterprise CRM system than I need to?

"'Having access to the most up-to-date information is critical to my business; why doesn't Salesforce.com provide real-time access to data and dashboards, refreshed whenever I need it like Microsoft does?

"Microsoft works great with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office; why does Salesforce.com want me to start from scratch when it comes to productivity tools for my people?'."

This is not the first time that Microsoft has attempted to pay cash to encourage users to switch from a competitor to its own products. When the firm launched its own search engine, Bing, Microsoft offered cash-back to users every time they searched for an item and then bought it from a participating online store. However, the scheme only had limited success as reports claimed that retailers had increased their prices, which meant that Bing users did not actually benefit.

In the long run, the search engine is still in third place in terms of market share, with findings from ComScore revealing that it holds 11.5 per cent of the search engine market, whereas Yahoo still has a higher percentage, at 16.5 per cent, and Google leads with 66.3 per cent of the market.