SugarCRM in the news: Macquarie win, LinkedIn’s Impact and in-time IT

chrisbucholtz —  February 26, 2013 — 1 Comment

The past week has seen SugarCRM grabbing headlines literally all over the world. Here are some of the more unusual, noteworthy and significant stories that SugarCRM has been a part of over the last week or so:

ARN: InsightfulCRM inks $2m contract with Macquarie University

SugarCRM partner InsightfulCRM has been working with Macquarie University in Australia for more than two years; last week, the two organizations signed a four-year, $2 million contract that will see InsightfulCRM extend SugarCRM campus-wide. Since Sugar was built with openness in mind, the system will integrate with Macquarie’s open-source back-end systems.

Business Insider: LinkedIn is a Reason Startups Raise More Money, Angel Investor Says

Julie Bort says the trend toward angel investors sinking money into enterprise startups is driven by LinkedIn’s success – and she’s not asking you to take her word for it. She drew her conclusion based on an interview with SugarCRM Larry Augustin, who said huge rounds of funding are driven by “Social networks like LinkedIn… because it’s become so much easier to find angels or stay in touch with the ones you know.”

Enterprise Efficiency: Building a Digital Company: When IT is Too Late

“Most companies think of bringing in technology at exactly the wrong time,” writes SugarCRM CTO Clint Oram in this commentary on how to make your business vision match up with technology. Of course, you need a strategy and a vision first – but don’t wait too long to make the technology part of the equation, Clint warns. “By building strategies and processes from the ground up around digital technology, companies will outperform those that don’t.”

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Numbers don’t lie: SugarCRM’s momentum continues to build

chrisbucholtz —  February 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

The numbers for 2012 are in, and they revealed that SugarCRM isn’t just maintaining its momentum –it’s picking up steam. Off a remarkable 2011, SugarCRM showed total revenue growth of 60 percent over the previous year, subscriber seats doubled in number and annual recurring revenue in the enterprise space leaped by 250 percent.

That last figure is one of the things that makes Sugar such an interesting CRM platform. Enormous companies find that it scales to suit their needs – in fact, a major multinational technology and consulting corporation went live with the first 7,000 seats of a 69,000-seat company wide deployment in the third quarter. At the same time, SugarCRM continues to gain smaller companies as customers at a blistering rate.

Reaching those smaller customers and enabling them to take advantage of Sugar’s flexibility depends on our 400 reseller partners. In Q4 2012, Sugar welcomed 21 partners, making 130 new partners added in 2012 serving customer of all sizes.

Sugar also boosted its technology partnership efforts in 2012. In Q4 2012, SugarCRM expanded its relationship with Box, and announce a new partnership with DocuSign to help users close deals more quickly by automating the signature and contract tracking process. Sugar also announced integrations in Q4 with VMWare, Act-On Software, Next Principles, Alteva, Lucid Imagination, Entrinsik and many more.

Want the entire scoop on SugarCRM’s outstanding year and evolving set of partnerships? Check out the full press release here.

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Business Insider says you can bet your career on SugarCRM

chrisbucholtz —  February 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

Have you ever read something in the newspaper or seen it on the evening news and though, “well, heck! Why is this news? I knew that!”

We kind of felt that way when we read that SugarCRM was among the “25 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On” in Business Insider. But, of course, we here have some inside information.

Not to blow our own horns… Well, okay. We’re going to blow our own horns. With a growing list of partners, an ever expanding galaxy of customers and an engineering team that’s focused on delivering on the idea of CRM for everyone, we’re doing important work in making CRM a tool for the entire business instead of a point solution for sales or support. And, by building a platform that integrates easily with other applications, we’re giving customers the freedom to build their own software ecosystems and the ability to make it work with a minimum of cost and hassle.

The companies on this list is impressive and include Box.net and Good Data – which already integrate with Sugar, giving us another leg up.

Want to join the team? Take a peek at Sugar’s career page  and see how you can place your bet on SugarCRM.

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Paul Greenberg picks SugarCRM as a CRM Watchlist Winner

chrisbucholtz —  February 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Every year, Paul Greenberg compiles his Watch List, which collects the companies Paul thinks will have the biggest impact that year. Paul’s criteria include:

  1. A breakout product
  2. Seizing thought leadership in some related area
  3. Market impact
  4. The company’s sheer size and continued long term existence guarantees them impact pretty much regardless of who they are and how well they do.
  5. A major initiative that will change the way the market works.
  6. Continued really good performance year over year with an expectation that they will be seen and recognized for that in 2012
  7. Fabulous customer achievements but to the level of setting an industry standard
  8. Impact in a particular distinguishable geographic market
  9. Faith that they will do something worthy of public recognition (that’s the subjective part).
  10. All of the above
  11. Other things he didn’t mention

Essentially, Paul has outlined the characteristics of a heavy-hitter or a game-changer in the CRM space (and he’s provided himself with room for a bit of interpretation, too).

Each year, he increases the rigor for selecting the Watchlist; this year he worked to get questionnaire submissions from vendors that would inform his choices, and that questionnaire was not insignificant in size.

Those criteria and that rigor are the reason we at SugarCRM are pleased to report that we’re CRM Watchlist winners (as we were in 2012). It’s not just that Paul likes us as people – Paul likes a lot of people in the CRM industry, and the feeling is largely mutual, but not everyone’s a Watchlist winner. He likes what we’re doing, and he spells out what we need to do in the future.

One of the more incisive observations he makes is that even as SugarCRM takes aim on attracting larger customers, it’s building its messaging around the idea of the user first – or, as Paul phrases it, taking aim on a market of one. “How do you appeal to a company needing thousands of seats when your target is the individual user without being lost in a morass of homogenous faces?” Paul asks.

We have plans for doing this – and our customers are already showing us concrete examples of how helping the individual user get the most from CRM maximizes the value of CRM for the entire organization.

Some of our customers will be sharing those examples at SugarCon in April – and event that will also show how we’re taking the “user-first” concept to new levels in upcoming releases that are more social, more mobile and more powerful in their ability to make front-line users’ jobs easier and more productive.

We couldn’t be more pleased that Paul selected us for the Watchlist – and we’re equally pleased that Paul will deliver the SugarCon keynote address on April 9. He’ll be the first in a long series of important CRM thinkers, analysts and observers who are coming to the show to speak or conduct sessions – a Watchlist of CRM influencers, if you will.

Thanks to Paul for his kind words and his challenge to Sugar for 2013. We’re looking forward to living up to his expectations – and those of our customers – and to making the list again in 2014!

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How “future-proof” is your CRM application?

chrisbucholtz —  February 1, 2013 — 1 Comment

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” sang John Lennon. He was talking about life in general – and in specific the future life of his son Sean in the song “Beautiful Boy” – but the sentiment is applicable to all kinds of situations – including CRM.

All successful CRM implementations start with planning – and plenty of it, the precise amount determined by the size and organizational complexity of the business in question. Those plans take into consideration what’s going on now and what is likely to happen in the near future. The result is a solution that, if implemented quickly, makes it easier to manage customer data (with the associated increase in revenue, customer loyalty and new sales) now and for a time of undetermined length after that.

But you want to assure yourself that the investment you’re making in CRM is not just for a brief future whose end will be determined by outside influences. For example, if your business sees an opportunity in a regulated industry like health care, insurance or human resources, you don’t want to be in a position where you have to weigh that opportunity against the costs of abandoning a cloud-based CRM application in favor of an on-site CRM application. Similarly, if you discover new lead management or a sales alerting software that’s a perfect fit for your organization, you don’t want to be in a position where you have to weigh its value against the high costs of integration.

You could also find that local data storage laws change. That could force you to move to an on-site option. Or, you could decide that economic conditions make a switch to the cloud the best option for your business.

What you want is a CRM application that “future proofs” the company around these kinds of choices. That means a range of deployment options that permits you to transition between delivery models as circumstances and resources require. If your CRM is provided in one flavor – on-site only, or just in the cloud – you may be stuck when business needs dictate a change. It may be possible to alter the delivery approach on a one-off basis, but that carries with it significant expense.

Liberation from a technology stack is also a way to future proof your company. Most large CRM vendors have gathered a set of ancillary software solutions and integrate them with the CRM product, which is great – if your needs are served precisely by all those solutions. But innovation does not often come from the big vendors; it comes from smaller companies, and it usually isn’t part of a large vendor’s technology stack. If you want to be agile and able to employ the latest technology when it’s the best fit for your business, you need a CRM application that’s more flexible and designed to integrate easily with any software, not just those stamped with the same brand as the CRM application.

SugarCRM’s objective is to be “future-proof;” not only do we keep all the options open for deployment models, we also keep your options open for the applications you can use to give your sales, marketing and support teams an edge over their competition.

By doing so, we think we can deliver a better ROI over the long term – and we can build better, longer and more fruitful relationships with our own customers by not limiting their choices.

Is there anything we can do to become more “future-proof?” Let us know in the comments!

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CRM for the “Digital” Age: how well does Sugar fit the bill?

chrisbucholtz —  January 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

In a recent blog, Ernst & Young’s Laurence Buchanan quite astutely pointed out that we are entering a new age of CRM. For want of better terms, he defined the age we’re leaving as the “analog” age and the age we’re entering as the “digital” age, primarily because the penetration of digital technology has had a change in the way businesses reach customers and vice versa.

Laurence delivered a tremendous keynote at SugarCon 2011 that touched on these topics (you can see it on SlideShare)  but this blog expands on these ideas, and it led Laurence to these set of characteristics of a “digital age” CRM application:

  • Designed for Customers and front line customer-facing staff, not just for management
  • Focused on speed to value and positive internal momentum
  • Designed with a core foundation (e.g. data, processes) but able to embrace change at the front-end of customer interaction (i.e. devices, apps, social networks etc.)
  • Delivered in an iterative fashion with constant business involvement
  • Open and integratable in nature (often made up of a collection of services rather than a single package)
  • Cross-functional in nature, busting through internal silos
  • Paid for based on value delivered to the business

It’s always great to see a respected thinker independently assert ideas that you hold dear, and that’s what Laurence has done here. He wasn’t talking specifically about Sugar, but he articulated many of the ideas that SugarCRM has used to build its platform. Here are a couple ways that Sugar achieves that:

“Designed for Customers and front-line customer-facing staff, not just for management:” This is the heart of SugarCRM’s “user first” philosophy. There’s no point in designing an application that caters to management and focuses on reporting if the people who feed data into the system (the front-line customer-facing staff) don’t use it. Sugar’s constant focus on the front-line user means that managers get better, more accurate data to work from, and the users clearly how using the application makes their jobs easier, makes them more in commissions, allows them to market better, or enables them to provide better support. A CRM application should make everyone better at his or her job, not just the sales manager.

“Focused on speed to value and positive internal momentum:” This is such a vital consideration we created a white paper about this very subject.  It’s critical that you take this into account, not just at the time of the initial deployment but as new features are added. The paper suggests that you ask yourself, ”from the time you begin deployment of a CRM solution, how long did it take before the solution delivered real business value as measured by criteria that you defined? We believe that with the right approach, you can achieve measurable business value from CRM in as little as 30 days.”

Of course, deployment time can be affected by outside influences, like the quality of the data you start with. But when the application is designed with this notion of speed to value as a critical attribute, you’re far more likely to see a return on investment – not just a faster ROI, but ROI in general, since delays can harm your ability to gain user buy-in and the universal adoption that leads to a truly effective CRM system.

“Designed with a core foundation (e.g. data, processes) but able to embrace change at the front-end of customer interaction (i.e. devices, apps, social networks etc.).” Sugar’s basic functionality is solid, but there’s a lot more to it than just the basics. As you get beyond the core sales force automation features you’ll see not only built-in support for mobility  (and that means mobility on all major devices) and for social media input (via activity streams), but also an unparalleled ability to integrate with the applications that are key to running your business.  Which leads directly to…

“Open and integratable in nature (often made up of a collection of services rather than a single package).” That doesn’t mean applications or services from a specific technology stack, as in the case with other major CRM vendors. That means the applications you select because they’re the right choices for your business. Because flexibility and integration are two more basic tenets in the Sugar design philosophy, and because SugarCRM works with over 400 resellers worldwide to deliver the application, it’s far easier and far les expensive to maintain that control over your business software systems. The vendor doesn’t dictate which applications you will use; you decide what’s best for you.

Laurence wasn’t describing SugarCRM in his blog post, but we’re exceedingly pleased that his choice of words fits us so well!

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A Five Step Strategy for Engaging in Social Selling

Clint Oram —  January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

The shift from transactional selling to solution selling has turned business people into something akin to therapists. Today’s best sales people need to immerse themselves in their customers’ problems and create customized, long-term solutions to these challenges. They can’t just take orders for what they have on the shelf, but rather map their products to their customers’ pain points and unlock the value of their solution.

It’s the difference between saying, “Would you like to super size your French fries?,” and asking, “So you need French fries. Tell us more about the current lack of fries in your organization. Have you considered Belgian fries? If you had better fries, would you be better positioned to hit your goals?” Customer problems are far more complex these days, which means it’s your job to think through the in-depth answers.

Social selling tools, or “social CRM,” can help businesses understand these new and complex problems, and address them (and solve them) even before their customers can properly articulate them. By staying social with customers, you can identify and squash problems before they affect a business – something for which your customers may never stop thanking you.

Unfortunately, not enough companies make it possible for their employees to talk to each other in this manner, much less talk to customers: A recent study from IABC and Prescient Digital Media notes that 39 percent of companies don’t have any social tools on their intranets. On the other hand, research is showing that the benefits of this social interaction are real: An ongoing McKinsey & Company study is clocking such outcomes as increased market share and reduced time to market.

Social tools are a big help in gaining benefits like faster time to market and higher customer satisfaction, but they need to work in concert with each other to have any real impact. Random tweets and off-the-cuff blog posts that are not part of a larger customer relationship strategy will just become noise. Here’s a more cohesive, five step approach to creating an ongoing dialogue with customers and showcasing the good work that you do to ensure satisfaction.

Social CRM building block #1: Your social profile. If you haven’t done it already, create your LinkedIn or Xing (in Europe) profiles.  This is where you list your industry experience and tell the world why you enjoy selling what you sell.  You will be amazed at how often your prospects and customers look at your LinkedIn profile to see who you are, what you look like, where you went to school, how long you have been in the industry.  They want to know what makes you tick.  Why?  Because people buy from people.

Social CRM building block #2: Your blog. This is where you expand on the ideas you have been posting to Twitter and LinkedIn. Think of the blog as the online equivalent of giving a keynote speech at an event. You’ll profess your position on issues most important to your customers, and see if you can generate any interest (in this case, via comments on blog posts). Posting at least once a week will help your audience get into the habit of turning to your blog for guidance.  Starting your personal blog at wordpress.com is easy and free.  Figuring out what to post can be harder.  This is where you should focus more on being conversational than pontific and let your natural voice that you use with your customers come out.  What do you talk about with your prospects every day?  Well, write it up in a series of short blog posts.

Social CRM building block #3: Dialogue in the Forums. If your company doesn’t have a corporate forums site, it’s easy to start a Group in LinkedIn about your company or just your industry. Think of this as the Q&A session that follows your keynote speech. This is where the conversation really starts. Ideally, you and your team start these conversations with provocative questions, like: Why do we even need XYZ product? Why can’t anyone seem to solve such-and-such a problem? Then listen to the answers, and keep the dialogue going. Don’t waste everyone’s time with “soft” questions – you need to hear the dirt if you’re really going to uncover the customer problems you need to solve. For key members of the sales team, I’d suggest spending at least one hour a day on reading, developing, and responding to such questions.

Social CRM building block #4: Twitter: Here’s where you start getting the word out about the insightful conversations you’re having in the discussion forums, and the thought leadership that appears on your blog. Tweet out the best nuggets from the forums, engage in skirmishes (hopefully, polite ones) among the subject-matter experts and begin attracting attention for the community you are building. Posting at least once a day will entice your audience to connect and follow your online commentary. I suggest using HootSuite, a free social media tool, to help you monitor your social activity streams and quickly post to your social outlets.  I also like Paper.li for automatically tweeting content on a daily basis that I find interesting.

Social CRM building block #5: Internal social networks: This step doesn’t involve direct communication with customers, but it does help you disseminate the knowledge you’ve gained to the rest of our team. And by the “team,” I don’t just mean sales. When customers aren’t happy, it’s not just the sales people who should be getting nervous – it’s everyone from the CEO on down. Therefore, when you think about connecting with customers and understanding what makes them tick, you need to think about giving everyone access to these conversations. You can use internal social networks like IBM Connections or Jive to make sure that your colleagues have a way to share customer interactions in an always-on environment.

The end result of these social CRM building blocks is that you can uncover more effective ways to connect people with problems (that’s your customers) to the people with solutions (that’s you). It’s also the best way to cut through much of the noise surrounding customer needs, and let discussions bubble up about the real challenges that need to get addressed – and that will drive your business success.

 

 

 

 

 

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