CRM Idol

  • May 1, 2012

    • What are you waiting for???  Just click this link and you’ll be in business.  You only have Till COB on Friday so don’t procrastinate!

    You’ll be happy you voted.

    Published: 171 days ago


    All year, it seems like, we’ve been running CRM Idol, the contest started by Paul Greenberg to identify hot emerging companies in the greater CRM space.  We are now down to voting for finalists and this is where you finally get the chance to make your ideas known.  Time to vote.

    This year’s crop of contestants, and especially the finalists, was exceptionally strong.  These companies are all well deserving of the venture capital that they’ve already raised as well as what will be showered on them after the voting is over.  We could tell right away that this year’s crop was a cut above last year’s — and they were pretty special, too.  But the companies in this year’s contest really, really get it.  They are laser focused on social and its many tentacles into CRM.

    But social is not the only thing on the menu.  We’ve seen an impressive array of automation that goes from various forms of analysis to clever virtual agents.  So, when you vote think about all that and also think about how three of the seven finalists come from parts outside of Norte America.  That’s right, this is a global event these days.

    So let’s get to it.  To vote go to the CRM Idol site here and please, s’il vous plait, por favor, puhleeze! watch the video that each company made to describe to you the business problem they solve, how they do it and what customers think of it.  Then read our judges reviews of each company.  Figure you need to spend about 30 minutes to do this job right and we need you to be conscientious about it.

    Don’t worry if you can’t get it all done in one sitting, we know what it’s like to live in these distracted times.  But come back if you need to, make some notes to yourself.  Rule some out before making your final selection if it helps (just like taking the SATs).

    So, go vote, it will do you some good.  It will show you where the market is moving.  It will also help some very talented emerging companies to sharpen their ideas and offers.  Most importantly, I’ve come to see Idol as the premiere community building activity in the front office.  You don’t see ERP vendors doing this, or HCM or any other branch of software (OK, maybe gamers have something equivalent but that’s not business, it’s entertainment).  It’s one of those things — like Dreamforce — that makes CRM such a hip and vibrant place to hang your hat.  Click here to get going. 

    Thanks! Gracias! Prego! Much obliged, pardner.

    Published: 179 days ago


    So, just about a month after Dreamforce, Salesforce.com is coming to New York for one of its regional Cloudforce conferences.  The event will be at the Javitz Center in Manhattan on October 19.  Salesforce is expecting six thousand attendees.

    The focus of the event is supposed to be on the newly re-announced Marketing Cloud — the amalgamation, so far, of Buddy Media and Radian6.  I will be briefed under NDA about the news to be announced at the event but that hasn’t happened yet so, hey, let’s speculate.

    As many of my colleagues have suggested, the Marketing Cloud is a good and important down payment on a full-featured marketing component but it is heavily weighted toward social marketing.  They expect more acquisitions primarily to beef up the Marketing Cloud’s lack of a conventional marketing campaigns element — the kind that runs traditional marketing programs.  I am not so sure.

    Salesforce already has a bevy of more or less conventional marketing partners in the AppExchange like Eloqua, Marketo and others.  It’s true that these vendors are not monogamous but so what?  They have good connectors and integration and are doing everything they can to carpet bomb, er, I mean cover, the Salesforce installed base so why buy what’s free?

    My instincts (which are right about half the time — and less when I’m driving according to my wife) tell me that Salesforce is going in another direction.  The company has always exhibited a Blue Ocean Strategy approach to its business seeking out niches that haven’t been named and I expect it to do the same in marketing.

    That means they’ll concentrate on the myriad ways to market in the social world.  If they make an acquisition — and I bet there’s nothing on the radar right now — it will be to beef up social marketing not conventional stuff.  That would mean companies like HubSpot or Awareness or Nearstream or others (some in the CRM Idol contest) that use a healthy dose of new age thinking and social media to access and communicate with customers.

    So, what to look for in New York?  In addition to October baseball, I think you’ll see elaboration of the basic message doled out at Dreamforce.  The San Francisco session was packed with information and image-making and there really wasn’t time to unpack all of what the Marketing Cloud means for customers.  I think Cloudforce is the place where the unpacking will happen.

    Salesforce has been great at three-pronged marketing for a long time.  That’s where they tell you what they’re going to tell you, then they tell you and finally the circle back to tell you what they told you.  I think they’re at part two and Cloudforce New York will be more of a deep dive.

    I could be very wrong but that’s what it means to speculate.  Right?

    Published: 224 days ago


    I read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in college (yes, in Middle English and no, it wasn’t that long ago) and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about spring time and renewal.  This April was especially memorable in our industry and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the things I witnessed.

    Mostly, for me, there was an unmistakable sense of renewal in CRM and in the tech sector more generally.  Facebook continued to primp for its assumed to be historic IPO and bought Instagram, a company with an application for mobile devices and not much more than a website otherwise.  Facebook paid a billion bucks for Instagram, no doubt a sign of the future.  Marketo heading for its own IPO at some point bought Crowd Factory combining marketing solutions into a suite that will offer modern and ultra modern marketing.

    Thankfully, there was more innovation than just the M&A variety.  I went to a couple of analyst briefing sessions that were interesting for different reasons and I will have to assume that the events I couldn’t fit in were much the same.  Oracle held a deep briefing to show off progress on all fronts.  The event made me a believer that they have a plan or plans that merge into a powerful vision of engineered systems and software that meets some of the challenges of the social/mobile/analytic/big data world we’re moving into at light speed.

    SugarCRM raised the bar and showed the world that it is growing rapidly and that its open source approach to business is very much in the mainstream along with operating system, server and database open source projects that support, in one way or another, the innovations in the rest of the industry.  It looks to me like Sugar is becoming the go to CRM that everyone has to include on the shopping list.  Open source might not be for everybody, but then again Sugar’s growth numbers and recent capital round indicate they just might be.

    Salesforce announced its Government Cloud in an effort to capture some of the new business likely to come out of local, state and federal initiatives to cut IT costs and improve constituent service.  When government becomes an adopter of a new technology like cloud computing it’s safe to say that it’s not a radical departure anymore.

    But that doesn’t mean we stop innovating.  As the Salesforce announcement made clear, the big issue for government will be security and, I would add, up time.  So I look for a new era of innovation around both security and fault tolerance as cloud computing works to measure up to a nine nines reliability standard found in other utilities.

    Finally, sneaking in just under the wire, on April 30, Paul Greenberg announced the second season of CRM Idol, the competition that seeks to discover hot emerging companies with great technology ideas in our space.  Full disclosure, I am Paul’s friend, but that category includes about half the world.  Last year, Idol’s first, was a great learning experiment.  As one of the founding primary judges (others in the U.S. are Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Jesus Hoyos) I was present for all of it and I can say we learned a lot.

    We got a stellar crop of finalists last year (both in the U.S. and Europe) including Crowd Factory, Stone Cobra, Assistly and Get Satisfaction, which won the contest.  Two of the four were bought — Assistly mid-way through the competition and Crowd Factory last month.

    We are expecting big things from this year’s group of contestants too.  The announcement by Greenberg on Monday is the opening of the season and companies interested in participating should visit the Idol website for details.  There are a few rules that make this a real competition among emerging companies — you can’t be too old or too rich for example — so check it out.

    Being a software entrepreneur is not easy.  While you might think that venture funding has eased many of the burdens, raising capital is not easy though it can be insightful.  VC’s look not just for new companies or new solutions but new categories.  And what looked hot last year may no longer be attractive.  They’re always looking for something that has never been seen before that nonetheless sparks interest and fills a need.  CRM Idol is like that.  The companies that do best are those that don’t conform to a pattern but instead break new ground.

    If you pay attention to Idol you might get an idea of the future of CRM and possibly other things.  Just looking at the Instagram deal tells me potentially that the hottest new companies might be those writing for the smartphone market.  That, of course, would be a significant finding — the kind of thing that will make future Aprils so interesting.

    Published: 387 days ago


    Well, this is interesting.  On the very day that CRM Idol launches its second season, last year’s winner is launching a passel of new products.  It’s just coincidence, you can’t plan something like this.

    The new Get Satisfaction widgets are interesting for many reasons.  First, they’re widgets, little bits of applications designed to be embedded in a company’s web outreach to its customers.  They are not websites that link to your web properties, just things that make your existing properties better for your customers.

    As Wendy Lea, CEO, Get Satisfaction said, “For the first time, companies now can blend social conversations anywhere on their website instead of relegating social to separate ‘destination channels’ such as Facebook or forums.”  I agree, I think this idea has legs.

    So what do these widgets do?  All kinds of things.  I count ten capabilities including self-service, social marketing, e-commerce and product development.  In other words, something for everyone with the focus on leveraging the community to crowd source great ideas.

    To me, this is the promise of social media in business.  It provides the ability to have social conversations without necessarily getting off topic and discussing weekend plans.  And unlike other products that have an in-house collaboration slant, this solution set is all about giving customers access to processes that are increasingly collaborative but which not too long ago were closely held by the vendor.  So, good luck to Get Satisfaction on the new products.

    What a difference a year makes!

    Published: 388 days ago