SugarCRM held its annual user conference, SugarCon, earlier this week in San Francisco. Over 1,200 people were on hand to see what direction the company was taking its platform in. And while many of its competitors are expanding their offerings to include ecommerce, configure-price-quoting (CPQ), marketing automation and other related areas, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin emphatically stated that Sugar is staying true to its CRM roots and explore the many ways CRM can be even more important to business success in the near future.

I had a chance to speak with Augustin and hear how the company is looking to bring the latest and greatest technology developments to the platform to make CRM a system more relevant, and attractive, for sales professionals to turn to in order to build successful relationships with modern consumers. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation, as well as the video of our full conversation.

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

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Small Business Trends: There are several interesting things you are working on around artificial intelligence, machine learning, and also your digital assistant Candace. What are your customers saying about some of these things?

Larry Augustin: For a long time CRM has been a collector of information. We’ve been talking for a long time about turning it, not just into recording information, but also a system of engagement that helps people do their jobs. The next step of that is not just giving them a system that helps them manage how they work, but now begins to give them something back in terms of intelligence.

If you look at our journey, I think of it in those three pieces. Stage one is you still need to be system of record, you still need to record the data and you need to have access to that. You need to automate that more and more so it’s much less about the person putting data in. That’s been part of our journey. You integrate with systems, you integrate with email, other data sources so those come in more automatically. Then you make the work flow and the activities easy to do so the system helps people do things, not just presents data.

The next step to that is intelligence. You saw some of our future vision around that today. Today we announced a couple of things; the Sugar Intelligence Service which is really a collection of services that help collect data, do data augmentation and then give you some intelligence and analysis around that. Then we showed a concept with a digital sales assistant, Candace, who is helping a person through natural language query understand their prospects and know what to do next. Some exciting things there.

One of things that I like in that that we’ll be delivering very shortly is the data augmentation around a person. If you think about where your contact starts with a person, it’s frequently an email address. The way we have with the service now, you put in an email address and you can get back a fully populated record that tells a lot of information about a person.

If you think about what a good sales person does today, what do they do if they have an email address, they have that starting point around a person? They probably open up multiple tabs in their browser, they start searching for that person, they’ll go on Facebook, they’ll go on LinkedIn, they’ll do a Google News search, they’ll go to company bio page, they’ll go to Twitter, social media, Instagram. There’s a lot of information on people out there. It’s all very public. This is not information that’s secret. It’s information we all put out about ourselves. When you’re going to meet someone, a good salesman will of course go and do that work. That can be 30 minutes of work or more opening multiple tabs in a browser. When you think about it, it’s very mechanical. This is not rocket science. Essentially what we’re doing is pulling all that information together now in a very easy way. Email address you get one screen, you click, you pull that in.

Then the next step is some insides around that. I think you saw in the demo today, the person we’re going to talk to is a Patriots fan.

Small Business Trends: When you think about some of the things mentioned in the various key notes – IoT (Internet of Things), machine learning, M2M (Machine to Machine), artificial intelligence, all the things that I would assume most salespeople don’t even want to think about; are those the things that will actually make CRM usable and increase adoption for those salespeople?

Larry Augustin: Those are the things that behind the scenes will create the information, an insight that you can give to the salesperson before they talk to a prospect or go into a meeting.

It doesn’t have to be hugely sophisticated. Now over time it will get more and more sophisticated, and you heard some of that future we’re looking at. I think one of the things that sometimes hits our industry is people like to talk way, way in the future and science fiction things and it’s not believable. A lot of the things we were showing today, very believable things you can understand and gather about a person. We’re all about delivering that today. That will make the system a must-have for that salesperson to use.

Small Business Trends: You made the point in your key note yesterday about being a CRM company by choice, drilling down and doubling down on CRM. Talk a little bit about why you said that and why that’s important.

Larry Augustin: We believe that there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation at CRM. This is just one example of it. Even the digital revolution is leading to that. The information we can now gather on the internet digitally compared to what people could find out even 5 years ago, so much more sophisticated. We now have the tools to process that. I see immense opportunities to innovate in core CRM.

For us that means that we’ve chosen to be that CRM company and we are deliberately choosing not to expand our breadth of solution footprint. What does that mean? We’re not in the marketing automation business. We have great partners there, they do marketing automation… We compete with Salesforce. They’ve acquired, they’ve acquired Demandware, they’ve acquired Steelbrick. Those are all spaces where we’re happy to partner and we’re not going to go into those spaces. We see opportunity to get deeper in CRM and we’re a CRM company first and that’s our mission and vision.

Small Business Trends: We’re in 2016 halfway through the year. I still hear and see stories of companies, rather large companies, who are just making the decision to use CRM today. One of the terms I heard at the conference is being and “Excellent” company – meaning running their company on Excel. Are you surprised that that is still the case in 2016?

Larry Augustin: I am both surprised and encouraged by the fact that a lot of companies aren’t there and it’s an opportunity for business. If you look at the market, total commercial seats of CRM sold today, 28 million. It’s probably less than 30 million. I’ve been watching it creep up over the years. I’m pretty sure it’s still less than 30 million.

You look today and there are 350 to 400 million people whose jobs are to talk to customers in business. You compare that to less than 30 million seats of CRM and –

Small Business Trends: That’s not even 10 percent.

Larry Augustin: Not even 10 percent! That’s why you see what you see which is a lot of companies are still not there. They’re not using a commercial solution. They’re using something, let’s be clear, but they’re not using a sophisticated CRM dedicated solution. They’re using Excel. They’re using email. As much as we see Excel, we see, “We have a process for organizing folders in email.” We see that one all the time.

Let’s be fair. It’s not a bad solution when you’re 3 people because you can look at the person next to you and just say to them, “I’m going to put everything in this folder and we’ll follow it along and we’ll track together.” You can do that. But when you’re 10 people or 20 as it starts to grow, that breaks down and you have no way to track, you have no way to report on that when you are handing from 1 person to the next, the history gets completely lost in all of that. Those solutions don’t scale. There are also CRM solutions that work for small as well. That’s a different place in the market. What happens is companies still grow up with those and eventually at some point they realize this isn’t going to work for me. I have to change it.

Small Business Trends: In terms of some of the things that I saw in this conference. The things that you are baking into SugarCRM. You have the artificial intelligence, you have the machine learning, you have the digital assistance, all these things. CRM has been around for almost 30 years and we see only 10 percent roughly penetration rate. Are the things that you displayed throughout the conference, is that going to accelerate the move to CRM in the next 5-10 years? Are we going to see that 10 percent penetration rate jump to let’s say 20 percent?

Larry Augustin: I think we will begin to see it jump. Part of it is the digital revolution is making more people comfortable with all of these technologies and not just paper and pencil. The concept that I have an application that helps me do all this is becoming more widespread. Integrating with all the various digital technologies helps to encourage the growth and adoption and usage of that.

Part of it is just digital revolution in general. Part of it is the systems are delivering more and more value and there are less and less record keeping. If you look at the … Part of the way I got to that large number of potential users is you’re expanding the set of people inside a company who the system can help. If it’s just record keeping, it’s going to be a smaller set. If it’s just sales management, it’s going to be a smaller set. If it’s everyone who potentially talks to a customer and coordinates around the customer and it helps them do that job, it’s a bigger set.

As you expand into helping more of the end users role and delivering more value to the end user, that’s part of the way you expand. I think the statistics today show that in a typical company, the penetration of CRM is about 20 percent whereas about half of the company is customer facing. You think about that difference, 20 versus 50 … Part of it is how do you find the companies that don’t have something. The other part of it is what happens when you go from 20 percent of the company is users to 50 percent of the users, that’s a big jump as well. That in itself is 2-1/2 times the market in existing companies. You deliver more value to them, it has to be easier to use for them, that’s where things like the insight and the intelligence will add more value across the business.

Small Business Trends: Last question. In the end, how important is CRM today as compared to 20 years ago or 15, or 5 years ago?

Larry Augustin: CRM has evolved from the tool the VP of sales uses to manage their business and people to the center of the front office. If you look at ERP as the center of the back office and there are a ton of financial and operational systems around a company that will plug into ERP. Your expense reporting and tracking, HR and employee tracking. All those things will tend to plug into ERP. CRM holds that same role in the center of the front office. Marketing automation, other systems that are delivering information to the customer or across the front office will plug in around CRM. It becomes that center.

I talked about ecommerce and CPQ and marketing automation and you can go down the list, they’ll have to sit around CRM. Those become the dual platforms that sit at the middle of the company. In that sense, I think CRM has become more important and grown out of the tool for the VP of sales to manage that business to the platform on which a company manages their customer facing part of their business.

For all your CRM needs contact InnoventCRM your local experts on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventsoftware.com.au

SUMMARY:
SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin on why the big cloud vendors have got it wrong on data centers, IaaS and the pursuit of breadth over depth.
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Larry Augustin
Larry Augustin
In the hubbub of the cloud marketplace, we tend to listen to those who shout the loudest. But one of the risks of crowd-pleasing pitches from the corporate soapbox is the comedown that customers will experience if the product doesn’t live up to the hype.

This is especially true in the CRM space, where depth of service truly needs to match the spin. But it’s not uncommon to hear of customers moaning about the lack of depth and agility within the very application suites that are supposed to give them that depth and agility.

One of the quieter CRM voices in recent years has been SugarCRM, and in a cloud-centric world that makes them interesting. While CRM peers focus on growing bigger and broader, and building further and further away from their foundations, SugarCRM has taken the opposite approach – the perennial ‘best of breed’ vs. ‘do it all’ strategy. According to SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin:

The problem is [the cloud industry] has recreated the vertical stack, and it’s operated by a single vendor. There are benefits, in that it’s easier for the vendor, and the customer gets some agility in terms of being able to turn things on and off, but you lose that integration with other applications and with your own data. In the short term, there are benefits in the current cloud model, but in the long term, integration and platform issues are problems that they really need to solve.

There has always been this divide between best-of-breed and integrated suites. The best-of-breed focus gets you strength and depth around a particular business area, while you often find that these giant suites are really put together through acquisitions, and they still need to be integrated.
A case in point might be Salesforce’s recently announced plans to acquire e-commerce firm Demandware for $2.8 billion. Augustin says this is not a surprise move from his perspective:

[Salesforce’s] business has been about expanding their suite of applications, not about investing in CRM. They’re building a whole suite, but we see our business as being about the depth of CRM. We’re going deep because we think there is so much more to be done in the CRM world.
That’s not the only differentiator for SugarCRM, he adds. For example, while the Oracles, SAPs, and Salesforces of the world have invested vast sums in building data centers across the world, only to find the international political climate becoming more complex for data, not less, SugarCRM has left infrastructure up to the infrastructure specialists. This, says Augustin, has left the firm free to focus on product depth:

One of our differentiators is that we can run on different cloud platforms and in different hosting environments, offering better security and more control. We can go in country, but also run closest to where the business is, which is increasingly important for regulation and data protection.

We don’t invest in our own data centers, we run off other people’s. We’re a CRM company, not an infrastructure provider, so we’ve decided to leverage the growth of the cloud through others. It’s been a good choice for us. We run off Amazon Web Service (AWS) data centers in Europe and we also have an agreement with Deutsche Telekom; we operate and sell through them.
(Other resellers also offer SugarCRM solutions.)

Brexit bother?

But those international complexities don’t just disappear, whatever your business model. Fifty-six per cent of SugarCRM’s business is non-US, and the UK is the biggest European territory for the company. How might the prospect of a UK withdrawal from the European Union (EU) impact on a business that helps customers manage their own data?

At a time when other cloud firms have taken a vow of silence over Brexit, Augustin is comparatively candid:

Good question. We don’t see a big impact for us, though. We have the ability to run in different data regimes. Potentially, some different data protection and privacy laws may emerge from a Brexit. We would have to see if we still comply with any changes that might result. But in a broader sense, there is the bigger question of what does it mean for companies in the UK and on the continent of Europe, as you have a common data security and privacy regime, and were that to change…
The UK is hardly alone in existing in a shifting landscape of regulations and political uncertainty. The US Safe Harbor agreement is gone, no-one’s happy with the replacement Privacy Shield and the EU is at odds with the US over data transparency, transfer, and security. Says Augustin:

For us, it doesn’t create problems, because we’ve chosen a business model where others host our products and we have resellers who are local, so we can always deliver to our customers within regulations. But we see more and more countries moving towards data security and privacy laws that require their data to be kept within the country, such as Russia and Canada, and potentially others.
This need to run applications on multiple infrastructures is not just being driven by data security and privacy laws, explains Augustin, but also by the business need to interrogate data:

The challenge that cloud vendors face is the volumes of data that you have to push off to a remote cloud service through an API call rather than have a high bandwidth connection into your own database. SaaS vendors really have to shift their model to leveraging other cloud infrastructures, because customers increasingly want other capabilities, like analytics on big data or the Internet of Things, and integrating that with other applications.

The more data becomes remote, the more problems proliferate with vertical SaaS vendors. Customers want to be able to drill down into the depths of their data, and that will force SaaS vendors to rethink. Vendor-managed and operated data centers made sense for a time when consolidation and managing the resources suited the vendor. After all, most of those SaaS models started before there was a proliferation of IaaS options and cloud portability. But now it makes sense for countries and companies to have their data locally.
There’s mounting evidence that Augustin may have had the right strategy all along. While Salesforce runs the overwhelming majority of its service from its own data centers, it recently named AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider for use on initiatives such as its IoT Cloud. That’s an interesting change of tack.

Human interaction

SugarCRM’s annual customer event, SugarCon, takes place next week in San Francisco, on 13-16 June. The theme will be business transformation and transforming relationships, says Augustin:

CRM is a business transformation technology, and we see digitisation driving business more and more. But for customers, most buying happens before they talk to anyone in a company. Businesses used to control a lot of the communication and played a large part in educating the consumer, whereas today the consumer educates themselves on the internet. So a company has to figure out how to insert themselves into that channel. The single most influential part is still the human interaction with a company.
But what about those customer organizations – banks, utilities, and telcos among them – that use CRM and automation in anger to slash costs and keep customers at bay? Says Augustin:

You want CRM to add value, not cut costs. If you take the human out of the equation, you create a poor customer experience. But of course, consumers don’t always want to go through a person; I don’t need to talk to a human being to check my balance. But that’s about convenience for the consumer, not about cost savings for the company.

We espouse customer journey mapping. You walk through the process by putting yourselves in the customer’s shoes. You talk about how customers use your services, not how you as a company want them to use it. Automation should never get between you and the customer, driven by cost savings.

CRM has to span the digital and the human and enable human interaction. As you transform your business, you have to enable human interaction. It’s still the most important thing.
My take

At last, it seems that SugarCRM is engaging in more human interaction itself, by opening up and sharing its story with the world.

Augustin makes an interesting case about the giants of the SaaS world growing ever larger, and the danger of growing ever more remote from their founding purposes (and perhaps their customers too). Maybe as the hubbub of the cloud market dies down and a modicum of good sense, pragmatism, and transparency replaces it, the quieter voices will have their day.

A major new customer win and SugarCRM could find itself much more in the spotlight than it has been of late. Could a big announcement be in the offing? I’d bet on it.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

Clint Oram co-founded SugarCRM in 2004 and is one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar application.

As the company’s chief technology officer, he currently leads SugarCRM’s corporate development strategy and alliances teams.

SugarCRM CTO Clint Oram
SugarCRM CTO Clint Oram
In this exclusive interview, CRM Buyer discusses with Oram some of the latest challenges and trends in CRM.

CRM Buyer: What’s the biggest CRM challenge right now?

Clint Oram: Technology is changing the way customers work with companies. I want the company that I do business with to give me answers quickly, and they need to be insightful answers. Technology has driven speed and relevancy expectations through the roof, and companies of all sizes are struggling to keep up with this.

CRM Buyer: How can businesses best respond to these challenges?

Oram: It’s a combination of technology and people. My historical roots involve people, process and technology working together to solve a problem. You rely on technology to solve a problem fast.

The part that I spend my time focusing on is how you really help the human, whose job it is to talk to a customer, to have all the right information on hand, and to help them know what to do next. That’s where there’s a lot of exciting innovation happening right now.

Modern CRM is at the center of the customer experience, and it’s CRM technology that powers that customer experience.

CRM Buyer: How do you make sure that the technology enhances human relations?

Oram: That’s where the art and science come together. I believe in a progressive future where technology enhances our lives. The next big technology wave ahead of us is artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The thing you can’t forget is that humans like talking with humans. To wipe that away is a dead-end scenario, and the companies that succeed in the future are the ones that leverage technology to enhance human contact. This is my personal philosophy. I refuse to believe in a dystopian world where machines will replace humans.

CRM Buyer: What are some common CRM mistakes that you see companies making?

Oram: Technology by itself is not panacea. You can’t just turn on technology and expect magical things to happen. People who sell the easy button are selling false promises. This is a cultural change. This is a different way of doing business. You have to get your people and processes aligned. What you need to do is sit down and look at your business through the lens of your customer and figure out how you streamline getting relevant answers to your customers.

The number of companies that are deploying CRM technology is radically larger than when I got started in the industry in 1999. What we’re seeing is that more and more companies are employing CRM technology, and often for the first time.

A new generation of salespeople expects technology to guide them through interactions. You’ve got more and more companies employing CRM technology, and it’s a new thing for them. They trip over the misconception that technology by itself drives revenue growth. You have to invest in your people, processes and technology.

CRM Buyer: Why is it important to engage customers across multiple channels?

Oram: As a business owner, you have to be where your customers are. One of the most significant trends in CRM is clienteling, which means having a seamless experience in the act of selling in online channels down to traditional retail channels. That’s the reality of the future.

In the first wave of e-commerce, we declared the end of brick and mortar. What we’ve learned is that people enjoy the act of shopping and getting out of their house and going to stores. I want the company or the retailer to know me consistently across platforms, and I want a seamless experience.

CRM Buyer: What are some other CRM trends?

Oram: CRM for enterprise is shifting away from systems of transaction to systems of engagement. You need to have the right tools and the right data. What that ultimately means is that companies are investing in a variety of clouds. What they need is a CRM solution that can work in all of these cloud strategies.

Customers want to be in charge of their customer data. They don’t want to feel that they’re being charged exorbitant fees. They don’t want to be boxed into one way of doing business. What is business? We have a person with a problem and a person with a solution, and you want to connect the two of them together.

With so much of our economy moving towards services, it’s the quality of this customer service that differentiates one company from another. I want something that allows me to be unique and different. I want something that lets me get to my customer data. We live in a world of massive data information. Legacy CRM providers have outdated technologies, and they’re having to move to new ones.

CRM Buyer: What’s in the future for CRM? How is it evolving and changing? And how can companies adapt?

Oram: Modern CRM is about empowering the individual to get their job done better. The way you do that is to make every customer experience extraordinary. All of that together makes your people smarter.

The way that I simplify this is to step away from the technology for a moment. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Understand what your customer is looking for. Make your customer’s life easier. That strips away all of the complexity. It gives you a laser focus. It lets you align all of your technology and people on a very simple mission.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

When I look at the industry in which SugarCRM operates, that of front office software, it is easy to see several defining moments. These monumental shifts have been both in the way the customer relationship has evolved, and also about the nature of the technology we create and use in business. And of course, these two are inextricably linked.

A few examples of defining moments that have shaped CRM: the introduction of email into the customer relationship, the emergence of SaaS delivery of apps (and the eventual evolution into cloud software), the iPhone making mobile CRM apps a must-have, Facebook and Twitter becoming de-facto customer conversation channels, etc.

Looking at these defining moments, a few observations become clear. One, the pace and breadth of defining moments in our world is increasing, due mainly to the insanely rapid pace of technology innovation. Second, those that refuse or simply fail to take advantage of the changes pushed forward from these moments do so at their own peril.

We talk a lot about “disruption” and “digital transformation” – but in the light of defining moments these should not be considered single “projects” or a one-time transformation endeavor. Rather, the pace of innovation and the onslaught of more customer channels, data points, and expectations means that businesses must be in a constant state of development, with total openness to change. Sure, change is hard, but you need to aggressively embrace new business models.

One great example is SugarCRM customer CitySprint (who just happened to co-present their transformation story on stage at the Gartner event). While CitySprint is a leader in its space as a last mile delivery and logistics provider in the UK, they saw the disruption curve coming – from new digital technologies like Uber, Amazon Prime, etc. Rather than risk getting left behind, CitySprint is incubating its own startup to shift its business from simple delivery into providing technology, solutions and tools for businesses across the UK to create more effective customer experiences. (CitySprint will be telling more about this story at SugarCon in June FYI.)

So, no matter what your industry, one thing is clear: disruption is coming in some form or another. And, it is going to keep coming. Those who embrace the pace of change and respond accordingly will win. Those who do not will face steeper and steeper uphill climbs in an increasingly competitive marketplace. On which side of this equation would you rather be?

Read the full article here – https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2016/05/31/learning-from-defining-moments-in-business-and-life/

For all your Business CRM needs, look no further than InnoventCRM – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

An Informative CRM Gathers Customer Information From Multiple Sources and Enables Individuals to Find the Data They Need to Do Their Jobs Better

SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most empowering, adaptable and affordable CRM solution on the market, today announced Sugar® 7.7. The latest version of the company’s award-winning CRM platform includes enhancements to put more timely and relevant information at customer-facing employees’ fingertips. Individuals can make faster, more informed decisions at every stage of the customer journey — boosting productivity and improving the customer experience.

“The pace of business today requires individuals to be able to access accurate information about their customers exactly when they need it,” said Rich Green, chief product officer at SugarCRM. “New features, including tagging to organize data within a common theme, and global search powered by scalable query engines, will help Sugar 7.7 users be more productive, and in turn provide their customers with a superior experience.”

Sugar 7.7 is the next step forward in the fulfillment of SugarCRM’s vision of a modern CRM. New headlining features include:

Custom Tags
Sugar 7.7 now allows individuals to tag any record in the application. The inclusion of tags empowers individuals to better classify customer information in a manner that makes sense to them and to share that same classification with their fellow employees. Unlike other CRM applications, Sugar tags are completely integrated into the Sugar database and are not limited by user or customer. The integration of tags into the Sugar database enables the availability of tags through the improved global search experience instead of a separate tag search mechanism.

Each tag is deeply integrated into the Sugar user experience and data structure. For example, tags are available as filter criteria in search results and are also available as reporting criteria. Tags themselves can also be reviewed and managed in the corresponding module within Sugar. This administrative interface allows individuals to edit, delete, export and merge tags.

Optimized Search Experience
The new search UI includes all of the advantages of the Sugar UX™ that help individuals pinpoint the right information as quickly as possible. The search option automatically expands upon selection, and the result sets can be readily filtered by module and other criteria, while the individual color-coded search results can be evaluated using the preview option. More importantly, each query searches across all Sugar standard and custom modules, will match any text or number stored in the application, and prioritizes frequently viewed records in the result set.

The expanded global search bar significantly boosts the value of Custom Tagging, as relevant tags for search keywords are displayed in the first row below the search bar.

Enhanced Knowledge Base
The Sugar Knowledge Base is a great resource for shared information. Users can write articles about any topic and make them available internally or externally. The Sugar 7.7 Knowledge Base is enriched with the easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate benefits of the Sugar UX. It includes an intelligence panel where context-sensitive display enables agents and customers to quickly find the most relevant articles.

Industry-Leading Capabilities for Marketing, Sales and Service
Sugar 7.7 also includes enhancements that streamline lead conversion for individuals, better highlight key quote and forecast information, and support Sugar Logic in the Sugar Customer Portal. These enhancements, combined with improvements to Sugar’s UI and Advanced Workflow functionality, make it the CRM of choice for organizations looking to empower all customer-facing employees to build extraordinary customer relationships.

Sugar 7.7 is available today. For more information, please visit www.SugarCRM.com or contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

Re-post from Clint Oram –

Cloud-based SaaS solutions offer some great benefits, but be careful. Getting trapped in a proprietary cloud solution can lead to a loss of control—of your data, your security, and maybe even your career.

The cloud is certainly having its day in the sun. Social, mobile, and now the cloud have taken turns topping IT priority lists for large enterprises. This notion was underscored when a recent Bitglass survey of 92 CIOs and IT leaders revealed that 55 percent of respondents said their companies embrace a “cloud-first” strategy. Such reverence is hardly surprising. The cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers a lot of advantages for many enterprise solutions. Rapid deployment of off-the-shelf software systems can be affordable, present a low barrier to adoption, and provide an excellent way to prove new ideas quickly. This has certainly made it easy for many companies to implement new software, but there are pitfalls that must be watched for and avoided.

Most cloud solutions are available only in proprietary, multitenant, shared-infrastructure, single-cloud configurations—a big black box in the sky. There is little or no opportunity for companies to decide where they want their applications and data to reside. Public cloud of your own choice? Private cloud? Within your own country’s borders? On premises? A hybrid combination of these? In some cases, all these options are off the table. The only choice is the vendor’s proprietary cloud—a model that just doesn’t work for everyone.

Security concerns, regulatory requirements, and enterprise integration strategies should be carefully considered before deciding to “lock in” with a solution that’s limited to a single vendor’s proprietary, public, shared-infrastructure cloud.

It’s interesting to note that a recent Gartner study, Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2014, states that 47 percent of CRM software revenue was generated from SaaS-based CRM applications in 2014. But that means the other half of CRM revenue was generated from private cloud, managed hosted, and on-premises solutions. The more sophisticated multinational companies with intense data integration and data security needs are turning away from the public cloud and choosing the private cloud for their CRM needs.

I recently met with representatives of a large company in the financial sector about a new CRM deployment. Without hesitation, they said, “There is no way we are putting our customer data in a public cloud environment where we lose control.” This is an understandable reaction: Around the world, companies in highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and the federal government must comply with strict regulations that govern the handling of personal information and sensitive data. An out-of-the-box shared infrastructure cloud CRM offering will not meet these strict regulatory requirements.

Compliance is becoming an even greater challenge outside the United States. Many countries have strict rules governing the collection and storage of customer data. This has led to an increasing drive for data localization. For example, Germany requires that data about German users must be stored within the country’s borders. Recent court rulings against the USA-EU Safe Harbor framework and the proposed “Safe Harbor 2.0” data transfer rules will lead to many companies deciding the best way to stay compliant is to keep customer data stored within the same continent and same country, if possible. Cloud Portability Image

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to compliance issues, data security concerns have caused many CIOs to delay shared-infrastructure, public-cloud deployments. One of the main concerns for organizations is that information stored in the public cloud is beyond its control. Imagine investing in the best security tools and having the most sophisticated authentication protocols, but still being at the mercy of your cloud vendor’s security mechanisms for managing your most precious asset, your customer data. Your top-notch information security team has no visibility into those security controls, and you have no way to move to another CRM cloud vendor if those security mechanisms are challenged or, worse, fail. It’s not a comfortable feeling. Couple the loss of control with the media’s constant reporting of embarrassing high-profile data breaches such as happened with Anthem Insurance, AT&T, and even Ashley Madison, and the unease about having customer data exposed grows—which is understandable, given the obvious consequences: compromised reputation, lost business, and fines levied for regulatory violations.

Another large multinational electronics manufacturing company I recently worked with reviewed all of the public-cloud CRM solutions available and determined that moving its large volumes of customer data across multiple public cloud vendors was not only potentially unsecure, but too costly. With tens of millions of customers around the world connecting with it across a variety of brick-and-mortar and online channels, the dollar costs of storing that data in a public cloud service and the costs of accessing its own data for reporting and integration purposes via that cloud service did not work out. Global enterprises find the very size and complexity of their customer data challenging to manage and integrate in the public cloud. All of these cost and control issues melt away when the CRM solution is managed in a private cloud, often by one of a variety of different expert-managed cloud service providers.

Organizations should have the freedom to implement the systems and architectures that best address their needs for security, regulatory compliance, and data integration. The cloud is a great option. But getting there shouldn’t force you into an environment that puts your data, your business, or your career at risk.

To learn more about CRM systems and the best one for your business contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

Intro
Let’s say you’ve implemented a marketing automation solution. If so, you’ve taken a great step in terms of providing a superior experience for your customers.

A next step, for many organizations, is to continue focusing on the customer experience with a Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, system.

Why CRM?
A CRM helps organizations create excellent customer experiences. As an example, at SugarCRM, we are focused on helping individual employees in customer facing roles – such as sales and service people – create extraordinary customer relationships.

A CRM typically differs from marketing automation in that marketing automation focuses on digital marketing to large audiences, whereas CRM is designed around human interactions (e.g. sales or service) to individual customer (or potential customer) contacts – what we at SugarCRM call i2i, or individual-to-individual. For an optimal experience from your customers’ point of view, and for optimal efficiency in your own sales, marketing and service teams, an integrated marketing automation and CRM system is the answer.

Benefits
Integrating marketing automation with CRM provides value in many ways. From the prospect or customer’s point of view, they see a seamless customer experience, regardless of whether they are interacting with your organization through a marketing-driven interaction, or a sales- or service-driven interaction, and whether through digital channels like website, email, or social media, or through human interaction like talking to a sales person or service person.

For your own sales and service teams, they are now more efficient and more prepared since they have the full context from marketing automation. They can see exactly which emails, websites, web / social / mobile offers struck a chord with a particular prospect.

Considerations
If you’re evaluating an integration between CRM and marketing automation, here are a few things to look for:

• Data synchronization –  An automatic and configurable synchronization between data objects like leads, contacts, and opportunities in your CRM and marketing automation systems is an absolute must. This ensures that the two systems can share data. Look for an ability to configure data mapping, frequency of synchronization, and conflict resolution. Ideally the synchronization can be two-way. And, since most marketing automation and CRM deployments have their own custom fields, make sure the synchronization supports custom fields in an upgrade-safe manner.

• The ability to create prospects lists in CRM according to specific criteria, and to supply those lists as input into a marketing automation program. When setting up new programs or campaigns in your marketing automation tool, what better place to start than with the data in your CRM system, which represents what you already know about customers and prospects?

• Automatic lead alerting between marketing automation and CRM. You want the ability for highly qualified leads in the marketing automation system to be automatically pushed over to CRM. The ability to apply workflow is helpful here. Workflow can be used for lead routing or assignment to a sales rep, as well as for lead escalation or reassignment (eg a lead that isn’t followed up on within 3 days gets reassigned with notification to the first level manager). Workflow can also be used to trigger notifications to the rep, like an email or text to notify the rep of their new hot lead(s).

• The ability for CRM users (like sales and service reps) to see full context from marketing automation. When a sales or service rep goes into their CRM system to work a lead that has been automatically created from the marketing automation system, you want that rep to be able to easily see what the lead did in marketing automation that resulted in the high score. Which emails did they open? Which websites did they visit and what did they look at on those sites? What digital offers did they respond to?  If sales and service can’t see this, they will provide an inconsistent experience to the customer. If, on the other hand, they can reinforce previous digital interactions, then you have created an optimized and consistent customer experience across channels.

• The ability for CRM users (like sales and service reps) to reuse marketing assets and programs. Many marketing teams create great assets (like well thought out, rich email templates) and programs (like sophisticated multi-touch campaigns). Yet many sales and service people can’t easily reuse these assets and programs. A well-integrated CRM and marketing automation system will allow the CRM user to seamlessly reuse existing email templates from marketing automation, and will allow a CRM user to drop a prospect into an existing marketing automation program.

Summary
Integrated marketing automation and CRM provides a consistent and optimized customer experience, across digital and human interaction channels, and across marketing, sales and service. By using the above considerations to evaluate a marketing automation and CRM integration, you’re well on your way to driving better customer experience, as well as on increasing your organization’s’ internal efficiency.

Reposted article by Laurence Leong – SugarCRM

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

The goal of providing the best possible experience for customers forms the foundation of business transformation at successful companies, according to a recent Forrester survey.

The goal of the survey, conducted in March 2016 by Forrester on behalf of SugarCRM. It was to determine how organizations with a mature digital strategy define and manage their “digital business transformation,” and how these firms are tackling the organizational and cultural challenges presented by business transformation.

For mature businesses, the top digital transformation drivers focus on improving the customer’s experience, increasing the speed of innovation, and improving time to market. In contrast, the drivers for less mature businesses focus mainly on profitability improvements and cost reduction. More than three-quarters (77%) of mature digital firms have clearly defined the experience they intend to create for their customers, demonstrating the benefits of having a strong customer focus.

More Key Findings

• Just 11% of companies surveyed assessed their digital strategy as “excellent.”
• The CEO is the executive who sets the overall digital vision and strategy for 41% of organizations with a mature digital strategy.
• 43% of firms with a mature digital strategy see competing departments wanting to own digital as the most significant barrier to effective transformation in their organization.
• 94% of mature businesses plan to address the threat of digital disruption through transforming systems and processes to be more agile in the digital world.

What Do These Results Mean

Only a comprehensive digital business transformation can create an organization that flexes to address customers’ heightened expectations. The study found that businesses with mature digital strategies tend to look at digital holistically and start their digital transformation journey with a clearly defined digital vision.

To win in the age of the customer, digital businesses understand that they need to be customer-obsessed. According to Forrester, success means investing in constantly evolving customer experiences and understanding that digital technologies have become fundamental to deliver delightful experiences to the customer. The days of treating customers as segments and cohorts are coming to an end. Companies need to think in terms of individualized experiences that organize and prioritize functionality and content around customers’ individual needs and behaviors.

As customers now use digital technologies and experiences as a part of their daily lives for nearly every purchasing decision, their expectations of what constitutes a high quality customer experience are much higher. A modern CRM platform will drive successful business transformation because it is a central hub for information about customers that enables personalized interactions and brand loyalty throughout the entire customer journey.

Methodology

In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 410 IT and business decision-makers involved with digital strategy and initiatives. Respondents were from enterprise organizations in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Singapore, the UK, and the US and from financial services and insurance, government, higher education, media and publishing, and retail industries

You can access the full Forrester report here.

The Annual Guide Recognizes the Best Channel Partner Programs in the Market

SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution on the market, announced today that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has given SugarCRM a 5-Star rating in its 2016 Partner Program Guide. This annual guide is the definitive listing of technology vendors that service solution providers or provide products through the IT channel. The 5-Star Partner Program Guide rating recognizes an elite subset of companies that offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs.

To determine the 2016 5-Star ratings, The Channel Company’s research team assessed each vendor’s application based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support and communication.

SugarCRM has built a unique channel program of CRM experts with more than 230 channel partners in more than 30 countries. As the company has moved upmarket, it has altered its partner ecosystem to address the diverse CRM needs of enterprise customers. The company’s core group of partners helps extend the value of the Sugar platform for customers by providing strategic CRM consulting, tailored solutions that complement Sugar, techniques for CRM best practices, and flexible implementation and integration services.

The SugarCRM partner program provides VARs with sales, marketing, and product support along with significant opportunities to grow their businesses in the CRM industry, which is projected to grow to $40 billion by 2018 according to Gartner. The program includes partner certification and training programs delivered via Sugar University, a partner advisory board, dedicated resources for partners and an annual conference just for partners.

“Solution providers have more choices than ever before when it comes to selecting vendor partners. Identifying the right vendor with the right technologies and the right channel approach can mean the difference between successful adoption of a new technology or business model and an awkward, unnecessarily difficult integration,” said Robert Faletra, CEO, The Channel Company. “Our annual Partner Program Guide and 5-Star ratings recognize the best channel programs available in the market today and serve as a valuable resource for solution providers looking for the right fit.”

“SugarCRM offers more than a typical reseller program, not just selling seats to cookie cutter customers. Instead, our top partners have evolved with us over the last 10 years, delivering strategic CRM solutions to our customers. Our partners have become true solution providers that are deeply involved in helping organizations utilize Sugar to distinguish themselves by offering a better customer experience,” said Clint Oram, CTO and co-founder at SugarCRM. “SugarCRM is honored to be recognized by CRN with a 5-star rating in their Partner Program Guide. It validates our channel program and the 230+ partners who have chosen to join us.”

Contact InnoventCRM today for all your Sugar needs – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

 

Mobile CRM is not the future, it’s today.

As the workforce becomes more dispersed and employees increasingly spend more time away from their desks, a high-quality mobile CRM app is crucial to ensure those valuable interactions with customers that take place outside the office aren’t left behind. CRM on mobile isn’t about shrinking the desktop experience down so it will fit on your smartphone screen. Instead, it’s about empowering users to build extraordinary customer relationships wherever they are with access to updated account, contact, and opportunity data; tools to collaborate with colleagues in real-time within the CRM; and the ability to personalize dashlets in an easy to navigate mobile interface so road warriors have everything they need before, during and after each customer interaction.

Of course, one of the top concerns with mobile CRM is the risk of customer data being compromised. Mobile devices get lost or stolen everyday. It is up to the organization to anticipate that happening, and be able to secure customer data in the event it happens. With those concerns in mind, SugarCRM has implemented significant data security updates to SugarCRM mobile 3.0.0. Now, offline data within SugarCRM Mobile will be stored in an encrypted database on the user’s mobile device. This new feature will give CIOs even more confidence that their data is even more secure than ever before.

We’ve heard from many SugarCRM customers who said they are now sending their employees on the road with tablets and smartphones instead of laptops. One such customer is Seguros Monterrey New York Life, the largest life insurance company in Latin America. Seguros sends its insurance agents, (about 2,000 in total) out into the field with tablets equipped with the SugarCRM Mobile app. The agents rely solely on mobile app to provide everything they need to build relationships with their customers and sell customized insurance policies.

In addition, no CRM vendor is more committed to offline mobile connectivity. Sugar Mobile’s offline sync truly makes it easy for users to access data. Users can retrieve or log customer information even when there is no connection to the Internet (such as on an airplane). When the app reconnects, changes or additions will be applied to the Sugar database.

SugarCRM Mobile is included in every Sugar subscription and is compatible with Android phones and tablets as well iPhone and iPad. Users get access to their CRM information, including Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Meetings, Activities, and all custom Sugar modules. The app encourages CRM use by providing users a tool that is familiar, easy to use, and has up-to-date information because it pulls in real time information from the same database as the desktop application.

For all your SugarCRM needs and to request a demo of SugarCRM Mobile contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au