PGreenblog

Blog Carnival: The ROI of Social Media is The CRV of Revenue Impact

This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post “Calculating the ROI of Social Media" to check out the full lists of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders.

ROI = Social Media CRV

There have been an amazing number of attempts to quantify the benefit of social media so that we can get a traditional result to measure against.  Most of them fail or are indecipherable stretches that really don’t apply.  The problem is that social media interactions are in a simplified world, only of a few types:

1. Identifying and capturing some unstructured information that is quantified by assessing the emotional state of the person’s who is the subject of the information.
2. Identifying a number of interactions which define the volume of interactions or the source of interactions
3. Taking an action based on the social media interaction -  capturing a lead and starting the process of lead nurturing or opening a case due to a social media based complaint.

But when social media is treated as a channel for the interactions and is integrated with CRM customer records and CRM systems, then the ability to measure an ROI for social media becomes not only possible, but also important.

What does that mean?

Well, lets start with this. To me, as we enter what I’m calling the era of customer engagement, we are seeing a more mature view of social media and its use as part of a multi-channel strategy.  Social channels have become one of the sets of channels being considered along with email, phone, etc. – They do represent a disproportionately influential segment because conversations in social channels have the ability to scale from one to one to one to many or even many to many.

What this implies is that the measurement of social media ROI has two components. One is strategic – and there it isn’t measured separately. It is part of the achievement of your planned overall return. The other aspect is tactical.  And this is where it gets a bit dicey.

Ultimately, any company trying to measure social media ROI needs to be able to think beyond the traditional marketing measures like reach.   But the problem is that many of those things that you’re looking to get a return on are nebulous when it comes to measurement.

For example, how do you measure your impact on influencers which is one area that social media is used for by some?  To do that, it implies that you know how to measure influence digitally.

“Do you?”  Well sure, you say, a Klout score.  Sorry. Not the case. Klout is good at measuring how engaged an individual is on social channels at any given time but doesn’t really measure influencers of the buyer kind or the industry kind.  Three weeks off the grid would lower your Klout score but wouldn’t necessarily impact your influence.  You see that don’t you?

But social media measurement ROI does need to be associated with meaningful metrics, nonetheless.

Measuring Advocacy

Bet you think that I’m going to talk about Net Promoter Score as a measure of ROI for social media, right?

Nope.

I’m going to talk about something far more important that begins to address the scalable power of social media and the most important return that social media can provide – revenue. Because we are talking about marketing to a large extent for this Blog Carnival, I’m going to stretch the definition to the more recent look at the alignment of sales and marketing that was initially discussed in 2009 by our hosts, Peppers and Rogers in their “Sales and Marketing, the New Power Couple,” report.

In his book, “Managing Customers for Profit,” Dr. V. Kumar speaks of an extension of customer lifetime value (CLV) that he calls CRV – customer referral value.  For those of you not acquainted with it, customer lifetime value is the measure of the economic value of a single customer and his/her household over the full length of a relationship that the customer has with a particular company. It is a measure of direct revenue impact.

But what customer referral value does is take a look at the power of a brand’s value in the social channels by operating under the assumption that customers who may or may not have a high CLV, could be strong brand advocates who will refer their friends and others to the brand. Then some of those friends and others buy the products or services based on the brand referral.   This is indirect revenue impact.

To determine that, there is data that needs to be collected from both social and traditional channels.  There are four questions that have to be asked to prepare to do that.  They are:

1. Would you recommend this company to someone you know  - the traditional Net Promoter Score question?  This signals intent.
2. Did  you recommend this company to someone you know?  The  key question – signals action on the intent. About 1/3 actually do recommend.
3. Did they become a customer?
4. Are/were they a profitable customer?

These four questions are the foundation for the ROI of social media. If you use social media to determine who the brand influencers are and then go a bit deeper to find out who those brand influencers actually influenced, you can get an actual ROI for your social media usage.  Which is what you want right?

CRM 2012 Forecast–The Era of Customer Engagement Begins– Part II

To understand why I’m saying this, please go to Part I on my ZDNet blog here.

Gamification becomes Serious Business

No matter how old you are, human beings never lose their desire to play. Play makes us happy. Each of us, and I challenge you to deny this, wants to have a happy life. We do what we have to in life to improve our chances to have one. One of those things is to have as many happy moments as we can accumulate throughout our lives. Even if we aren’t all that universally happy (not projecting here), each of us has had times where we were that we can point to.

Gamification, while often over hyped and misunderstood, is a concept that has increasingly important business value. It doesn’t mean playing games; it isn’t game theory; it isn’t a form of hunting meat. My favorite definition comes from Constellation Research Group CEO (and key influencer) (and great friend) Ray Wang from his recent research paper, “Demystifying Enterprise Gamification for Business:Behind the Hype of Influencing Behaviors and Effecting Business Outcomes:”

“Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes.”

To see it in action, even in an unexpected place, take a look at how SAP has gamified Accounts Payable. As odd as that may sound, they’ve done a genuinely good job. Here is a post on it with screenshots at Enterprise Gamification.

These aren’t edge cases for a small niche. Gartner Group in April 2011 thinks that by 2014, 70% of all businesses in the Global 2000 will have “gamified apps.” Research firm, M2 says that by 2016, the gamification market, currently sized at $100,000,000 will reach $2.8 billion, with 200% growth in 2012.

In other words this is starting to get big.

The vendors are in the game too. Those who have enterprise ready gamification platforms out there include Bunchball, Badgeville, and of course, Gamify, all in all about a bakers dozen.

We’re already seeing sophisticated gamification frameworks being set up. Innovative small companies like the award-winning UK virtual mobile network operator GiffGaff used gamification to recruit their initial customer community prior to their beta launch by providing DIY tools to create videos – the best of which got a £5000 prize.

For a more complete discussion on gamification worth reading, please make sure that you read the posts by thought leader and Lithium Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu. They are well worth it.

Ray Wong, Gartner, M2, all say gamification in a big way starting this year over the next few. I say, amen, brothers and sisters.

Insight Solutions will emerge as a technology category of its own

One thing that we can’t ignore (okay, that I can’t ignore) is that if customer engagement is to work, then insights into how customers want it to work are becoming increasingly necessary.

But again, we’re dealing with scale and we’re dealing with a dynamic social web with constant conversations that are liquid and changing continually. They are being carried out in multiple channels – channels that number all in all, in the thousands, both public and private.

The current generation of social media monitoring tools with a few exceptions – Radian6 and Attensity come immediately to mind – are somewhat passive tools that scour the web, find the conversations and organize unstructured data in the form of a report that provides the users with what is being said, usually in a positive, negative or neutral vein. The better tools provide strong analytic capabilities that give some insight into how customer segments are thinking or how “nodes” are responding. That would be Attensity, for example. Or they provide highly focused, highly specific, well thought out intelligence such as the sales intelligence focus of InsideView. Radian6 takes this to a whole new level with their Insights Platform which takes Radian6’s vast data mining and information organizing capabilities and integrate other technology tools that combined with Radian6 provide deep insight into individual customers, if that’s where you want to go. With the future capacity to tie this to salesforce.com or database.com or data.com transactional data, and contact information, we are beginning to see how an insight solution would work. It’s obvious limitation is that it will be tied to salesforce.com only customer data. But that aside, we are talking about something that at least foreshadows what are a future class of applications. Bryan Jennewein, the product manager for the Insights platform calls the results “social insight”, which is not an inappropriate term, in this case.

But Radian6 hardly plays in its own sandbox here. There are a number of emerging players in this space which I’m calling “insight solutions” who have been misplaced in or evolved from other market categories. Currently, the runaway number #1 of these for me is Coveo, which came from the Enterprise Search space. Following them is Allegiance, emerging from the Enterprise Feedback Management world and Lattice Engines, which inhabits the sales intelligence world uncomfortably. Another newcomer that has flown under the radar is WiseWindow, a "mass opinion business intelligence" (MOBI) provider, who specializes in vertical insights among other things and come from the BI world All four have the technology to provide insights. Each takes an entirely different approach to attaining the knowledge that can support insight, but each minimally provides dynamic data mining, collaboration and analytics. All four either can or do integrate with CRM, by the way.

This is not to say that more “traditional” analytics such as text and sentiment analysis, business intelligence, etc are going to be replaced or suffering. In 2012, they will be even more important than they are now.

Several vendors are either upping the ante or providing new ways of looking at the data – all in the name of recognition of the importance of insight – into customers primarily, but also employees, opportunities, processes, etc.

For example, Clarabridge is both upping the ante and providing a new approach to analytics by taking sentiment analysis to a whole other level beyond the traditional five-point expression (very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative) and ratcheting it up to eleven points using semantic analysis so that there is context to the sentiment, besides. Recently, SAP, despite the fact that they own the best analytics firm known to man – Business Objects, recently announced a partnership with social analytics provider Netbase to become a VAR that would sell “SAP Social Analytics by Netbase” to their customers. They realized like others before them, insight is 2012 table stakes and social data is the tableware.

Analytics as a whole is becoming fundamental to all business strategy. 2012 brings more of that than ever and the rise of a new category customer-focused solution that provides a combination the surfacing of dynamic information and the analysis of that behavior as dynamically as it is surfaced.

An optimal customer experience becomes the core of what CRM can provide. Finally.

In 2011, we saw a significant shift away from the pure left-brained messaging of CRM toward a much stronger focus on customer interactions, engagement and behaviors. Traditional CRM vendors for reasons that are both good and bad began to rebrand their messaging around the idea of technologies that can support an enhanced customer experience. The good reason is that they needed to do that and they did. The bad reason is that they did it as a reaction to historic CRM bad press a lot of times, rather than just recognizing that the context had shifted and we were entering a period that demanded that customer experience and engagement got attention. Right results, sometimes wrong reasons.

Vendors like Sword-Ciboodle have taken it further and begun to present their product portfolios not as a menu of features and functions but around solution sets that help you do your jobs better. The name for it is jobs-based thinking. The academic framework for that is Service Design Logic, something that is gaining increasing credence in the business world. If you look at the Sword-Ciboodle site, you’ll see that it’s got a roles-based focus. The reason for this is that there is a recognition that we are dealing with behaviors – both customers and employees, not just products.

But the interest in providing the “right” customer experience high. Witness these numbers that come from the “2011 State of Customer Experience Management” put together by ubër-expert Bruce Temkin, the leading customer experience influencer and best of the lot in my book. These numbers are indicative of both where things are (not new but embedded) and where they can go (toward maturity). Temkin found that:

• Nearly 60% of the companies surveyed have a senior executive in charge of customer experience
• There are 30% of the companies that have 20+ employees who are delegated to the customer experience
• There have been positive results (measureable ones, people!) from Voice of the Customer programs in 84% of the companies using them
• The percentage of companies that received a moderate or better competency rating rose from 22% on 2010 to 30% in 2011.

That’s the good news.

The signs that this is still immature?

· “Only 3% of companies reached the highest level of customer experience maturity, which (Temkin calls) a Customer-Centric Organization

· Only 17% of respondents believe that their executives regularly support decisions to trade off short-term financial results for longer-term customer loyalty.” (source: Temkin, 2011 State of Customer Experience Management)

That means that there is a lot of room to grow and in 2012, I expect that we’ll see a continuation of these efforts to improve and get measurable benefit, though nothing dramatic.

The only real “trend” that will likely stand out when it comes to customer experience in 2012 is that I think vendor messaging will be increasingly focused around it. That’s not really much of a trend, if you think about it. You feel me?

Social marketing becomes an integral part of an explosive marketing automation sector

Social marketing and the broader, customer-facing interactive marketing are becoming ubiquitous as customer engagement becomes the increasing focus of companies thoughts.

Chief Marketer in their 2011 Social Marketing survey found that 73% of the respondent companies were incorporating some kind of “social messaging” into their marketing campaigns and in 2012 an additional 10% (meaning around 83%) would be doing the same. What’s interesting is the primary reason that the respondents were doing so. Fully 85% of them felt it was a way to “reach customers at multiple touchpoints.” That’s 25% more than the next reason, which is that customers are spending more time on social networks. In other words, there is a recognition that social channels are now part of the mainstream and that they are additions to the channels that we’ve reached customers on traditionally. To get a feel for how big a deal this really is, in August 2011, Forrester Group came out with their “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011-2016” and saw the market spend up from $34 billion in 2011 to nearly $42 billion in 2012 and $77 billion by 2016. The bulk of the spend will be in the more traditional channels of interactive marketing – e.g. display ads and search marketing with emerging marketing such as mobile and social increasing about 250% in that time.

This is not surprising and if you look at it, the technologies available are once again more primitive than the efforts expended by the practitioner marketing departments.

The vendors are beginning to recognize the value of social marketing and are trying mightily to catch up and either incorporate it into their existing marketing automation or revenue performance management (sigh) applications and services. There are only a few genuinely useful pure social marketing or niche related apps out there at the moment, notably CRM Idol 2011 finalist Crowd Factory. One example of a niche related vendor would be the FuzeDigital reputation engine.

However the larger marketing automation/revenue performance vendors are taking note too. We are seeing social features being incorporated into more traditional applications from Marketo, Eloqua and Silverpop for example. Analytics giant SAS, rather than incorporating too much social into their marketing automation application, built and social media analytics application to take the pulse of the brand conversations going on out there. Companies like Infor, who provide customer interaction engines like Epiphany are using them to engage their prospects.

2012 will bring us continued explosive growth in marketing, especially social marketing because we have reached ubiquity when it comes to utilizing social channels as part of campaign planning. The more engagement is on the table, the more that marketing – with social marketing functionality as a prerequisite for a contemporary marketing suite – will grow dramatically. Forrester has it partially right with the increase of some 20% year over year in interactive marketing expenditures.

Think I’m wrong? Prove it. Launch a campaign on Twitter to do that. Ha!

Short Bursts: Other Trends

These aren’t meant to be full blown prognostications – just short takes on interesting trends that I’ve noticed that I want to make you aware of. There is too much in the sections above for me to draw these out but I didn’t think I should ignore them even if I don't spend a lot of digital ink making the case.

1. Mobile CRM - As in 2011, the creative development of mobile CRM will be driven by the tablet market and by the ability to analyze large amounts of data quickly that will show up on the tablets. The iPad will still be the dominant driver of mobile CRM application development. But we will see more activity around mobile payment than we will around anything else as Near Field Communication (NFC) is deployed on devices to a much greater extent than 2011 and Google Wallet grabs share of….mind as more and more businesses adopt.
2. Small Business SCRM – The success of Hubspot in 2011 and the emergence of a myriad of other technology platforms and companies who are small business focused (see CRM Idol again for many of the technology companies who concentrate on small business) is an indicator of the interest that small business has when it comes to doing business using social channels. I’m going to leave the details to Brent Leary in a forthcoming post here on the small business CRM market in 2012.
3. Big Data Becomes Really Big Data - The issue of how to data the massive increase in data and especially desirable data becomes possible the highlight of 2012. This is being fueled by the substantial increases in unstructured data on the social web, in the use of video, images, audio files and other rich data and by the growing ubiquity of the cloud all leading to what IDC feels is going to jump to more than 2.7 zettabytes (that would be 1021) in 2012, which is 48% higher rate of growth than 2011 – and 90% of it will be unstructured (Source: IDC Predictions for 2012: Competing for 2020). Managing this data will drive not only the storage and infrastructure markets, but will make even more “traditional” areas like Master Data Management (MDM) something that businesses will be investing in. This is a massive opportunity and a massive issue.
4. Acquisitions – The shrinkage of the market via acquisitions and it’s strengthening via strategic partnerships that support Social CRM and social business ecosystems will continue as they did in 2011. IN 2011 we saw, among others, salesforce.com acquiring DimDim, Radian6, Assistly, Model Metrics and Rypple; Oracle acquiring Inquira, Endeca and RightNow; SAP acquiring SuccessFactors and Microsoft acquiring Skype. We also saw a key strategic partnership between IBM and SugarCRM which was crucial to both companies. There will be more of the same in 2012 with interesting acquisition targets (at least interesting to me, not because I heard anything. Just to be clear) will be Marketo, InsideView, Coveo, SugarCRM and a handful of others including several of the CRM Idol contestants. Though, as always I’m sure I’ll be surprised and completely wrong. But acquisitions and partnerships will be the stars of 2012, whether I’m surprised or wrong or not.
5. The Cloud – 2012 continues the bandwagon though the hype will slow. This year not only did we see Amazon continue to be the cloud to beat, but companies like Oracle announce their “public cloud” and SAP went deep into the cloud as they announced at the recent SAP Business Influencers Conference not only buying SuccessFactors shortly after they announced that they wanted to significantly compete in the cloud but also announcing that from here on they are going to architect what they produce as cloud and will adapt it to on premises, rather than the other way around – a 180° turn in philosophy and development strategy. We also saw the cloud become the delivery system of choice, if you take it from the rate of adoption, not the amount of deployments out there in the on premises v. the cloud competition. Since this is short, let me recommend the always fantastic, quiet thought leader, Louis Columbus’ great aggregation post on cloud adoption. Read that to get the picture. On premises still is the dominant installation for CRM and other business technology, with hybrid deployments a popular option – and one offered by companies who have historically been invested in on premises software. In fact, all the leaders but salesforce.com offer it as part of their portfolio. More of this in 2012 as the unstoppable cloud juggernaut continues to gain delivery mechanism share.
6. Innovation/Co-Creation – This will continue to be in the purview of the most progressive companies – the leading edge of thinking and practice in business. But only at the lowest levels – feedback etc. will it be pre-eminent. The true practitioners of co-creation are just beginning to make their appearance on the global stage. I expect we’ll see most of this in the Fortune 3500 companies. I’ll be writing more on this and you’ll be seeing guest posts on this subject in 2012.
7. Knowledge Management – while there will be no slacking off of the existing models for knowledge management – accessible knowledgebases being the core of that – there will be considerably more focus on dynamic knowledge with as close to real time response as possible and the use of knowledge for insight (via analysis). The technologies to meet the requirements for the latter are just beginning to appear in the market. Knowledge grabbed from customer user forums and other external "unstructured":
8. Applications Marketplaces – Application marketplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more companies begin to view things from the standpoint of providing their customers with customized/configurable ecosystems. So now, in addition to the technology company marketplaces we know and…whatever emotion you want goes here….we are seeing even government agencies like the U.S. General Services Administration or the U.S. Army providing these application marketplaces to their constituents – in the former case, the other U.S. federal agencies and the latter case, varying Army commands. There is no reason to think that this is going to slack in 2012. In fact, look for it to accelerate.

The One By Itself

This is the most important prognostication for 2012. Period.

The Yankees Win the World Series – Locked and loaded. Our starting pitching straightens itself out, Teixeira gets his batting average back to a normal .290 or so; A-Rod revives his career enough to be a difference maker; Jeter just continues from his 2011 second half and Rivera of course is Rivera. Thus, The Yankees Win. The Yankeeeeeees Wiiiiiiiiin! Yay!

Finally

Look. This may be the most uncomfortable "forecast" I've ever made. It wasn't easy. I'm evolving a perspective I've had for almost 10 years and it has implications that are important, though not that dramatic, for how the industry will be developing and the strategies that need to be considered - if I'm right.

And that makes me uncomfortable. But I've learned a few things in my 62 years that I think have done me well over the years - some of it due to adversity that makes my skin very thick. Let's just say criticism doesn't exactly phase me.

First, I've learned that you are always learning.  That means that what I am writing here while I think its useful is only the beginning of something that I hope will have some impact but that will be constantly evolving even as it does due to collegial inputs from smarter people than me and those who are testing out what I'm hypothesizing here and finding how to tweak it or to show me that I'm wrong.

But if there is one thing I've learned that probably will never change, there is a way to think about all this. You make as good a case as your observations allow and then get on with your life and see how the next phase plays out. Which is what I'm now doing for 2012.

CRM Idol 2011: The Reviews Continue to Roll #4A

The first round of CRM Idol 2011 - The Americas is now officially over with the EMEA competition looming.  We have completed the demos/reviews of 39 companies for the Americas (we lost one due to personal reasons at the last minute) and about 25 of the reviews are completed and published. You've seen 14 of them. You'll see the rest of them over the days to come. Hopefully, by the end of next week, you'll see the announcement of the names of the 12 semi-finalists. For more details on all this, go to the CRM Idol website where we'll be announcing their names. Its gonna get intense.

To start your week off right, here's three more reviews Antharia, LLC; InvisibleCRM; and Aplicor.  Go baby!

Antharia LLC

Fortyfourfish is a very complete CRM tool for not-for-profit organizations.  Featuring an intuitive and easy to navigate interface, a full set of features (including donor-management, development, volunteer management, and an end-to-end relationship data model for non- profit), and a very low entry price.

Indeed, in a market mostly controlled by Blackbaud and Convio, and where starting implementations are bound to cost upwards of $30,000-$40,000 for just the first year, their entry price is a comparatively frugal $1,200.00 per year per person (it is a hosted model, so unless there is an increase in the number of people using it - that price should remain through the rest of the time it is deployed).

fourtyfourfish, the name of the product, is a creation of Antharia - a consulting organization for not-for-profits.  The product's tight integration means that the professional services for the product are provided by Antharia - a well known firm in the not-for-profit world.  One of the most salient features of the product is its flexibility and ability to be customized as needed - which is what Antharia does in addition to traditional business and management consulting.

The CRM product generates low recurring license revenue, and the product generates few other sources of revenue.  The business integration with Antharia gives the combined product and service company a sustainable revenue and business model, solving our concern over viability.

We were impressed by the quantity of features and functions it covers, both as a not-for-profit product and as a general CRM tool.  It covers the basic gamut of functions necessary to identify, contact, interact, track, and retain customers (or in this case, donors and volunteers).  One of the most remarkable features is the development tool, which is not something seen in anything but high-end products.  It seems at first look to be a very complete module and to do its job quite well.

While the interface seems a tad busy and at moments may seem overwhelming - it is easily customized and shrank or expanded (more or less information used, per the needs of the customer) to deliver an intuitive way to capture and incorporate information into specific processes.  We would definitely recommend those interested in adopting this product to think about the experience they want to provide for the volunteers or employees using it and right-size the number of functions (and options for those functions) to deliver a cleaner and more productive interface.

While we like the price point, as we are sure their clients and prospects do, we are concerned over the addressable market.  A combination of not-for-profits traditionally preferring more expensive solutions, a product that is mostly used by smaller non-profit, and a finite number of non-profits in the United States (international expansion is hard due to compliance regulations) yields a low potential client pool.

While we don't foresee Antharia or fortyfourfish needing additional funding - or other sources of income - we are concerned about their potential for growth.  We would like to see more funds invested in marketing and sales to ensure a continuity of the brand by deeper adoption in their market.

InvisibleCRM

InvisibleCRM (Invisible) is a vendor that rose from the "good old days" of CRM with Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle - their initial product was promoted as a simple, more powerful way to deploy SFA functions for companies who did not want to commit to full-size CRM Suites.  Their product is a series of "bridges" or connectors between different CRM products and an organization's systems.

Invisible's solution is very interesting from the integration perspective.  Working better in situations where two or more organizations need to "integrate", or work together using different CRM solutions.  Acting as a integration layer for CRM tools, Invisible captures the necessary data from both sides and injects in either everyday windows functions (such as file manager, or outlook, or even word), or into the corresponding CRM solution.

The real power of the solution comes down to this: users don't need to learn new interfaces or menus to interact with the solution (as it is tightly integrated into the everyday functions users are already using), and integration between systems is seamless.  In fact, the more systems that reside in the background and that it has to interface with, the more it shows its prowess.

Their demo showed us integration with Salesforce (one of their preferred integration partners) as well as other systems.  The items related to the different contacts, opportunities, and tasks from Salesforce were presented in the Windows Explorer (file manager) application as folders and files, and double-clicking on a file brought the information from Salesforce in a format that was pre-programmed for the demo.  There was no visible latency in these actions and the data seemed to update in real-time directly in the systems in the back.

We can see the value of Invisible in complex situations (e.g. sub-contracting in a project where two consultants need to sell or deliver together).  There is a certain amount of value in being able to integrate the data from the two systems in an easy manner.  It can save time, effort, and resources of building a single-purpose interface and integration; it saves time and money in training users as well - since they continue to use the tools and procedures they already know.

The value that Invisible brings, however, is downplayed by the potential market.  There are limited instances where companies would choose this product, and even then, the agreement and integration work necessary between partners is not an easy thing to agree to.  Even If we were to see Invisible in situations where only one organization needs access to the information - there are still limited situations where navigating through file manager, as opposed to a CRM interface, would be preferred.

We like the technology involved, and we like the speed at which Invisible performs when working; the demos were virtually free of wait time when using or adding data.  We are concerned for their growth potential with the model they use.  A potential future for Invisible is to build an ecosystem of partners to OEM these bridges and embed them in different applications directly. It would extend their reach and make the model easier to adopt.

Aplicor

Aplicor has a cloud-based Business Management solution targeted at small and medium businesses (businesses with 500 or fewer employees). Aplicor is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida with customers in United States and overseas. Their showcased solution is Aplicor CloudSuite7 which provides both CRM and ERP solutions.

One of Aplicor's key differentiators is its ability to be cloud independent. Aplicor's customers can select where the application can run based on their cloud strategies. Aplicor can host on their own cloud, or the customer can host in a traditional IT situation or on external clouds like Windows Azure and Amazon.

Aplicor is built on the Microsoft technology stack and all functionality is included with the solution under one single price - $89/user/month. The price is the same for any cloud model or software delivery alternative such as private hosting, multi-tenant hosting or on-premise.

Aplicor is creating a partner ecosystem with a mix of solutions and cloud partners in order to expand market share, branding and revenue generation. Aplicor provides agility and flexibility as key benefits to its customers via the partner ecosystem.  This adds the ability to provide hybrid solutions to the small and medium market.

Aplicor differentiates in the CRM marketplace on the user experience and tool sets. The user interface looks easy and clean. The system comes with videos and tutorial for self-help, including a central hub to gather information from RSS feeds and customer records. This hub should eventually provide social components with integration to Facebook and other social channels.

Aplicor did a rethink of the traditional GUI and came up with two - a traditional user interface and a panel and tiled view that helps users to set up the system to mirror their work styles.  For example, panels can have views, graphs and objects.

Some key aspects of the CRM functionality and user interface are:

1. Drag and drop fields to group and sub-group list of customers in order to drill down on specific customers.
2. A Google-like search is provided to quickly jump to customer records and objects.
3. Customer records and views can be bookmarked under a Favorite Menu to quickly jump back and forward between different places in the application.
4. Ability to perform LinkedIn, Google and Twitter searches from within account record.
5. Drag and drop any screen, graph, object or view into the workspace.

The administration and setup of the application is also drag and drop driven which provides a very easy interface for administrator and business users to configure the application.  Workflow is part of the application using a graphical interface to create business rules using Microsoft's workflow foundation. With the workflow you can perform inserts, updates, alerts and monitor changes based on the business rules.

Aplicor Airwaves is their mobile application platform where forms can be created via the CRM application admin tools. These forms can then be deployed on any mobile device. However, the look and feel is like a Blackberry interface no matter the device. Part of the Aplicor's roadmap includes the creation of CRM apps for iPhone and Androids devices.

Overall, Aplicor CloudSuite7 is a good CRM system with a clean and easy to use interface that comes with an all-inclusive pricing that is very attractive to small and medium business. This positions Aplicor to be an interesting alternative to other CRM solution like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

CRM Idol 2011: SMB Vendors Come to the Fore #3B

Okay, its now 2pm and I'm getting weirdly sleepy. So I'm going to post three more CRM Idol reviews that I'm begging you, pleading with you on my hands and knees to write your comments on here or on the CRM Idol website in the reviews section. This can actually have an impact on the semi-finalist choices and we're going to be counting on you to review the videos of the finalists when the time comes which means your vote will count. So this will be good prep work. Like voting for Lys Agnes, that gorgeous opera singer on America's Got Talent to get to the finals.  Well, not like voting for her, but at least you get the idea.

The CRM Idol reviews this afternoon are, Tasker.ly, thedatabank, and Antharia LLC.

Tasker.ly

A large problem in Customer Relationship Management is the lack of products serving B2B2C models.  Traditionally seen in franchise business, distributorships or where sub-contracting is a core part of the industry, there are virtually no packages available.  For the most part, those available focus on either marketing or service ignoring the complex situations that arise where there is more than traditional service necessary.

Tasker.ly solves the problem of complex business-to-business partnerships dealing with a customer.  The package does really well what it sets out to accomplish: make sure that processes involving parties from both businesses do what they are supposed to do in a methodical and repeatable manner.  True to its name, Tasker.ly focuses on the tasks necessary to deliver marketing and service functions in such environments.

Although they did not explicitly indicate it in the briefing, we can see a deeper focus on very complex environments, with thousands of tasks to be accomplished form the moment a process is started until it is completed.  In a complete framework, and tightly integrated with Gmail for message delivery, Tasker.ly makes sure that tasks are completed on time, and if not it ensures appropriate escalation and notification.

While we agree that the product does a very good job of managing a complex set of tasks and monitoring processes to make sure things happen as needed, there are three areas of concern for Tasker.ly:

First, they focus on solving a specific functional problem without defining well the target market - who they are selling to., Based on their recent launch to the market, they have a short but interesting client list - but there is on cohesiveness to it.  While this is understandable behavior for an emerging company, they need to focus more on who they are targeting, what their offer is, and tightening the message for that target market.

Second, their pricing needs to be revised.  Starting at $ 1,000.00 per month, pricing makes it almost impossible to engage them, with few exceptions. During the demo we saw a few business cases that would match those exceptions, but no very well defined use case.  They need to figure out better not so much how to solve the problem, but rather what problem they are solving.

Finally, they need to develop a better long-term vision.  The product is good, there is no question, as to what it does - and it delivers in an interesting manner (the interface could use some simplification - but given the complexity of the functions it performs, it is quite intuitive).  However, we have a hard time seeing how the product grows beyond its single functionality and matures into a closer-to-CRM solution.

Overall, it is a good product with limited functionality that could be used in more use cases if they were to invest in product management and strategy; we would like to see them better focused.

thedatabank

Founded in 1998, thedatabank (TDB) is one of the earliest pioneers of online fundraising management software aimed at the nonprofit sector.  Cofounder Chris Hanson brings twenty-five plus years of fundraising and database marketing experience to the company, while his partner Mark Paquette brings more than twenty-five years of software development experience to the thirteen person organization.

Having raised $250K in 2001, TDB has been cash flow positive since 2002, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 14% since 2006.  Subscription revenue accounted for 80% of overall revenue, with an CAGR of 20%.

According to information provided by TDB, there are approximately 1.6M registered nonprofits in the United States, a 60% increase over the past decade.  Nonprofits in the USA employ nine percent of the population, and account for 11% of GDP.

TDB currently focuses their efforts on the segment of nonprofits with annual revenues between one and ten million dollars - a group made up of approximately 250K organizations.  Industry groups they target include environmental, civic, human rights and educational organizations.  TDB currently has over one thousand organizations using their online service.  They estimate their competitors have a combined total of less than 30K organizations using these services.  With these numbers being a fraction of the overall nonprofit market, there appears to be good opportunities available for TDB to grow.

In a field with a number of competitive offerings, there are two vendors leading the market - Blackbaud ($300M annual revenues) and Convio ($80M in annual revenues).  These two are particularly competitive at the high end of the market - over $1M in annual revenue.  TDB counts as a competitive advantage being one of the only pure SaaS service providers in the space.  And with a large number of nonprofits not having experienced IT expertise on staff, and limited IT budgets, TDB believes its position as an online service provider will be attractive to the growing number of organizations needing a fundraising management solution.

The core of TDB's solution is the fundraising system designed to manage online and offline transactions.  The solution is built on the foundation of a centralized database, with integrated application modules for important areas, such as fundraising management, email marketing, advocacy, volunteer management, voter management and event/meeting management.  TDB says customers select their service to build better relationships with donors, volunteers, activists and event attendees.  The fundraising and advocacy modules are especially attractive to organizations looking to manage relationships at the individual donor level.  They feel this is why 60% of new business come from customer referrals, and for their high 40% lead conversion rate.

The email marketing module allows organizations to send out email blasts, manage subscriptions, and integrate forms on a website to filter data right into their TDB account, making it easy to follow up with prospective donors, volunteers, and advocates.  You can also create forms to put on your Facebook page to have those submissions automatically come into TDB.  There is also bulk-texting capabilities built into the system to further communicate with customer segments.

The advocacy module uses geocoding to automatically assign political districts based on a person's address.  You can also create an "alert" email that takes advocates to an Alerts Page to try and cause immediate action on an issue. A recipient can see what the issue is, and who will get this communication if they follow through with the action.  They can then click to send email, fax, letter, etc. in support of the specific issue.  Automating this process increases the number of advocates that follow through with the desired action.

From a fundraising standpoint one of the fastest growing areas is for attracting new donors is personal fundraising pages.   This allows organizations to set up personal campaigns at the individual level, and increase donor conversions.

Pricing for TDB depends on the number of contacts (size of database), number of modules used, and the number of users accessing the system.  The basic system setup with 5,000 records starts at $170 a month.  The average client spends $400/mo, for 18,000 records and 5 user accounts.

With TDB having its foundation in the late 1990s, the bulk of the application is written in classic ASP code, with a SQL Server backend.  This has some obvious limitations, which is why TDB says they are going to do a re-write of the interface.  They do have a partial API available now, but expect to have a full API available by the end of this year which should open up access to integrate personal info, contact histories and transaction histories.

Another goal for next year is to raise some expansion capital to develop additional functionality to move down into the lower segments of the nonprofit segment - particularly aiming at the 700K organizations with $100 to $1M in annual revenues.  By developing a self-serve version, TDB feels that allows smaller organizations to come in, sign-up and have immediate access to a system with a basic level of functionality and customization capability- at a price point less than $100/mo.  They feel that would provide lots of opportunities to grow their customer base.

TDB has a great deal of knowledge and expertise to assist organizations in improving their fundraising management activities.  The functionality is rich and well executed.  They do understand they need to upgrade the application architecture to allow for greater flexibility and agility moving forward.  And they also need to develop and implement a mobile strategy that will be important to deliver in the near future.  But if they are able to make things happen, and up their brand awareness efforts, they should be able to successfully compete for the growing number of nonprofits needing fundraising solutions.

Antharia, LLC

Fortyfourfish is a very complete CRM tool for not-for-profit organizations.  Featuring an intuitive and easy to navigate interface, a full set of features (including donor-management, development, volunteer management, and an end-to-end relationship data model for non- profit), and a very low entry price.

Indeed, in a market mostly controlled by Blackbaud and Convio, and where starting implementations are bound to cost upwards of $30,000-$40,000 for just the first year, their entry price is a comparatively frugal $1,200.00 per year per person (it is a hosted model, so unless there is an increase in the number of people using it - that price should remain through the rest of the time it is deployed).

fourtyfourfish, the name of the product, is a creation of Antharia - a consulting organization for not-for-profits.  The product's tight integration means that the professional services for the product are provided by Antharia - a well known firm in the not-for-profit world.  One of the most salient features of the product is its flexibility and ability to be customized as needed - which is what Antharia does in addition to traditional business and management consulting.

The CRM product generates low recurring license revenue, and the product generates few other sources of revenue.  The business integration with Antharia gives the combined product and service company a sustainable revenue and business model, solving our concern over viability.

We were impressed by the quantity of features and functions it covers, both as a not-for-profit product and as a general CRM tool.  It covers the basic gamut of functions necessary to identify, contact, interact, track, and retain customers (or in this case, donors and volunteers).  One of the most remarkable features is the development tool, which is not something seen in anything but high-end products.  It seems at first look to be a very complete module and to do its job quite well.

While the interface seems a tad busy and at moments may seem overwhelming - it is easily customized and shrank or expanded (more or less information used, per the needs of the customer) to deliver an intuitive way to capture and incorporate information into specific processes.  We would definitely recommend those interested in adopting this product to think about the experience they want to provide for the volunteers or employees using it and right-size the number of functions (and options for those functions) to deliver a cleaner and more productive interface.

While we like the price point, as we are sure their clients and prospects do, we are concerned over the addressable market.  A combination of not-for-profits traditionally preferring more expensive solutions, a product that is mostly used by smaller non-profit, and a finite number of non-profits in the United States (international expansion is hard due to compliance regulations) yields a low potential client pool.

While we don't foresee Antharia or fortyfourfish needing additional funding - or other sources of income - we are concerned about their potential for growth.  We would like to see more funds invested in marketing and sales to ensure a continuity of the brand by deeper adoption in their market.

CRM Idol 2011: SMB Vendors Come to the Fore #3A

Wow. We are pouring it on aren't we? CRM Idol has so far been interesting and you'll see at the end of week one and before we go to Dreamforce, an analysis of what the primary judges have noticed so far, given what we've reviewed. Some fascinating findings though keep in mind our sample is 39 companies  That's for later.

For now, today up is 2 more reviews: FreeCRM and RelayWare.

FreeCRM

FreeCRM (CRM ASP, Inc.) was founded with Angel funding in 2003 by Eric Stone, a person who clearly loves what he does and prides himself on the technical prowess of his solution.  The company has 10 employees.  Their CRM solution is focused on the small business market with most of their customers being very small businesses.  They have a freemium model that drives their business and that we'll discuss a little later in this review.

The Market

FreeCRM is focused clearly on the smaller side of the SMB market. With their freemium model, they claim 220,000 customers in 120 companies, with roughly 85% of them (give or take 5% at any given time) taking the free version and 15% (again, give or take 5% at any given time) paying customers.  That would mean, with these numbers being presumed to be approximately accurate, roughly 187,000 free customers and 33,000 premium customers, still a significant number.  They also state that they have a 5-10% conversion rate when it comes to free to premium subscriptions, decent by any standards.

The bulk of their customers come from companies with 1-50 employees, and are under $20 million in revenue.  They have perhaps 15 customers who are part of multibillion companies, primarily on small sales teams and perhaps 5-10% of their customers are at multi-national entities.

The Product

What makes FreeCRM more than just interesting is the incredible level of functionality that Eric incorporates into his solution, and then gives away.  That is the strength - and the weakness of this company.  This company may be among the few with the most complete functionality for an on-demand CRM product that we've seen incorporating pretty much all you need when it comes to sales, customer service, and interestingly enough, marketing - a place where the better known CRM suites are often deficient.  Additionally, he offers less frequently available capabilities when it comes to almost all small business CRM suites such as Knowledge Management, blogging (though we've seen this more frequently in the first 20 CRM Idol contestant's applications than we do in the rest of the CRM world), and even audit trails.

Here's a screen to give you the idea of the scope of this application.

FreeCRM Pipeline Management

As impressive as the breadth of functionality is, so is the depth of each of the functions - at least what we've seen. For example, the sales force automation component has what you expect at the level of salesforce.com or other major SaaS players.  Lead management, opportunity management, pipeline management, integrated calendars, sales targets are just a partial list of the extraordinarily rich functionality that FreeCRM provides.

It doesn't stop being impressive with just its applications.  The company has two geographically diverse data centers - impressive enough, right? Well, these data centers are not just up and running but are compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Billey and Federal Rules 26 and 34.  Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the data facilities have been audited as SAS 70 compliant by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). What all this means is what you see is what you get, when it comes to the controls that are claimed by FreeCRM at the datacenters.

To add to this, Eric Stone, in the demo/review, claimed that they are at "five 9s" uptime right now (99.999%) and "looking forward to six 9s."

Their product architecture is built on Linux and MySQL, like many of the other participants in CRM Idol.

It has very little social integration, with the initial odd, but interesting choice of Skype to start, rather than Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  However, the integration of these three social standards is part of their roadmap for the immediate future - and needs to be effected quickly, since, if they want to complete in the CRM market, this level of channel integration is becoming de rigueur.

Their roadmap also calls for improvements in the UI which is colorful but a bit heavy and mobile and HTML5 clients, both important and smart choices for a near future release.

The Business Model

While we can't begin to cover the number of features/functions that are inherent in this nearly complete product, and while we think extraordinarily highly of the product itself and the exacting standards that FreeCRM places on the development and quality of the product, we do have several concerns with the business model and the marketing.

Their business model is centered on the freemium idea. The actual difference between free and paid subscriptions isn't features though. The Pro version and the Free version have nearly the same fundamental functionality with the only differences being that you get up to 50 users for the free version and more limited storage and records.  Beyond 50 users, you have to pay $14.95 per user/month and you do get some added functionality, though the vital stuff is part of the Free version too. What you are paying for primarily is the level of support and maintenance ranging from a minimum standard of customer support for $19.95/user/month to $24.95/user/month for premium support.  If you care to, you can add voice functionality (they call it VoiceCRM) to the premium support for their top priced $39.95 month.

We feel that this model is inherently problematic because they are giving away too much functionality for nothing. Even the name of the product "FreeCRM" puts the customers in a frame of mind that says, freemium is good enough, impacting their potential revenue.  Additionally, 50 users for free is more than most small companies will ever need.  Support alone shouldn't be the difference.  We suggest that some of the more vital feature set be part of the Pro version only.

Additionally, for a company with 220,000 customers, they have little market impact, though hopefully, their participation in CRM Idol will begin to address that in some way.  Their marketing tends too strongly toward the functionality of the product and not how it helps the customers do the jobs they need to do.

Final Thoughts

All the concerns aside, FreeCRM competes as a product with any SaaS based CRM product out there when it comes to features and functions. The care that the staff has taken to be as functionally complete as they are and as flaw-free as they can be is something to be applauded. If they can fix their business model and dramatically improve their marketing, they could be a serious player in the SMB CRM market.

RelayWare

Partner relationship management (PRM) has gone in and out of style as much as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  PRM is the branch of CRM that does the hard work of managing indirect sales channels for vendors that prefer to sell through distributors and resellers.  There are good reasons for the channel and many of us forget that about half of technology sales go through the indirect channel including the business-to-business side of the equation.  It can be confusing for the consumer - the Apple Store is a direct channel but Best Buy is indirect.  Go figure.

Demand for PRM, or at least the attention it gets, is partly driven by where an industry is in its renewable lifecycle.  Attention is low when categories are new because the vendors need to employ direct sales forces to drive a missionary message.  Demand for PRM rises as the market becomes familiar with a category and the vendor looks to cut costs by managing a channel rather than an in-house sales team.  We are in one of those periods when PRM is back in style.

PRM vendors have come and gone in the last decade but RelayWare is one with staying power and one of the most complete solution sets in the business.  Founded in 2000 near Oxford, UK, RelayWare has changed significantly.  The entity today employs forty people, is privately held and they say profitable.  It addresses an international market and is headed by CEO Mike Morgan who led a management buyout a few years back and moved part of the company from Oxford to Redwood Shores, CA.  The company also eats its own dog food and has a distributor in Singapore though historically it used a direct model to sell its solution.  Importantly RelayWare is not a modified CRM system, PRM is their only business.

Interestingly, the company claims that PRM is inherently social (they may be right, but...) and uses this to claim ten years of social involvement.  There is social and there is social and we saw little evidence of what might be more commonly thought of as social in the product though it is on their road map.

RelayWare has built a solution that encompasses the basics of managing a channel along with the extras that channel managers have come to depend on.  They told us that they have application support for every phase of the partner lifecycle and we concur.  Often there is no analog in CRM for what PRM does and that is why CRM is often inappropriate for managing the channel.

For instance, managing market development funds is a big deal in the channel.  Partners are given amounts of money by the OEM for marketing programs based on their past success.  Awarding this money and tracking results is a part of channel management that vendors must have.  So is lead registration.  In conventional CRM or SFA a lead might be assigned to a representative in a territory and often those two things are the same.  However, in a channel partner territories may overlap and a partner always wants a way to make the lead uniquely its own.  At the same time, the OEM wants the lead aggressively pursued and the OEM needs a way to track if the partner is indeed pursuing it.  So deal registration works in both directions and neatly demonstrates the multi-directional nature of PRM.

RelayWare has gone well beyond the basics of PRM.  Because the company has been in the business and invested in its product line for a long time it has a distinct advantage over some of its newer competition.  CEO Mike Morgan is a self described channel guy who understand the unique demands of vendor life in the channel.  Nothing demonstrates this better than RelayWare's approach to analytics.  In addition to offering basic reporting capabilities up and down the channel, RelayWare also offers a special service to its customers.  It strips out identifying information in its data and analyzes it to develop metrics across its universe.  Individual vendors can then compare their own performances against these metrics to see how well their organizations perform or where they need to improve.

RelayWare has done a good job of building a complete product set for PRM and we think their approach will carry forward so they get high marks for vision.  The briefing was solid though we dealt with a minor login problem.  No matter, the demo suffered from a condition that we have seen in other briefings as well.  The vendor spent too much time on tactics - "this is how you enter data" - rather than on how the product advances the business aims of the customer.  Business aims were better covered in a presentation but the demo and presentation have to synchronize with one reinforcing the other.  The demo would improve with greater attention to the business issues.

We believe demand for PRM is likely to increase as market conditions continue to favor situations where innovation happens within the category rather than through developing net new categories.  We're likely to see a plethora of product line extensions that will only make sense when specialized partners bring them into relevant customer situations.  This is something the channel excels at provided it has the tools to manage all the data it is likely to churn up.  This should mean good times ahead for PRM.

CRM Idol 2011: The SMB Vendors Jump to the Fore #2B

Here's two more CRM Idol Reviews. We are almost done with the competition's Americas round. Semi-finalists will be named and interviewed in early September.  Now up: SplendidCRM,and Cosential. An interesting twosome - in a nice way that is.

SplendidCRM

SplendidCRM was founded in 2005 by Paul Rony and a group of fellow engineers looking to create an alternative solution to SugarCRM but using Microsoft technologies. The company is still privately held and funded by sales. SplendidCRM is primarily formed by an engineering team with a focus on software development looking to develop an open-source solution using Microsoft technologies.

The company's main markets are small businesses and companies with small IT departments that are looking for a generic CRM solution that it is based on a Microsoft stack.  The product is written using the C# language. Within this market they have customers in different industries from healthcare to government. They also have a national and international network of resellers that help develop and sell vertical solutions.

The product has all the main components you can expect from any full-featured CRM system with its respective sales, marketing and support modules. Source code is provided with the solution and integrates with key Microsoft technologies:

1. Report Design Language
2. Rules Engine
3. Workflow Engine
4. Exchange Server Synchronization
5. Microsoft Outlook Add-in
6. Microsoft Word Add-in

Besides providing MS Exchange integration, SplendidCRM also integrates with Google Apps and Paypal. Mobile applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android are under development. The only available social CRM functionality is the ability to use Facebook Connect to login into the application. Social CRM functionalities are part of the roadmap, but SplendidCRM's customers are not asking yet for any social CRM functionality according to Rony.

SplendidCRM has the same tiers of editions as SugarCRM: community, professional and enterprise, but a full-featured edition is available under the on-premise option. The enterprise edition (SaaS) is $40.00 per user/month and the on-premise edition is $480.00 per user/year and it includes support and upgrades. A minimum of 10 users is required. The community live edition (SaaS) is $10.00 per user/month and the on-premise is free using the open-source option.

SplendidCRM is definitely less expensive than SugarCRM and other CRM solutions, and it is packed with many CRM functionalities. This is a good thing for them. However, SplendidCRM's problem is that they just want to be like SugarCRM. This is not a good thing. SplendidCRM needs to innovate and be just more than an open source CRM solution based on Microsoft technologies.  One way to accomplish this is by providing industry templates for vertical solutions and integration with other solutions such as email marketing and social media management.  And besides selling the solution to IT departments, SplendidCRM needs to reach the sales and marketing decision makers. The full-featured functionality that comes out-of-the-box needs to be known by other decision makers beside the IT department.

If you need a less expensive solution than SugarCRM and need open-source in a Microsoft environment, SplendidCRM should be considered as an option to evaluate.

SugarCRM has a free open source version, so the only advantage that SplendidCRM has is the pure Microsoft stack.

Cosential

Subject matter expertise....matters.  One of the benefits of a CRM related application or service in a specific vertical is that the successful applications take the terms, processes and of course, best practices and even the psychology of the industry and its practitioners into account when they are being built.  The danger is that if it isn't diligent about the special circumstances in its industry, a vertical application might just take some of that into account, usually just the terms, without an understanding of what the differences are between that specific industry and pretty much every other one.

There is no lack of expertise and domain knowledge in Cosential, a CRM vertical solution for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry.

Cosential was founded in 1996 by industry veterans with 25 years of experience each in the AEC industry.  Their customer list is a who's who in the AEC world with customers like Hensel Phillips who have 1200+ seats to Tishman with more than 200 seats.  All in all they have 700 customers with over 38,000 users.

They have a SaaS based delivery and pricing model. They run $2/mo/user for a read only relationship to the system - though who would want that is beyond us. Then they run $60/user/month for complete read/write access to the system with all functionality turned on. They have a $30/user/month subscription for their CRM "piece" which they call Contact Management, but for once, that Contact Management is used wrongly because they have all the CRM functionality rather than little of it, which is normally the case when Contact Management is called CRM.

Their competition in the market, who tend to be much larger players, are not really competing with them because they are pricing deals both on premise and at a level of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not even occasionally millions. Cosential gets the companies that don't want to pay the high ticket implementation costs and instead prefer a manageable, not as costly, still robust implementation. So where the competition isn't, Cosential is.  This means that they have a good repeatable revenue stream in a large marketplace which has room for both the high ticket and subscription models.

That domain expertise is apparent inside what is arguably a complete application that covers not only the essential traditional CRM functionality - sales, marketing and customer service, but also the more industry specific project management capabilities baked into the application proposal collaboration, development and automation that is geared toward large project development, including one feature that we found particularly smart - a go/no go bidding tool.

The overall toolset is exceptionally powerful but what adds to the huge benefit that this product provides to its AEC niche is the level of sophisticated well thought out integrations. For example, it integrates with Lawson, JD Edwards, Oracle and Deltek among the most recognizable names when it comes to financial systems.  It also integrates with McGraw-Hill Dodge, FedBizOpps.gov and IMC (among others) for lead sourcing.  It also integrates with Parature for customer service; Google Calendar and Docs for collaboration and even Evernote for personal productivity.  For data sourcing, LinkedIn, Hoovers and even the US Post Office.   In other words, they've thought the end to end processes for winning, executing and servicing deals in the AEC sector, and allowed for all possibilities and all necessary sourcing and skills.  Their reporting engine, something that is of obvious importance to companies involved in bidding and building large construction projects uses an internal reporting engine or, if you have high levels of complexity necessary for your reports, either industry-standard Crystal Reports or Jasper reports, both via web services and Jasper particularly, in the cloud.

Much of their integration (though not all) is done through their Integration Exchange, which allows for relatively easy 3rd party integrations through the use of a web services API.

Since this is a CRM Idol contest not an AEC Idol contest or ERP Idol, we took a look at their sales and marketing capabilities and found that the sales capabilities are full-featured and the marketing functional if not somewhat basic in nature with email marketing, lead scoring, some campaign management, among a few other capabilities.

Their interface is decent and clean looking though somewhat 1.0 - which is neither good nor bad, merely a statement.  While the interface is more or less easy to understand, there is a learning curve that their users will have to go through to understand, if not use, the vast functionality this system provides and the navigation isn't intuitive.  That said, their dashboard, which has what we presume are Ajax-enabled drag and drop, interactivity and drill down functionality is very nicely done.

One strong feature that we were impressed with is their enterprise-wide search capability which is a phonetics based search engine designed to overcome misspelling and poor data entry.  It searches their internal data repositories and knowledge bases and also is able to go out and look at external sources - at the moment, just LinkedIn.  Given the complexity of some construction projects and the multiple sources of information they touch, this is particularly valuable and helps overcome some of the human issues that large amounts of data are subject to.

Here's a picture of the search engine capabilities via their dashboard Quick Search functionality:

Cosential Quick Search Engine

Despite all this goodness, we do have some concerns.   First, their architecture is Cold Fusion based - a development platform that still exists from the mid-90s that's becoming increasingly dated, even though Adobe is still producing constantly more robust versions of it.  Despite their well thought out use of web services APIs, Java, and HTML5 etc. they are going to have to keep up with the more contemporary architectures in order to continue to compete.  They've made it clear that they aren't going to rearchitect the application, so they'll have to just make sure they incorporate the more modern platforms and services as they go.  But it does remain a concern to us.

Additionally, their social integration beyond LinkedIn is non-existent, something that they are acutely aware of. Their roadmap reflects social as their most important priority one that we think needs to be done sooner than later. We'll take a look next year and see how they did.

Finally, they need to temper their marketing claims. While clearly they are AEC domain experts to an admirable level, their website professes that "Cosential is the most advanced CRM and marketing automation product on the market," a comparison that is way out of line on the face of it, and shouldn't even be made given that they represent a specific vertical industry and this implies a lot more than a single vertical in their claim.

However, even with these concerns, this is one of the best thought through and complete vertical applications that we've seen in quite a while, including the bulk of the CRM components.

CRM Idol 2011: The SMB Vendor Jump to the Fore #2A

More and more and more...CRM Idol reviews keep coming. Here are three more from the last few days of judging. Please feel free to comment here on them. This round, Relenta, RightAnswers and Connected. 

Here we go:

Relenta

Relenta is an interesting company, with a product that can stand on its own, but, as we will discuss later, might be better suited elsewhere.  Founded by a highly experienced and successful entrepreneur, Dmitri Eroshenko, in 2004 and in beta by 2005, they showed a good enough value proposition around their "simplicity" mantra to capture their first commercial customer by 2006 and went to breakeven and debt free by 2010.  While the range of users per company is from one to sixteen, the average number of users is "2.5."  Their pricing model is subscription based. It ranges from a very small freemium model to a 30-user, lots of everything else, $250/month plan.

The best way to describe Relenta is a unified inbox with strong (for small business purposes) workflow and one click access between channels, activities and records.  This solves what they see as a problem with "data fragmentation" which is probably, given the technical ramifications of that phrase, not the best way to characterize it. It would seem to us to be more like "fragmented data distribution."

Relenta

Regardless, what Relenta does seemingly quite successfully is to take social data channels, emails and the traditional CRM transaction records and activities and aggregate the data in ways that are useful to what is primarily a sales person from what we were able to see from the Relenta demo.  Aside from presenting traditional contact and account activity data such as invoices and sales history, it can incorporate social data in ways that are highly beneficial such as lead gathering or lead nurturing, or tracking the internal and external actions and interactions of an account or contact.  It can pull in data through its pipes from Twitter, Facebook, and email bidirectionally and as you will see in the figure below, incorporate customer activity.  That according to Dmitri, includes, "DMs" meaning Twitter direct messages though how that would work without permission is a bit of a mystery at this point. Also, noticeably absent in this was SMS, e-faxes and a whole host of other communications channels that are used by sales people in the 21st century.

Relenta's aggregation and integration of the data sources that they do provide for this unified inbox is effective in its ease of use. Because of its open source architecture, being built with Linux, Apache, PhP and MySQL, how you use the system is flexible, and, in this case, somewhat customizable. This architecture's open-endedness will allow it to be integrated with other like systems such as open source CRM systems (e.g. SugarCRM) or those like salesforce.com which allows for this kind of integration even though built on a different architecture. This fact has some bearing on some of the conclusions as you will see.

Relenta has what they call a "holographic system" which means that with their interface you can be in the CRM system, the email system or social channels and still be in the other systems though interfaced with one of them.  How this is holographic we're not sure, but the point is well taken.  Since Relenta drives for simplicity, lightness and one-click accessibility, this is a critical facet of their value and their differentiation.  They claim 90% of the functionality (of CRM?) with 10% of the application weight. While that's a bit of a stretch, again, the idea is a good one for their target markets, which are small businesses and small workgroups within larger businesses.

For example, you can, after a tweet is discovered that is associated with a contact in your system who might have an active deal, read the tweet, dig out the deal information - available from wherever you are with a single click and then develop a response. It also provides you with the ability to tag the contact, or any other area for that matter, so that you can see other tag-related activity associated with that descriptor.

While Relenta says 90% of the functionality at 10% of the application load, it actually is closer, at least in CRM terms, to 25% of traditional CRM functionality. It really doesn't natively provide sales functionality like opportunity management or pipeline management or the dashboards that managers even of small teams might need to see how their sales teams and staff are doing.  On the customer service side, what it provides really is something like find a twitter complaint, respond accordingly but it is a simple action reaction etc. kind of system. Not any real customer service functionality, at least from a CRM standard. And this is CRM Idol, after all.

But this doesn't mean we are dealing with a bad product, just one that is extremely light on traditional CRM functionality.  What it does very well, is enrich the functionality available to what is just usually the back and forth of an activity stream.  For example, you can not only show the deal that's being discussed in the activity stream but also the contact history so that you have much more information at your fingertips when you are collaborating, making this a good product for small groups - with the caveat below. For a very small businesses - those that average 2.5 users -  Relenta works as a rich but simple SFA-lite system. Since his roadmap incorporates pipeline management (according to their website, "coming soon."), they are obviously interested in building the standalone sales functionality out a bit more than it currently supports.  But for small workgroups in larger companies, they would be best suited as an integrated engine that would enrich the workflows, simplify the sales person's job and provide an increased useful value for the data that those small workgroups need - from other CRM systems.

While they integrate with Freshbooks, integration isn't a strong focus for them.  It should be.  They are very good at what they provide, and would be even better if they could provide it as something interwoven into multiple existing CRM systems.

GreenRope

Small businesses typically have few choices when configuring their systems.  Either a small business takes out of the box functionality and learns to live with it or the company can invest its resources in customizing software to meet its needs.  Larger companies have the same issues but their deeper pockets and greater resources make the customization route viable.  Of course, any business can also fall back to using spreadsheet applications but that solution has its downside which has been well documented.

GreenRope tries to provide a third path.  Founded in 2000 and located in Soland Beach, CA, the company offers something like a Swiss Army knife approach to business software for small businesses and consumer groups.

GreenRope may not match other CRM products feature for feature but given its audience, it doesn't have to.  It provides an eighty-percent solution that combines CRM, social media, email marketing, surveys, event and project management, website content management, ecommerce and a private wiki.  There's more than enough here to enable a small business to compete in the marketplace.

The big benefit for customers is that, as a platform for so many business applications, GreenRope can synchronize data and help coordinate various business activities thereby helping its customers to save money over point solutions and keep issues from falling through the cracks.  Corraling business information helps the small business to keep more balls in the air and compete more effectively.

GreenRope has been around for more than a decade and as yet, has not taken any outside capital.  The founders' roots are in email marketing and the product set is built around the assumption that email is an important channel for small businesses. Homogeneous consumer groups - associations, alumni and similar organizations - that have affinity among their memberships will frequently see this email approach as good and productive where others might put up the spam filters.

The product is highly configurable enabling even a small business short of technical expertise to still be able to modify its behavior.  For more technical audiences the company also offers code access.  The product runs a LAMP stack (Linux (operating system), Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and Perl/PHP/Python using both Perl and JQuery for applications.  GreenRope's approach to the market also includes a VAR channel and private labeling so that associations can offer the product as a benefit of membership to members.

Historically small businesses first bought accounting software to manage their books and when business picked up a contact manager.  Today multichannel customer access and a greater dependence on doing business online or through other indirect channels make it imperative for many small businesses that they find more efficient ways to bring their channels together to serve their customers cost effectively and efficiency.  The GreenRope suite is a good step in that direction.

GreenRope has taken its organic growth approach about as far as it can.  It is not the only CRM product attempting to address the small business market and that market could benefit from the richness and simplicity GreenRope offers.  The company now needs to get better known and reach out to the market which may mean taking on outside capital and the structure and advice that comes with it.

Small businesses typically have few choices when configuring their systems. Either a small business takes out of the box functionality and learns to live with it or the company can invest its resources in customizing software to meet its needs. Larger companies have the same issues but their deeper pockets and greater resources make the customization route viable. Of course, any business can also fall back to using spreadsheet applications but that solution has its downside which has been well documented.

GreenRope tries to provide a third path. Founded in 2000 and located in Soland Beach, CA, the company offers something like a Swiss Army knife approach to business software for small businesses and consumer groups.

GreenRope may not match other CRM products feature for feature but given its audience, it doesn’t have to.It provides an eighty-percent solution that combines CRM, social media, email marketing, surveys, event and project management, website content management, ecommerce and a private wiki. There’s more than enough here to enable a small business to compete in the marketplace.

The big benefit for customers is that, as a platform for so many business applications, GreenRope can synchronize data and help coordinate various business activities thereby helping its customers to save money over point solutions and keep issues from falling through the cracks. Corraling business information helps the small business to keep more balls in the air and compete more effectively.

GreenRope has been around for more than a decade and as yet, has not taken any outside capital. The founders’ roots are in email marketing and the product set is built around the assumption that email is an important channel for small businesses. Homogeneous consumer groups — associations, alumni and similar organizations — that have affinity among their memberships will frequently see this email approach as good and productive where others might put up the spam filters.

The product is highly configurable enabling even a small business short of technical expertise to still be able to modify its behavior. For more technical audiences the company also offers code access. The product runs a LAMP stack (Linux (operating system), Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and Perl/PHP/Python using both Perl and JQuery for applications. GreenRope’s approach to the market also includes a VAR channel and private labeling so that associations can offer the product as a benefit of membership to members.

Historically small businesses first bought accounting software to manage their books and when business picked up a contact manager. Today multichannel customer access and a greater dependence on doing business online or through other indirect channels make it imperative for many small businesses that they find more efficient ways to bring their channels together to serve their customers cost effectively and efficiency. The GreenRope suite is a good step in that direction.

GreenRope has taken its organic growth approach about as far as it can. It is not the only CRM product attempting to address the small business market and that market could benefit from the richness and simplicity GreenRope offers. The company now needs to get better known and reach out to the market which may mean taking on outside capital and the structure and advice that comes with it.

Connected

It's a common story with emerging companies almost bordering on a cliché.  The founders have a bright idea, maybe get some funding and try to bring their idea to the world.  Often the world ignores the idea or if the innovator is lucky some early adopters pick it up and run with it though they will likely change the idea considerably along the way.

Connected (www.connectedhq.com) has all of the elements of a typical startup story plus one.  Founded in 2010 the company launched its social CRM product in early 2011 with the help of angel investors Trinity, Ignition and 500 Startups.  Founders Sachin Rekhl and Ada Chen Rekhi envisioned "SocialCRM Without the Work" and that is where the wheels could (but don't) fall off.

The plus one referenced above goes like this.  Connected is not a very useful bit of CRM.  The Rekhls envisioned a solution to the CRM adoption problem last seen in an off the cuff comment by an analyst many years ago that still lives in mythology.  The Rekhls contend that the problem with CRM adoption is that CRM requires a great deal of data input before it can be useful and that many users balk at the data entry.

True enough but the same can be said of ERP in spades but you never hear of anyone tiring of plugging in those dollars and cents.  It says something about our respect for existing money and our imperfect understanding of future money that CRM is supposed to help us get.  At any rate you can't have CRM without data and it isn't all going to come in via osmosis, especially when you consider deal and other transaction data.

But all those shortcomings in Connected can easily be ignored if we simply ignore the founders' initial positioning.  Connected has no conventional CRM back end and isn't really CRM but it is a superb contact manager.  In fact to call Connected a contact manager is to redefine the category.  If Connected manages contacts, other products merely warehouse them.

The heart of Connected is a Universal Address Book that Hoovers (as in a vacuum) in social and other relevant data from a growing list of social sources that includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Email, blogs and much more.  Connected keeps you abreast of all the social meanderings of all your contacts and reminds you of things you need to know in business.  Someone was promoted or changed jobs or that already old chestnut, somebody has a birthday today - Connected tells you without your having to search so that you can presumably do the right thing.

Connected has what the company calls Comprehensive Profiles so if there is something on the Net about one of your contacts you can reasonably expect it will show up in your Connected account.  Same goes for companies you want to follow.

If think there's too much data and not enough information, the company has already reached the same conclusion and built a prescient Daily Agenda function - a daily email about your meetings and their context, recent status updates, reminder of all previous meetings.  It's the equivalent of your personal daily briefing.  This is significantly valuable for sales people for instance preparing for a busy day or commuting to a meeting.  Just don't try to drive while you're digesting it all.  Daily Engage Events goes deeper to inform you about what's happening in the lives of people around you, i.e. the birthdays etc.

So, ignoring the positioning, the founders have delivered on most of what they set out to do.  They've built a tool that collects and presents a great deal of social information about your contacts without imposing the data capture on the user.

Of course capturing and using transaction data is still an issue and it will be solved as Connected gets connected to conventional CRM products in the months ahead.  More likely this company is well positioned (in San Francisco of all places) to be scooped up by some smart and more well established CRM company that understands the value of social media in CRM and the overarching requirement to seamlessly integrate social and CRM.  Who might that be?

CRM Idol 2011: The SMB Vendors Jump to the Fore #1B

Its now 2pm ET and, right on time, here (and on ZDNet) are the next two reviews for CRM Idol - Soluciones S.A. and Jaguar TPM. Same rules apply. Please do me a favor and comment on what you think.  You may be able to affect the semi-finalist choices if you do.

Here we go...

Soluciones S.A.

Soluciones S.A., an Argentinian based company and creator of Engage Business Solutions, is a well matured company focused on CRM solutions for both the Spanish Speaking Latin American and Brazilian markets.  The company was founded in 1989 with offices and partners in Mexico City, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador and Brazil.

Soluciones S.A. has a network of partnerships and alliances that include companies like Oracle, Microstrategy, SPSS, Microsoft, Atos, Telefonica and Deloitte. With a staff of 60 employees, Soluciones manages the product development, software sales and professional services in the entire region.

Engage Business Solutions (EBS) main focus is to provide efficiency, profitability and competitiveness to the unique Latin American market. They have been accomplishing this by providing a solution that has BPM, CRM, Collections and Analytics - an all-inclusive solution. EBS solution targets small business as well as large enterprise in Latin American, from banks and to insurance and from cable to telecommunication companies.

Their main market is the financial industry which represents 40% of their customers. Other industries where they have key customers are insurance, telecommunications, government and automotive. They have an impressive list of customers that represent who is who of banks in Latin America like Banco Columbia, Banco Fallabela, Banco Comafi, GE Consumer Finance, Banco Ripley, Meridian Financial, BBVA and others. DirecTV is also one of their showcased customers in Latin America.

When the CRM decision is local to the market, they compete very well with CRM vendors like Siebel and Microsoft, since EBS offers local best practices in CRM and especially in Collections. Also, their integrated BPM technology and the local pricing are very attractive to many Latin American companies.

The EBS solution provides the traditional CRM modules such as marketing, sales and service, but it also provide loyalty, collections and BI modules - all integrated. This includes functionality to manage different touch-points with consumers such as call center, web, branches, mobile and CTI. One unique factor is that EBS is tailored for the B2C market more than the B2B market.

Their technical architecture provides a complete data integration between the application and integration layers. In terms of middleware they are capable of connecting to MQ Series and Web Services, among others. MQ Series is a popular option in Latin America for integration services, especially in the financial industry. Additionally, EBS is database independent; it can work with most popular databases.

One of the key benefits of EBS is their Business Applications Library. They have created 100s of business applications to manage all types of processes from credit validation to collections and from marketing to sales. The library includes processes, forms, metrics and formulas. These business applications are based on local and regional best practices. This is a unique competitive advantage against their competition and a benefit for their customers.

The solution also provides 50 predefined reports and dashboards using an embedded OLAP engine, including metrics such as RFM, Time Analysis, Collections, Customer Scores and Geographical Analysis, among many others.

Soluciones S.A. have found a good niche in the Latin American market due to the fact that they can serve the large enterprise and small business markets in a B2C environment, and most important in the financial industry.  They can help large enterprise with complex processes in the typical Latin American environment. This is a unique differentiator.  The know-how of the region is an excellent competitive advantage.

Today, most of their customers are using EBS under the on-premise model. However, they currently have a SaaS solution for small businesses.  They see some challenges ahead such as replicating their success in Argentina in other countries, increasing their partner network and moving to the Cloud.

Their user interface is designed for call center reps and only provides Spanish and Portuguese support. The user interface really needs improvement; it is not that user friendly and looks like a client/server or mainframe screen deployed in a web interface. This look and feel could be fine for the Latin American market, but if they eventually want to enter the market in United States, EBS will need to improve some key aspects of the user interface and support the English language.

If you are a multinational company with operations in Latin America, EBS should be in your short list of CRM vendors. They have the local know-how, the local best practices and the local support. Soluciones S.A. is a matured CRM vendor with great opportunities ahead and worth considering.

Jaguar TPM

Founded in 2009, JaguarTPM is a management consulting and systems integration firm focused on CRM and trade promotion management solutions for consumer products companies.  Cofounders John Mazan and Rick Davies bring extensive CPG industry experience in strategy and implementation from leading firms such as IBM, KPMG, and McKinsey & Company.

According to research provided by JaguarTPM, there are approximately sixty-six thousand consumer products firms in the US, employing fourteen million people, and accounts for $2.5 trillion in annual revenues.  According to various reports, these companies spend anywhere from 10-30% of revenue on trade promotions.  JaguarTPM is focusing their efforts on providing small and midsized CPG companies the ability to compete for distributors and retailers with an integrated set of trade promotion management (TPM) and CRM tools larger competitors typically have at their disposal, but at a fraction of the cost of high-end solutions from vendors like Oracle and SAP.

Lack of integrated planning between trade promotion planning, volume forecasting and account management is a key challenge of TPM. Most TPM systems require a substantial investment in human resources and IT. JaguarTPM's main objective is to bring down barriers to implementing a systematic approach to managing TPM from both a sales promotion and financial management perspective - at the SMB level.  Prices start at $150 per user per month.

Built on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, JaguarTPM leverages account management, contact management and reporting capabilities from that platform, and integrates a complete trade promotions management module specifically for the CPG industry.  Their industry template focuses on adding/extending the following capabilities:

• Account and contact management customized for handling relationships with both distributors and retailers
• Product Planning at the SKU or product group level
• Volume Forecasting (performing "what if" analysis for adjustments)
• Trade Promotion Activity Planning
• Integrated trade promotion with forecasting
• Merchandise retail execution (information on how retailers place/showcase products)
• Distributor Portal integrated with Dynamics CRM to allow distribution partners capability to provide depletion information back to manufacturer allowing for more accurate forecasting

The company is currently working on a customer service extension called JaguarQ.  The extension will not only manage the quality of product delivery to distributors and retailers, but also look at consumer side service.

JaguarQ will take into account lot number, and the product location. If a call comes in and says something was wrong with a product, (e.g. found a product defect) a set of workflows will kick off to see who needs to be contacted and what procedures need to be followed.

Additionally they are exploring the concept of having QR codes as part of the packaging so that someone can take a picture, send it in, which will allow users to tell how the product got there, when it got there, where it is in the distribution channel, and how long it's been there.

JaguarTPM can be deployed as an on-premise solution, or over the cloud.  Originally they looked at building their solution on top of "cloud-only" solutions, but some of their larger customers preferred the option of having an on-premise or a cloud-based service.

Although they are a Microsoft Certified Gold partner, JaguarTPM does not target Dynamics CRM customers, and doesn't focus their business on reselling Microsoft products.  They also don't look to Microsoft as a channel for leads. Due to their experience and expertise, they view themselves as a TPM/CRM solution for CPG, and not primarily as a reseller.

Even though Oracle and SAP are the main players in the space, particularly at the high end of the CPG market, JaguarTPM's price point should be attractive to companies growing their product catalogue and distributor/retailer network.  Educating the SMB market, in addition to providing an integrated CRM/TPM solution will be key to JaguarTPM building a successful niche in this area.

Also, JaguarTPM believes more CPG manufacturers view social networking as an interesting avenue to create opportunities for direct conversations with consumers to offer trade promotions to them Tighter integration with social will provide for richer conversations between vendors and consumers enabling vendors and retailers to better manage promotional dollars. This would allow manufacturers to gain valuable customer insights in order to create more attractive products and offerings to distribute.  JaguarTPM sees this as a potential selling point that could drive interest at the SMB level for an integrated approach to CRM and TPM.

JaguarTPM's deep experience and expertise in the CPG space, coupled with their focus on small and midsized organizations, is a combination worth paying attention to.  The solution makes it possible for smaller manufacturers to have a much better handle on trade promotion activities, as well as a better system for managing key relationships with distributors and retailers.  And as their need to spread promotion dollars into more products over a wider distribution network, JaguarTPM's integrated approach to this challenge should make it an option worth considering.

CRM Idol 2011: The SMB Vendors Jump To the Fore #1A

From now on through the next few weeks, I'm going to bombard you with the reviews that an esteemed panel of judges (well, esteemed except me) are writing for the companies that are participating in the CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season competition. This thing has burgeoned into something rather large - at least within the confines of the CRM industry - and is a chance for small companies who are attempting to penetrate the CRM, SCRM and related markets (despite the proclamations of its death) and are being given a stage to be declared after an easy-to-enter, hard-to-win CRM Idol 2011 - the best of a heavy vetted lot of small companies with a real future.

Even those who don't win deserve their day in the sun. So in addition to these reviews being published on the CRM Idol website, we would like to get them to you guys to read elsewhere too.  And to comment on them.

See what's going to happen is that there will be semi-finalists chosen and your comments on the website, on our blogs, at the press sites that are covering the reviews (more on this later this week) will matter in the selection of those semi-finalists.

What I'm going to do is to get these out to you as I get them.  Roughly, 2-4 a day will be published and some days even more than that.  Please spend time reading them, looking at these companies, give me  your thinking on these companies in the comments section of this blog, PGreenblog, or the CRM Idol website or all three.

The First Reviews

Each review has been signed off by all the CRM Idol Primary Judges - currently for the Americas and in early September for EMEA.   So these are all jointly done in effect.  They represent a distillation of the understanding of the companies and their products from the principals who did the demos and briefing with us throughout last week and through the end of this week. This time 39 in all, due to a withdrawal of one company for inescapable reasons.

What you'll see here right now is four companies: Phaseware, Performance Solutions S.A., this morning and Soluciones S.A. and Jaguar TPM later this afternoon.  I hope that you'll not only learn something of these companies but respond with what you think.

Thanks for taking the time.

Phaseware

Phaseware was co-founded in 2005 by Randall Nelson (CEO) and Hoyt Mann (president) two industry veterans who first worked together at RamQuest Software.  The company made its first sale in 2006 and achieved profitability in 2007.  Phaseware dedicates itself to providing customer service solutions to SMB companies in the five million to twenty million dollar revenue range.  Phaseware has just ten employees serving more than one hundred thirty five customers.

Phaseware has no outside capital and plans to continue its organic growth focusing on a variety of industries including software, medical device hardware and outsources services.  Phaseware goes to market in two modes on-premise and on-demand using the same code base a trait enabled by the Microsoft platform.  The customer base is roughly evenly divided between premise based (55%) and cloud (45%) and the company enjoys high levels of customer retention, which it describes as being in the "upper 90 percent" range.

One reason Phaseware can run so lean is that it relies on a Microsoft stack including .net for application development.  The company leverages the Microsoft partnership for its foundation and focuses on customer service and feature development.

The Phaseware product suite consists of five related products.

Self Service Center (customer web portal).  This customer portal offers a clean and serviceable though somewhat dated user interface enabling customers to search for information in the vendor knowledgebase.  Customers can generate a service ticket through the web interface to initiate a deeper service process.

Knowledge Base. Phaseware uses Microsoft Silverlight for content management for documents FAQs and articles.  The knowledgebase is accessible through the Self Service Center as well as the Tracker products.

Integrated Chat. There are two chat channels available in the system including one for vendor to customer communication and another for supervisor to agent for training and monitoring purposes.

Event Engine (business rules automation). Phaseware put a great deal of effort into the product to enable its customers to define business rules for processing customer requests.  Ad hoc search boxes in the system enable customers and vendor agents to drill into customer, product and other parameters to identify issues and their resolutions.

Tracker and Tracker on Demand (agent desktops). The company offers two agent desktops (Tracker) for remote and premise based agents.  Through Tracker agents can define business processes using the rules engine and customize business processes.  Users also have the ability to design and manipulate screen design to better reflect their work styles.

The system comes with a full array of functionality designed to make the agent productive and provide a quality customer experience.  Some functions and features include alerts,  automatic case escalation, targeted email, customer forums, auto reminders to customers and automatic report distribution.

Phaseware fits its niche well and prides itself on its customer care responding to its customers within a two hour window (using its own products).  Its close alliance with Microsoft and dedication to the platform help ensure the Phaseware can continually bring its customers a steady stream of updates and enhancements.  Looking ahead, Phaseware is well situated to continue improving its product line selling into a broad market for SMB customer care and customer service systems and growing organically.

Performance Solutions S.A.

Performance Solutions S.A. creators of the customer service product suite Blitz, was founded in 2006 in Lima Peru by its current managing director, Marcia Garcia-Smith.  They have 16 team members who include a number of employees and contractors who are working for Performance Solutions.  As with most of the competitors in CRM Idol, only a small number of the team members are employees who function as part of a team consisting of those employees and contractors and the management of the company. In fact, the employees on the demo call went out of their way "we don't work for Maria. We work with Maria," something that Maria confirmed, which indicates a closely knit organization with a relaxed and somewhat (please note the use of somewhat here) non-hierarchical organizational culture.

The company is bootstrapped, funded primarily by Ms. Garcia-Smith and one member of her family.  There are no outside funds.

They have about 20 customers that are distributed across multiple verticals including financial services, telco, airlines, and health services. Their market has been until very recently strictly focused in Latin America with customers primarily in Peru and also Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina, although the latter four countries has been more consulting customers than product/solutions directed customers.  But in the last several months, they've had their first English speaking customer in the United States, which led them to accelerate their program to get to the U.S. market, which as we'll see shortly has implications for their product that are quite important.

To date their regional customers has been widely scattered among banks, retail stores/chains, insurance, hospitals, airlines and a government agency.  What makes it a bit unusual is that they also have a strong "vertical" area in economic groups - Latin American based family-owned businesses that control a variety of interests.  For example, one economic group using Blitz controls 120 companies of varying sizes.

What remains a bit unclear, besides their interest in going to market in the United States, is their future go to market strategy because they have such general penetration in the Peruvian market in particular, though still a small customer base and because the customers in the other countries are primarily consulting customers.

Their portfolio, called, all in all Blitz, consists of two products and what they call a "platform.  It is geared to customer care centers, an increasingly crowded market and one that takes in general exceptional performance and a high level of differentiation to make any real progress in all in all.  But the products are very focused around some particularly interesting capabilities so that there is a decent chance, with some caveats, that they can do well in this busy marketplace.

Business Model

Their business model, according to their own literature: "Blitz is a platform that has a complete set of tools to help Business SERVICE & SUPPORT their customer base, in a BOUTIQUE CONSULTING mode. (Their capitalization)."  This is something we find confusing given their line of reasoning to us which was more supportive of a solutions based model more akin selling the products; provide professional services to implement them.  Strategic consulting did not seem to be something that they were terribly interested in.

Additionally, another point of confusion in the model is in the following excerpt from their differentiators:

"•Twitter, Facebook, emails, mobile enabled and Portal Self-Servicing as well as those traditional Call Center and Sales Force Support...."

We saw no evidence of sales force support in their offering, though a highly customizable offering can, we're sure provide that with some work.

Product

Blitz is a customer service product suite that consists of three offerings:  two products - a Self-Service portal; a Channel Manager and what they call a platform -CRM Service and Support Workflows.

Their entire portfolio is built on a Microsoft SQL and .NET framework with an MVC architecture that allows them to port the products to DB2 and Oracle databases if need be.  Their roadmap is geared in a few directions in 2012 and beyond with an increased use of webservices and cloud APIs, many already used in their Channel Manager product. These not only allow for better mobile offerings beyond their current Blackberry effort, but stronger integration with other CRM products like salesforce, SugarCRM and vTiger - three they specifically named.

What they do have to their great credit is a highly and somewhat easily configurable platform and product set that allows deep customization, which, given the disparate kinds of customers they have is a definite and important quality of their portfolio.

While they have three offerings, they are clearly focused on Channel Manager, the one product that the judges had a chance to see in depth in the course of the demonstration.  Channel Manager functions as more than just an aggregator of social and traditional contact center channels.  It allows the agents to not only record the interactions, and view them on screens that are clean and easy to read, but also to respond to the queries, questions and problems and ties the customer's interactions to any service level agreements they have with the companies they are communicating, with. One great strength of Channel Manager is the ability handle social inputs such as Facebook and Twitter and more traditional channels such as email in a matter of fact way - as part of the agent's life, rather than something that stands out as a "wow isn't this cool" set of screens every time it pops up.  It reflects a recognition (that we applaud) that social channels are just that - channels, no more, no less and they are used for more inputs from and insights into customers.

We didn't see evidence of any way to handle phone calls which might have been an oversight in the demo, so we'll just leave it as a comment.

They have a small analytics set with a simple, easy to access and use personal dashboard that provides some basic, though not much more than that, metrics for an agent or manager's perusal. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea of what this looks like.

What still remains a little unclear is their scalability to the larger enterprises in the U.S. market which are considerably larger than the larger enterprises in LATAM.   However, they do claim to have their enterprise product now and ready.

Final Thoughts

The Blitz Channel Manager, the only product we're qualified to speak of, is a well thought out LATAM focused customer service product that on the one hand, suits their current market but has some challenges for North American markets.  The biggest challenge is the obvious one. As of now, they have only a Spanish version, though they recently acquired their first U.S. customer, putting them on the spot to complete the English version in the near future.

Their roadmap is prudent yet ambitious, not only incorporating some re-architecture of their product around Websphere, depending on an opportunity to partner with IBM.  More definitive is their future inclusion of other channels and capabilities into their product suite, particularly SMS, Online Chat, fax-to-email and native Mobile to go with both the social and traditional channels they already incorporate.

What seems to be a little skewed or at least unclear, is their business model or what they present as their business model. Consulting is not the course of action we recommend for them but rather a solutions-focused model that uses professional services to implement them. If that is the way they go to market, then they need to align their messaging much more appropriately to their business model.  Additionally, it would be valuable for this small company to pursue some partnership for additional exposure to the U.S. market once they complete their English edition.

What is clear is that they have a very good product that is what it claims. It's easy to use, yet customizable to a degree that is laudable. What is also truly smart is their treatment of social channels as no more than another set of channels for agents or managers to use in their quest to provide customer service effectively.  Their roadmap for the future with the incorporation of text, online chat etc. shows that in spades.

(Later today, Soluciones S.A. and Jaguar TPM.  Check back at 2pm ET.....)

CRM Idol 2011 Update #2: We're Crankin' Now!

In case you need the full monty as CRM 2011 keeps rollin': here are the two links to the oh so passé past.

• The original rules and contest ideas, judges and prizes.
• Update #1

Now here are the latest updates:

Additions to the Judges

1. Lets give a big round of applause to Larry Ritter,  Senior Vice President & General Manager of CRM for Sage Software who joins our Extended Judges Vendor Panel . Larry is a long time industry veteran who not only knows software but knows small business too. A huge addition for the panel
2. Now, put your hands together for Chris Carfi, Vice President of Antseyeview and the man who just may have coined the term "social customer" with his incredibly popular blog. Chris is one of the first social influencers and one who knew the CRM market from the get go. He is also incredibly popular.  He joins the Extended Judges Influencer Panel.
3. We've got one more to clap those hands for and that would be Brian Vellmure, Founder and Principal of Initium, LLC. Brian is one of those Social CRM influencers who appeared about 2 years ago and just keeps getting more and more prominent. He joins the Extended Judges Influencer Panel too.
4. Also, give it up for Thomas Vander Wal, Principal at InfoCloud Solutions who joins the Extended Judges Influencers Panel. Thomas is a web legend who pretty much created social tagging and folksonomies and is the man who is defining the social "lens" that we look at companies, products and social interactions through.
5. Finally, last but not least, raise a glass to Kristian af Sandberg, Product Manager, Redpill Linpro, one of Scandinavia's foremost strategic implementation firms. Kristian is an EMEA leader who becomes part of the Extended Judges Vendor Panel.

The Mentor Program

We are adding another facet to the mentorship program. Where originally mentors were available to only the seven finalists on how to construct the content for their video, we are going to be able to expand that program to the 60 contestants on how to handle their demos etc with the primary judges. These mentors will be drawn from the Extended Judges panel and will be VOLUNTARY when it comes to which judges. Watch for a list to be published on the website at some time after the site launches.  The contact information will be made available PRIVATELY to the contestants for their knowledge only and the dates that the mentors will be available also will be privately provided. This is an exciting addition because it will provide invaluable advice on how to do things that will benefit the young businesses that are in this competition. Participation is strictly voluntary on both sides.

The Latest Calendar - May  5, 4:30PM ET, 10:30PM GMT

CRM Idol 2011 is closed. All the slots are taken but we've put together a waiting list. 

For all of the companies that have made it, please remember:

1. its provisional - dependent on your three references checking out. Once they do, we will send out notifications to everyone that will let you know the time and date of your actual slot.
2. I'm traveling and the other key judges are busy and we are all human beings so we might be a little slow in responding.
3. The waiting list is those Americas companies that submitted after closing of the competition. The order is based on the time stamped proper submission of the email. Any email that had something wrong with the submission has been asked to resubmit with the corrections. The resubmittal will be their actual time and date, not the original submission. Hey, it might sound sorta anal, but we haven't been asking much so reading the rules and making our lives a little easier isn't unwarranted, is it?

The Americas Calendar - FINAL (see #1 above though)

The Americas (all times are Eastern Time)

Date
	August 15 3pm – PhaseWare 4pm – Performance Solutions 5pm – Solucciones 6pm – Jaguar TPM	August 16 3pm – Relenta CRM 4pm – LuxorCRM 5pm – thedatabank 6pm –Connected	August 17 3pm –Assistly 4pm – SplendidCRM 5pm – RO/Innovation 6pm - GreenRope	August 18 3pm – Cosential 4pm – Media Funnel 5pm – Tasker.ly 6pm – Aplicor	August 19 3pm -FreeCRM 4pm – Interactions Corp 5pm – Antharia LLC 6pm – Relayware
	August 22 3pm – Lookout Software, Inc. 4pm – InvisibleCRM 5pm – Negoxia 6pm - CiviCRM	August 23 3pm –Vigilius LLC 4pm – Hyperoffice 5pm – SalesNexus LLC 6pm – Salestrakr	August 24 3pm – Brick St. Software 4pm – Stone Cobra 5pm – VIPorbit 6pm – Nimble	August 25 3pm – Front Row CRM 4pm – GetSatisfaction 5pm – ContactMe 6pm – FuzeDigital	August 26 3pm - bigWebApps 4pm – Loopfuse 5pm – Vertical Solutions, Inc. 6pm – Dovetail Software

EMEA - FINAL as of May 5, 10:30PM GMT

EMEA (all times are GMT)

Date
	September 5 3pm - Swivelscript 4pm – InTouch 5pm - Efficy NV 6pm - Jibe Company	September 6 3pm - Loyalty Factory 4pm – B-Kin 5pm – Atollon 6pm - Dimelo	September 7 3pm - Pipedrive 4pm – Akordis 5pm - Workbooks.com 6pm - BPMonline CRM	September 8 3pm – Iko System 4pm – Zestia Ltd 5pm - Really Simple Systems 6pm - Arten Science Ltd.	September 9 3pm –The SelfService Co. 4pm – Digita Srl 5pm –ABCrm 6pm - webCRM

Thus….Available Times as of May 5 at 1:30am ET, 7:30am GMT.

Americas (all ET)

• CLOSED

EMEA (all GMT)

• CLOSED

That's it. CRM Idol 2011 now has all its candidates for this year.  This is exciting. There is still room for those who don't mind being on a waiting list. Feel free to submit.In Other News

We are cranking on several other fronts that are in progress as this is written. Among them:

1. We are working on a CRM Idol 2011 website that will feature a Joomla! based content management system at the backend. This will become the source for all updates and queries when its ready. Watch for it in the near to mid future.
2. We are also working on a Facebook page for all you fans and friends out there.
3. We are working on a YouTube channel, which as of now, is going to be the system of record for the videos though because we are at 10 minutes as a video, we reserve the right to move this channel elsewhere should YouTube rules interfere.
4. We are working on the 1 hour session guidelines for all the entries so that you won't feel lost and we will see what we can do to set up a system of mentors that will be available during certains as yet ascertained period for advice for the one hours. That will be in July sometime I would reckon for the Americas and August for EMEA.
5. Finally, we are continuing to provide more possible prizes and will be refining the rules for prizes etc as we go on.  Stay tuned for more announcements.