The contemporary B2B sales landscape is currently drowning in its own engineering achievements. For the past decade, the holy grail of outbound sales development was scale: how many touches could an automated sequence tool squeeze out of a Sales Development Representative (SDR) per day? The answer was always "more". With the mainstream infiltration of generative artificial intelligence and LLMs, the marginal cost of creating more text collapsed to zero, well, almost. Predictably, this did not produce a renaissance of enlightened business communication; it merely triggered an existential crisis in the recipients’ mailboxes.

TL;DR

If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers).

Else, be my guest and continue to read.

Or do both …

When any entry-level sales rep can prompt a system to instantly parse a prospect's digital footprint and draft a customized icebreaker, personalization is no more a competitive differentiator. As Ganesh Iyer of ASPR AI succinctly observes, personalization is officially the new spam. It has morphed into a meaningless background drone: a highly polished, entirely hollow manifestation of lazy marketing that enterprise decision-makers have naturally trained their brains to screen out completely.

The structural mistake is confusing personalization with relevance. A cold email congratulating a Chief Revenue Officer on their recent round of series-B funding feels automated, even if an LLM wrote it dynamically.

Why?

Because one hundred other vendors are hitting the exact same spot with identical messages. Genuine relevance requires more: it needs a deep, mechanical understanding of the prospect's actual current internal operational challenges. If a vendor can trace that the target organization has aggressively hired forty specific field reps over the past quarter, the conversational entry point shifts entirely away from marketing boilerplate toward actionable operational triage. Relevancy and temporal accuracy outpace linguistic personalization every single time. The real battleground isn't text generation: it's contextual timing.

The Structural Collapse of the Predictable Revenue Stack

For years, the B2B tech sector operated on a highly segmented, assembly-line model of sales development. The SDR nursed the lead, the Account Executive (AE) closed the contract, and the Customer Success Manager (CSM) prevented churn. It was a model optimized for the natural data limits of human beings. However, this classic three-tier architecture is breaking, driven by agentic workflows.

If an AI system can flawlessly execute list building, basic multi-channel sequencing, generic follow-ups, and baseline qualification without a human lifting a finger, the traditional foundational tier of the sales funnel falls apart. The entry-level SDR role as a brute-force pipeline loader is essentially dead on arrival. We are moving rapidly toward a consolidated lifecycle rep: a unified architectural sales role where the boundaries between SDR, AE, and CSM blur into a singular, highly strategic asset.

This displacement will also reorganize corporate talent pipelines. Historically, the SDR role was the training ground where future enterprise closers learned the ropes and earned their stripes. If that tier is entirely automated, organizations must completely rethink where their future strategic sellers come from. The future belongs not to the volume-driven pipeline chaser, but to the business analyst who knows how to leverage AI to handle the tactical grunt work while they focus on strategic trust engineering. AI will act as a cognitive amplifier for junior reps, significantly compressing the time it takes to achieve full quota competency. The software becomes an operational coach in the loop, providing real-time navigation through complex corporate buying dynamics.

The Data Sewer: Why CRMs are Facing an Existential Crisis

The core bottleneck of any enterprise AI strategy remains data integrity. The enterprise tech stack is littered with the remains of failed automation projects that assumed that an advanced algorithm could magically transform chaotic data inputs into pristine business intelligence. In the current world, CRM databases are notoriously dirty, often resembling a digital graveyard of outdated records, half-logged interactions, stale opportunities, and mismatched fields.

Sellers despise manual data entry; and why wouldn’t they? Expecting a high-performing enterprise seller to meticulously log pipeline updates or cleanse customer profiles is a process design flaw. As a result, CRMs have historically functioned as passive, historical content repositories rather than dynamic execution engines.

To remain structurally relevant, the modern CRM architecture must bypass manual human data collection as much as possible and move directly to the execution layer. The software must autonomously harvest the natural digital exhaust of the business motion: parsing emails, meeting transcripts, and contract exchanges to dynamically build its own contextual knowledge graph. After all, he communication stream contains the absolute highest concentration of tribal business intelligence.

Furthermore, you cannot simply dump un-cleansed, un-normalized data sets into a generic foundational model and expect strategic outcomes. If you put a mountain of dirty data into a larger enterprise container, you do not get corporate perfume; you merely get a bigger, more expensive repository of smelly garbage, and that faster. The real value lies in the extraction layer: structuring raw corporate exhaust into clean schemas so that localized LLMs can parse it with high precision to determine real buying intent, deal clarity, and structural risks.

The Trust Frontier and the Rise of Bot-to-Bot Bargaining

A fascinating architectural divergence is appearing that is based entirely on transactional deal value. In the low-velocity, high-volume world of B2C transactions, a high degree of automation is a must; the risk is low, and efficiency is the main metric of success. However, in complex, high-value enterprise B2B selling, the mechanics of purchases are closely tied to human accountability.

When a corporate buyer signs off on a seven-figure enterprise infrastructure implementation, they are not just purchasing a feature set; they are placing their own professional reputation and career on the line. If a critical system experiences a catastrophic operational failure, it is not a digital agent that stands before an executive board or takes personal accountability for a remediation SLA. Buyers implicitly demand a physical human being accountable: a real stakeholder they can look in the eye and hold responsible. High-value enterprise commerce will always be anchored in human trust – at least in the foreseeable future.

Simultaneously, we are entering the era of bot-to-bot filtering. Buyers, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of AI-generated noise, are starting to deploy inbound AI filters to actively parse, summarize, and gatekeep their mailboxes as a self-defense. The sellers’ agents craft a perfectly optimized, contextually personalized outreach sequence, only for the buyers’ agents to aggressively intercept it, strip out all the rhetorical marketing fluff, and reduce it to a blunt three-bullet-point operational summary for the decision-maker, if they don’t dispose of the mail altogether.

When algorithms are actively selling to algorithms, the traditional sales funnel collapses into a game of signal isolation. The only messages that will successfully pass the algorithmic gatekeepers are those that precisely align with validated pain points. The flashy copywriting, the emotional hooks, and the artificial conversational mechanisms become obsolete. The sales motion gets stripped down to pure, unadulterated structural relevance.

Architectural Safeguards for the Modern CX Buyer

Enterprise technology buyers are currently standing on the edge of a potentially incredibly expensive mistake: buying into generative AI hype cycles without auditing their underlying data architecture. To successfully navigate this transition without incinerating corporate capital, buyers must anchor their strategy in realities rather than vendor press releases.

Audit the Data Sewer Before Deploying the Engine

Do not buy an enterprise-wide generative AI layer if your underlying CRM is an un-mitigated disaster. An agent will not fix broken data collections: it will merely hallucinate inaccurate business conclusions at unprecedented speed and scale. Prioritize vendors that focus on autonomous extraction and normalization of natural communication channels over those offering shiny text-generation interfaces.

Enforce Strict Accountabilities in High-Value Flows

Clearly isolate your low-risk efficiency workflows from your high-value trust motions. Attempting to fully automate complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise buying journeys with digital agents, let alone standalone digital agents is an operational risk you do not want to take. Ensure your AI tools are strictly engineered to act as cognitive co-pilots for high-context human reps rather than attempting to replace human accountability entirely.

Prepare for the Bot-to-Bot Reality

Optimize your procurement and vendor selection processes for pure, structured relevance. Recognize that executive teams will inevitably use algorithmic gatekeepers to block out marketing noise. Look for sales tools that focus deeply on temporal precision and hard operational indicators rather than tools designed to maximize outbound communication volume. Volume is officially a dead metric.

Three times is the charm. Our first attempt was disrupted by Texas getting off the (power) grid due to a winter storm, the second one due to Streamyard going offline (courtesy of a Google problem), now we finally made it happen and talked with an enterprise software user about sales operations.

Based upon real life experience, how can sales ops be improved, how can it contribute to sales success? Does it need process, tools, or what? Well, the answer to that one is, of course, both. But what comes first and how to make sure that people love to use the resulting system?

Our guest Thomas Verly, VP of Sales and Marketing at EagleBurgmann has quite some interesting answers. Also to the question whether Revenue Operations is really a thing. Is it new wine in an old bottle or rather old wine in a new bottle. 

Thomas has some truely interesting stories to tell that help us identifying what is really important for a sales organization, even if it is in a quite specific industry. 

At EagleBurgmann they identified the secret of what makes their sales reps use the system - and they have a truly astonishing adoption. Hint: It is not force but they managed to make the people want to use the system because it delivers value to them.

How? No spoiler here besides:

• Don't digitalise chaos
• Simple is beautiful
• Harmonisation is a good thing
• Don't forget about change management

Watch the episode. It is worthwhile. More than worthwhile!

The news

On November 2, 2021, SugarCRM held an analyst summit to share what is going on at the company and to get some candid feedback of the participants. As usual for this type of event, there is quite some information that is still under NDA, so I will be able to cover some of it only in broad strokes rather than the detail that the matters deserve.

After a business update by CEO Craig Charlton, the event itself revolved around two themes:

• customer success stories, including customers describing how they are using SugarCRM to improve their own business by better serving their customers in an interview style format
• SugarCRM business development, technology, and its future trajectory. Naturally, this part is largely under NDA.

There were breakout sessions covering Sugar Sell, Sugar Service, and Sugar Market

As usual, and with the notable exception of the customer interviews, the event was slide-driven with giving the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the respective agenda items plus offering a brief Q&A with the executives.

Last, but not least, part of the event is a 1:1 session with a SugarCRM executive a few days after the summit.

After a short opening by Sarita Kincaid, Craig Charlton offered a business update, showing how SugarCRM developed in the past twelve months. The company is focusing keenly on the mid-market. Craig painted a bright picture that shows a very high customer retention combined with a good growth rate. Noteworthy are a steep increase of the recurring ARR. He quoted a nearly doubled number of new logos, combined with a more than doubled new/upsell ARR and an average deal size that went up by 160 plus per cent. 

The ratio of business outside vs. inside the US is increasing.

Another trend that he sees is a continued adoption of the SugarCRM cloud solutions with the US counting more than 90 per cent of new customers in the cloud, not surprisingly trailed by Europe and, more interestingly, Asia..

This success he attributed to the overall three-pronged strategy of investing into platform, product, and customers, with a strong focus on the mid-market. Focusing on the customer means for SugarCRM focusing on making them successful.

This strategy was supported by information about new wins and customer testimonials. Customers very much focused very much on integration, visibility of data/information via a holistic view and the overall flexibility of the application platform.

This combined with ease of use and quick time to value.

Technology-wise chief product officer and CTO Rich Green emphasized upon the value of the underlying time aware (data) streaming model and an AI that works with data augmentation using external sources via the acquisition of node.io about a year ago.

The bigger picture

Every CRM player that addresses the mid-market and above sends two messages. The first one is that they provide a platform and the second one is that they are CX players, not mere CRM players. All of them are also increasingly deploying machine learning based solutions to achieve this. 

For companies, it is quite important to get a fast time to value and not have month- or yearlong projects before a system can go live.

Users increasingly demand a consumerization of business applications, especially those that are implementing customer facing processes – i.e., CRM systems. In essence, what they want is an easy and simple to use application.

For them a CRM system, to get value out of it, needs to exhibit three basic tenets:

• it needs to be there where they are, physically or digitally
• it needs to show the users what is important in the current context and to make solid suggestions or even take actions.
• it needs to speak with them, their way.

Be where I am

Their CRM system is but one of many applications people are using across devices, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. By their very nature, CRM systems are tools that ingest, aggregate and enrich data, so it can be used for a purpose. The result is actionable information that needs to be provided to its users. This way, e.g. interactions with contacts are logged without any explicit intervention or are pulled from various sources to be then also visualized via different applications or communications tools.

Furthering this thought, the system must offer is services across channels, be available within social media tools, productivity tools and especially within the used email client. The latter part being fairly easy as probably 90 per cent of all business users use either Outlook or GMail. Still, what this means is that the system must embed itself and be available in the tool of choice, either by means of a chatbot or by offering a user interface that becomes a part of the social media tool or mail client and that from there, intelligently using the users context, provides relevant information.

Speak with me

The mobile aspect is a given, too. No CRM system that is worth a grain of salt comes without mobile capabilities, as an app or at least via responsive user interfaces. What they are lacking, though, is the ability of being used in a hands off fashion, e.g. using voice as the interaction channel. How about getting a call from your friendly CRM system after a customer visit, asking for a visit summary while you are driving to your next appointment or creating a report via voice commands? 

Voice as an interaction channel will become an increasingly important interface to CRM systems, be it initiated by the user “hey CRM” or by the system itself as in the example above.

Show me what is important and make solid suggestions

Last, but not least, the system needs to be able to show the users what is important for them at any given time. This includes AI-supported lead- and opportunity scoring, the creation of target groups and campaigns based upon interaction quality, frequency, change thereof, deal size, and sentiment, business objectives, to name a few criteria. This It also includes the ability to suggest next actions that provide the best chance to further nurture a lead or opportunity, or to resolve a service case. On top of this, the system might unearth opportunities for the sales representative, which provides tremendous value.

My PoV and analysis

A bit more than two years ago I asked whether SugarCRM is getting its mojo back. At the end of 2021 the company clearly shows that the answer to this question is a yes. 

Thanks to a strict focus and several smart acquisitions, the most important one to me being node.io, Sugar has re-established itself as a formidable competitor in the CRM market. The now embedded AI engine named Sugar Predict makes the AI a ubiquitously available helper and not a geeky and not necessarily trustworthy technology. This, and its being available to everyone (not only management), some explanation capabilities, should increase user acceptance. The system “speaking” the user’s language by for example classifying an opportunity as “more likely” instead of giving it a pseudo-accurate likelihood of 85 per cent is the icing on the cake.

Generally, making sure that the platform does the work for the user by reducing busy work, making what still needs to be done simple and by surfacing relevant information in context is key. It looks like SugarCRM has really found a way to not only claim this but to also deliver. 

With the acquisitions of W-Systems and Loaded Technologies, the company has increased its ability to deliver professional services and to enable partners.

It is a smart move to focus on serving the upper mid-market segment, although there is some competition in this area. The enterprise market is just too saturated with the big four although SugarCRM should be able to successfully compete in some areas. The solution does scale, so customers do not need to be worried to outgrow it.

SugarExchange, the Sugar app marketplace, is fairly young and lists about 360 apps at the time of this writing, which is a fairly small number. Increasing the number of available partner solutions would surely help increasing SugarCRM’s reach even further. SugarCRM has a number of loyal implementation and technology partners.  However, compared to the other vendors, the size of the ecosystem is fairly small. According to the company, it has more than 300 ISVs, 111 reseller partners, 9 solution partners and 2 distribution partners.

I am not a financial analyst, still it appears to me that SugarCRM’s growth figures are in the range of other companies, which indicates that SugarCRM, being a smaller player in the market, does not outgrow it yet. But then, the pivot happened less than three years ago.

And, as said, I am not a financial analyst.

All in all, what I see is a company that has established a core platform with a solid solution set on top of it, that has a sound strategy and a strong team to implement the strategy. And it has an investor with the funds to support important acquisitions. This is important, as there are still some gaps to close – but then, who doesn’t have gaps?

What is more, the team is emphasizing on an outside-in mindset: Make your customer successful in making their customers succeed. There are only few companies who work this way. 

Together with SugarCRM’s Clint Oram and fellow analysts Kate Leggett, Liz Miller and Michael Fauscette, theCRMKonvos team discussed first impressions of where SugarCRM is going. It is worthwhile watching the discussion (shameless plug: Please subscribe to our channel. We deliver interesting content on a weekly base).

Kudos all around. SugarCRM has gained considerable traction and visibility. I am curious to see what comes next.

The News

On September 20, 2021 Oracle announced during an Oracle Live event named “The future of CRM” Oracle Fusion Marketing, which is not the same as Oracle Marketing.

According to Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, Oracle Fusion Marketing is a layer that automatically executes account based marketing and sales campaigns. 

The product aims at enabling an end-to-end process from creating a marketing campaign to closing the sale, bridging the divide between marketing and sales. 

It does so by combining services that are delivered by three products:

• Unity, Oracle‘s Customer Data Platform
• Fusion Advertising, Oracle‘s digital advertisement platform
• Fusion Products & References, Oracle‘s recommendation platform

under one easy-to-use user interface that is modeled as a guided procedure. 

Oracle Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing by

• Building a target audience of known contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM system
• Expanding your audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign – byt unknown to your contact database
• Identifying the best customer references: based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaign
• Simplifying campaign configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channels
• Launching the campaign: the marketer can easily set up advertising budget, star and end dates and launch their campaign
• Monitoring results: a prebuilt dashboard that provides marketers with real time visibility into campaign performance.

After campaigns are launched, Fusion Marketing automates the generation and qualification of leads:

• Personalized campaign microsites: emails and ads take people to an automatically generated „microsite“ landing page for each campaign, which includes customer references personalized to match the industry and interest of the customer
• AI-powered lead qualification: Fusion Marketing monitors engagement across all campaign channels including emails, online ads, and microsite visits. Because interest at the company level is what matters, Fusion Marketing will qualify account level interest by aggregating engagement frompeople at the same company. This AI algorithm automatically generates qualified opportunities for salespeople when it detects sufficient engagement.
• Deliver qualified opportunities to any CRM system: Wen identified, qualified opportunities are delivered to any CRM system.

According to Oracle, Fusion Marketing helps marketers and sellers focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals.

The Bigger Picture

As I have often written and said, sales representatives do not love their system. One of the main reasons for this is that salesforce automation systems and CRM systems are often targeted rather at the management than the actual workforce. They are good at collecting data and reporting, but not so good at helping sales representatives – and marketers, for that purpose – getting their job done easily. The result is widespread dissatisfaction and poor adoption. Phil Winters spoke about an adoption level of 25 per cent in a recent CRMKonvo.

In the words of Larry Ellison: „The sales automation system has value. It keeps track of your opportunities, it allows you to communicate with management, and say „I expect these deals to close in the quarter“. It is really a management tool for individual salesprople and their bosses to make estimates; how many deals will close in the quarter and figure out what revenue will look like in the quarter.

Now, that has value! But the sales system does not increase sales. It doesn‘t automate selling. It autmates sales, forecasting and improves communication. But what we want to do is actually build systems that help you sell more“. He continues „We realized that we couldn‘t just do a second generation sales automation system. To help sell more, we had to also include marketing to generate, and most importantly, qualify leads. The question is being able to figure out which of those leads are high quality.

Which of those leads do you want to turn over to salespeople, and then get them engaged? So, we thought, we had a two step process. We had to autmate lead generation and qualification – a new second generation marketing system. And then, as soon as we got that don, build a second generation sales automation system that would maek the salespeople more productive and help them sell more“.

What needs to change is that the systems are available where the users are, in a physical and digital way, that they work like the users work and give them relevant information as and when needed and finally, that the systems are enabled to interact with the users in natural ways, which includes language, text and voice.

Two specific problems facing marketers and sales representatives are that it is often hard to set up multi channel campaigns, especially when they include advertisements in the public web and walled gardens like Facebook or in the Apple ecosystem and then to hand over well qualified leads that are generated by the marketing department to the sales department. Who hasn‘t heard of the eternal fight between marketing and sales, one side claiming that it doesn‘t get any leads and the other side complaining that leads are just not taken up.

Oracle Fusion Marketing sets out to solve both challenges.

My PoV and Analysis

Let me start with that the event’s naming raised quite some expectations that led me to state during the CRM Playaz Watch Party to the event that I haven’t seen much that I haven’t heard from other vendors, too. I stand to this statement, especially when it comes to integrating or aligning marketing and sales departments. Every suite vendor that is worth a grain of salt can either move a qualified lead out of the marketing subsystem into the sales force automation system and/or directly create an opportunity there (which is something that the sales reps often like to do themselves). An agreement about what constitutes a qualified obviously needs to be achieved before. Most of the vendors can also fairly easily create campaign templates basing on existing objectives, target groups and marketing assets.

However, there are three main differentiators that I can see. 

• As shown in the demo of a campaign creation process as used at Oracle itself, the user interface to create this campaign is extremely sleek, also thanks to the new Redwood UI.
• The ability to combine traditional campaigns with web advertising out of one single technology stack, which Oracle can do using its Advertising line of products.
• The  tight link into the, again own, enterprise content management system.

As I do see it, there are only two companies that could deliver close to this value proposition using an own stack, and these are, Microsoft and Salesforce, maybe Adobe as a third one. Still, Oracle has clearly an edge.

The other suite vendors are either not there at all, or do rely on partners for parts of this process.

Still, building a campaign in a few steps while automatically identifying relevant content for targeted accounts to serve on landing pages and in personalized emails is quite a feat. So far, I have only seen this based upon rules. Oracle seems to have done a great job at this and I would love to have a peek behind the scenes.

I believe in technology and am less sceptic about the power of AI to qualify leads etc. based on existing interactions than esteemed colleague Jon Reed expressed in his article; therefore I am quite convinced that Oracle Fusion Marketing is able to find and deliver the relevant high quality leads to be created as opportunities in a sales force automation system of whatever couleur. This ability is of great help to salespeople. As I like the emphasis on openness, I would have loved to see both, what it takes to create an opportunity in an Oracle as well as a non-Oracle system.

Will there be false positives or negatives when creating these opportunities based on an AI?

Of course!

Is there a very good chance that the system is better than the average salesperson?

Yes!

This ability, however, is nothing that sets Oracle apart from the tier one competition in my eyes. This competition in the case of marketing consists of Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP. All of these have the ability to create either qualified leads or opportunities in sales force automation systems. And these are only the tier ones. The difference will be in the degree of effort that is necessary to do so.

The business objectives that are covered by Fusion Marketing are currently quite limited. There are only few business objectives and the need to supply a target group to the system. This is due to it being a very young product and is ok for now! There is no reason to assume that these objectives will not be expanded fast, by either Oracle itself or by partners. I think that it would be a good idea to have the system also identify target groups based upon business objectives, similar to or better than what e.g. Emarsys is already capable of in the B2C arena. Building on that, it would be great to see a system that is able to build or suggest campaigns based upon identified customer needs. This would tie neatly into customer journey analytics and orchestration and build a story of outside-in capabilities.

The process that Oracle demonstrated to create a campaign towards an objective is amazingly simple. It can be used by any person, including non marketing personnel. This means that there can be quite some upside in offering it to salespersons or sales teams. Marketing as a service. The objectives are there, the collateral is there, why not enable salespeople to create campaigns targeted to their objectives, based on predefined templates? 

Having said all this, there are a few things that I would like to see as neither the announcement nor the demo covered them.

Assuming that a good number of Fusion Marketing customers also owns an e-commerce site that is based on Oracle technology it would be great to see how Fusion Marketing integrates to e-commerce, especially Oracle technology.

The demo is based upon existing target groups and existing e-mail templates; it did not cover the actual segmentation process, be it based upon personas or on static target groups, nor the creation of the email- and microsite-templates. I‘d love to see how this is done and what products it needs. 

Because this is where the the effort is hidden that helps Marketing Fusion be so simple.

In summary, I applaud Oracle to what it announced here. I am a sceptic and would love to see the answer to some of the questions and doubts that I have. 

I also see that, marketing buzz or not, the competion now needs an answer to the challenge that Fusion Marketing is.

A short while ago the CRMKonvos team had the opportunity to invite Frank Tjaben of SugarCRM into our living rooms or home offices for a lively discussion about whether businesses are facing a crisis of customer relationship management and if so, why.

To use some slightly clichéd terminology, Frank has been both a hunter and a farmer throughout his career, putting him in a unique place to talk about exactly this topic. He has seen it from both sides—as a user and seller of CRM software. He started his career as a call center agent, and then held various sales and sales management positions, including customer advisory roles for both enterprise organisations and SMBs. He says that a sales person’s main objective is to get into an as good as possible dialogue with the customer, regardless of one’s actual role. At the end of the day it is about solving a customer’s problem. He firmly believes that those who understand the customer best are the ones who close the deal.

This is where the value of CRM systems begins. These systems are good for managing to-dos and activities, which is important in sales. It is important to be reliable. “It might sound conservative, but then sales is a conservative craft,” Frank says. “If you make an appointment for next week, then this is what is meant, an appointment.”

He maintains that this, although important, is only a part of it. It only looks at the basics. The business evolves. Therefore, customers need to also know that the vendor’s product vision matches their future needs.

The big question is: What makes the system right?

At its foundation, the sales team must have access to all data that they need. At the same time, this data needs to be prepared and presented in a way that makes it actually helpful and avoids blind spots that could cause a loss of business. There is no use in having thousands of data points if they are not easily accessible and brought into context. In other words, data needs to be turned into information. Additionally, this data should enter into the system with minimum effort to avoid unproductive busywork. After all, according to the recent SugarCRM CRM and Sales Impact report sales reps are, on average, spending only 54 percent of their time actually doing what they want to do: Work with their customers and sell.

The last aspect that needs to be covered is the consistent availability of data and information across departments, from Marketing via Sales to Service.

Now, the bad news. According to SugarCRM’s findings, CRM systems are not delivering, and this more than 40 years after the emergence of the first sales support or computer aided selling systems. To this day, more than 50 percent of sales professionals report that they cannot access the same data across departments. About half of them say that their system is unfit to provide the critical details they need to attain their quota. In summary, more than half of sales leaders are of the opinion that their CRM system makes them lose potential revenue opportunities.

What can be done about it?

One big step in the right direction is platform thinking, following the hierarchy of customer or user expectations. At the minimum, things need to function reliably. From then on, it needs to be efficient, cause minimum busywork and friction for the users while providing maximum value.

Secondly, the system needs to be enjoyable to work with, allowing users to work the way they need to work, not the way the system forces them to. Tools are supposed to make work easier, not harder.

Figure 1: Pyramid of employee expectations

This requires a platform. A platform that consistently holds the relevant data, that helps in surfacing information—not data—at the right time and that offers additional applications with a consistent UI that share and display this data in an efficient and useful way.

This is why SugarCRM’s new message to let the platform do the work for you rings quite a bell for me. It follows a thinking that is similar to what I expressed in a recent article about why sales reps still hate their CRM.

In Sugar’s world this pyramid translates to:

·  No blind spots – which I translate to: It works

·  No busy work – which I translate to: It is simple

·  No roadblocks – which I translate to: it is fun

As Frank Tjaben said correctly during our CRMKonvo, CRM and CX are not objectives, they are journeys that need to be based upon a strategy. This strategy needs to evolve as the market and the world around oneself change. However, basing this strategic journey on the above simple customer oriented cornerstones helps in staying on track. If this strategy is in line with and driven by the brand promise, the resulting experience that a user — and also a customer — has, matches their expectations.

This needs the right technology, including machine learning technologies that enable progress towards these objectives. It starts with simple things like lead, opportunity, and account scoring, account enrichment, and next best actions, and then innovates from there. In Sugar’s understanding, this is where and how the platform should work.

However, getting there needs not only the right technology but also the right project partners. The ones who ask the right questions, listen, understand—and then collaboratively deliver a system that works for its users, so that they can do their job.

Now this title is not a case of do a rhyme or get bitten but actually summarizes the topic pretty well. The CRMKonvos team had a long and good discussion with John Paterson, CEO of Really Simple Systems about the needs and wants of a CRM for SMBs.

Are the requirements that an SMB has really different from the ones that an enterprise has? At the end of the day the original challenges seem to be fairly similar. Especially on the sales side, people avoid the system, just like Denis Pombriant found in a study that we talked about earlier this year in our CRMKonvo about why salesreps hate their CRM. Here a short version that just answers this very question. The parallels in thinking and observations between Denis and John are striking!

But then, there are a few differences. Listen to John explaining them.

But then this isn't all. Talking about value of the systems we couldn't not also talk about the value of AI. Is there any? Where?

Spoiler alert: There is, but one needs to know what one is doing. What? The discussion reveals it in the last 15 or so minutes.

Enjoy the conversation. We learned a lot. You can, too.

This CRMKonvo was supposed to be with Thomas Verly, a highly experienced Sales- and IT leader. We wanted to learn from his experience how to enable sales operations. What is important, what to measure? Do you really need a CPQ system?

Unluckily he could not participate due to the heavy snow storm in Texas that caused major disruption. The good news is that Thomas and his family are safe

Now, the CRMKonvos team has more than 70 years of CRM experience. We are coming from very different angles. So, we decided to tackle the topic, making some good points.

Enjoy this episode and look forward to another one with Thomas Verly. Coming soon!

There is one scary fact in the CRM world. Out of roughly 25 million businesses, only 1 percent has a CRM system. Imagine this! It is a huge waste on one side and a tremendous opportunity on the other side. If vendors find the way into the future of CRM. Nimble seems to have found a way.

The CRMKonvos team discussed these and other challenges of CRM systems with Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. We are following his path for quite some time now, how he built Nimble from very small beginnings and always with the thought of enriching an ecosystem with his solution that is formed around simplicity and making life easier not only for the salesreps but for other employees, too.

Learn how a philosophy of giving and sharing enables own growth by helping others to grow - from someone who achieved this repeatedly.

And yes, Jon also knows why social selling and social CRM are not things anymore - if they have ever been.

Jon is a true role model. Learn from him how to scale while being yourself, thinking outside-in.

Salesreps really love to feed data into their CRM system after a long day, or even during the week-end. They are truly looking forward to their weekly sales call with numbers that every single one of their colleague massaged themselves. They are obsessed with typing all sorts of entries into a quotation and know their product catalogue by heart, so that they can provide their customer with the best of all possible quotes to solve their business issue.

Salespeople really appreciate all the high quality leads that are funnelled to them by the system.

And, of course, they are truly altruistic and thrive on helping their customers for good.

Sounds like you?

No?

Well, then you are probably like most of us.

In brief: Salespeople hate their CRM!

This didn’t change almost 40 years after the first electronic CRM tools have been introduced. Users of CRM systems still often do not have the feeling that the systems are serving them, but that it is rather the opposite.

That is especially true for salespeople. But I repeat myself.

Salespeople face a two-pronged challenge. On one side, in an environment that is more and more data driven, they face an increasing reporting demand, which in turns requires an increasing amount of quality data being fed into the system.

They feel that all these administrative tasks keep them away what they are doing best and what they want to do most: Be with their customers, understand them, and offer – sell – them the right solutions for their challenges.

Thereby making them happy.

On the other hand, salespeople feel that they become more and more redundant.

A feeling that is backed by statistics and surveys showing that more than half of the buying journey is already done before a customer – b2c or b2b – contacts a salesperson.

One might get the idea that these two challenges are related to each other. So, how can this be overcome? How can salespeople become more relevant again?

The path to where we are now

In the beginning there were activity management tools, contact management tools, and account management tools, the latter as a kind of shared electronic rolodex. Goldmine, founded in 1989, successfully combined activity-, account- and contact management for teams, as a first of its kind. Amazingly, the software is still around.

Salespersons used some of these tools and hated the fact that they weren’t integrated. They had to use and live with many different tools, which improved some aspects of their lives – or not.

A consequence of this was the emergence of sales force automation (SFA) tools that targeted at two issues:

• Integrating and streamlining sales processes from lead to order and
• establishing a common repository of data that could get used by whole, distributed, teams.

This was the high time of boutique vendors like Kiefer und Veittinger (later acquired by SAP) or CAS, which originated in Germany, and later on of Rockstar Siebel. From here the thought of integrating marketing, sales, and service in one suite emerged and CRM, an integrated tool, that intended to cover all relevant customer side processes, was born.

Add some analytics (to create analytical CRM) and not only salespersons but also management were happy.

Only that especially salespersons weren’t.

They weren’t happy, because CRM software made them enter an increasing amount of data into the system, making ‘their’ personal assets and contacts corporate assets and contacts. On top of that, by entering ‘their’ data into the system, they feared to become transparent, without getting anything back. They felt like being controlled and like working for the system, instead of having a system that works for them.

Well, and then this whole data entry did and still does cost their time.

Salespeople are communicators. They live on the phone and in their email client. Sincerely, most CRM tools traditionally do not have a decent email editor. Also, email clients were needed then and continue to be needed now, anyways. So, the problem of switching apps was improved, but not yet really solved.

Social media emerged and quickly became mainstream. People started to publish lots of valuable information, information that is extremely helpful for building relationships. The ‘social animals’ that salespersons are, pounced on this chance to understand people, their interests, relationships, and affiliations.

Naturally, CRM software could not keep pace with the ever evolving social media, which quickly became one of the most important information sources and communications channels for salespersons.

Of course specialized vendors, that addressed this gap emerged quickly; from social media engagement platforms like Hubspot to more SFA-like tools: one of the latter being Nimble. The big vendors, being less agile, took a bit more time to jump on the wagon.

A new term was born: Social CRM.

But only few vendors truly realised – and acted upon this realisation – that CRM, especially sales, is and always was, social. And most of the solutions still distinguished between social media as channels and email as another channel. And, being point solutions, initially mostly with poor APIs, the solutions did not help in creating a consistent account and contact database, let alone achieving the holy grail of a 360 degree view of the customer. Even if the solutions had a decent API, IT departments often refused to invest the effort needed to integrate yet another point solution.

The obvious result was a decrease of data quality, making salespersons even more unhappy, as working off unreliable data is not effective, let alone efficient. XLS became important again.

This story continues with the still ongoing move into the CEM and CEX world.

What to do about it?

As said before, sales representatives are social animals who do not have time to spare.

For them a CRM system, to get value out of it, needs to exhibit three basic tenets:

• it needs to be there where the sales representative is, physically or digitally
• it needs to show the sales representative what is important in the current context and to make solid suggestions or even take actions.
• it needs to speak with him

Be where I am

Their CRM system is but one of many applications they are using across devices, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. By their very nature, CRM systems are tools that ingest, aggregate and enrich data, so it can be used for a purpose. The result is actionable information that needs to be provided to its users. This way, e.g. interactions with contacts are logged without any explicit intervention or are pulled from various sources.

Furthering this thought, the system must offer is services across channels, be available within social media tools, productivity tools and especially within the used email client. The latter part being fairly easy as probably 90 per cent of all business users use either Outlook or GMail. Still, what this means is that the system must embed itself in the tool of choice, either by means of a chatbot or by offering a user interface that becomes a part of the social media tool or mail client and that from there, intelligently using the users context, provides relevant information.

Speak with me

The mobile aspect is a given, too. No CRM system that is worth a grain of salt comes without mobile capabilities, as an app or at least via responsive User Interfaces. What they are lacking, though, is the ability of being used in a hands off fashion, e.g. using voice as the interaction channel. How about getting a call from your friendly CRM system after a customer visit, asking for a visit summary while you are driving to your next appointment? After all, the system recognizes that the time for the meeting has passed and that you are on the move again.

Voice as an interaction channel will become an increasingly important interface to CRM systems, be it initiated by the user “hey CRM” or by the system itself as in the example above.

Show me what is important and make solid suggestions

Last, but not least, the system needs to be able to show the salesperson what is important for him at any given time. This includes AI-supported lead- and opportunity scoring based upon interaction quality, frequency, change thereof, deal size, and sentiment, to name a few criteria. This It also includes the ability to suggest next actions that provide the best chance to further nurture the opportunity. On top of this, the system might unearth opportunities for the sales representative, which provides tremendous value.

Next steps for Sales Leaders

There are few to no system that fulfils all this. Some solutions are closer than others, some of these might even fit into the chosen platform strategy.

In case you do not yet have a CRM system, or even an SFA system, choose wisely. Identify not only what is important for the company but also how you can best enable your sales representatives to contribute to this.

The easiest way is to make life simpler and more joyful for them, so that they have more time to do what they do best and like to do most: Selling your solutions to your customers.

If you already have a system that you are happy with, then your situation is slightly more difficult: Together with your vendor and your implementation partner you need to thoroughly analyse the short and midterm roadmap of your software. Will it fulfil the needs stated above? When? How reliable have the vendor’s roadmaps been?

If this exercise does not lead to a satisfactory result but you are still happy with the system, then it is time to work on systems in the vendor ecosystem that augment your system, so that it fulfils your needs. You could even go best-of-breed here, but always start within the ecosystem as this promises best possible interfaces and lower pain integrating the two systems.

If you are unhappy? Well, then it is time to look for a new system.

A good number of my customers is pursuing this strategy.

Are you?

This is a repost of my February 2020 CustomerThink column article