There is a moment in every technology cycle where a vendor decides the best way to signal relevance is to put the current buzzword in its name. We seem to be in that moment.

SugarCRM, the mid-market CRM vendor backed by Accel-KKR, just rebranded to SugarAI. The company declared that CRM as a category has failed to deliver on its 30-year-old promise and that AI makes a fundamental reset possible. CEO David Roberts frames it as moving from "AI as a feature" to "intelligence as the system."

That is a strong claim.

And a good claim!

Let us see what is behind it.

What Sugar Is Actually Saying

Strip away the rebrand fanfare and there are three substantial moves here.

First, Sugar is narrowing its identity around what it calls "precision selling." The concept: CRM should stop being a passive system of record that sellers resent updating and start actively telling them where to focus, what accounts are at risk, and what to do next. This is not a new aspiration in the CRM industry. What makes Sugar's version more interesting than the usual hand-waving is the second move.

Second, Sugar is leaning hard into the ERP-CRM bridge. The 2024 acquisition of sales-i gave Sugar the ability to ingest transactional data from over 180 ERP systems and surface revenue signals that traditional CRM cannot see. When a distributor's reorder volume drops 30% or a manufacturing customer shifts purchasing patterns, that signal lives in the ERP, not in the CRM. Sugar is betting that connecting these dots is where real value sits. Cameron Marsh at Nucleus Research called this "a pragmatic approach to AI," and he is right. It is one of the more grounded AI stories in CRM right now.

Third, Sugar is doubling down on verticals. Manufacturing, wholesale, distribution. Industries with long buying cycles, complex product catalogs, and deep account relationships. Industries that largely sat out earlier waves of sales technology because those tools were not built for their world. Sugar is saying: we are built for your world.

All three moves are coherent and mutually reinforcing. That alone puts this rebrand ahead of most.

The Name Problem

Here is where my enthusiasm somewhat decreases.

Every enterprise software vendor will have AI deeply embedded within 24 months. When that happens, having "AI" in your brand name will feel like calling yourself "CloudCRM" in 2024. Nobody does that, because cloud became table stakes.

The brands that age well are anchored to outcomes. Salesforce is about the sales force. ServiceNow is about service delivery. SugarAI is about... a technology ingredient. If Sugar can make "precision selling" synonymous with its brand the way Salesforce owns "CRM," the name not only survives, but can become category shaping. If precision selling remains a tagline rather than a category, expect another rebrand by 2029.

I give this name a coin-flip chance of lasting five years. The strategy underneath it is far stronger than the label on top.

At the very minimum, this rebranding becomes a conversation starter, gives some startup vibes and an internal catalyst to focus efforts, which are good things in themselves.

The Competitive Landscape Sugar Needs to Navigate

SugarCRM co-founder Clint Oram, who stepped away from the company in 2025 after 21 years, shared a competitive read that is worth examining.

He argues that the rebrand matters most in the context of Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and Creatio. His take, in brief: Salesforce is a juggernaut where switching costs keep accounts locked. HubSpot serves a fundamentally different market (SMB, short sales cycles, inbound-first). Creatio owns the DIY ops buyer who wants to build processes, a segment Sugar moved away from years ago. And Zoho's horizontal "everything" brand cannot match Sugar's vertical depth.

He is largely right. But there is a significant gap in this competitive frame.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the competitor Clint does not name, and it may be the most dangerous one Sugar faces. In mid-market manufacturing and distribution, Microsoft already has native ERP (Business Central), native CRM, native AI (Copilot), and the entire Microsoft 365 productivity stack, including Teams that buyers already live inside. Sugar's anti-complexity pitch works well against Salesforce. Against Microsoft, that argument is harder to sustain. The buyer who runs their email, collaboration, ERP, and business intelligence on Microsoft will need a compelling reason to add a separate CRM vendor to the stack. This reason could be "precision selling".

SAP is another factor. Sugar targets verticals where SAP is the dominant ERP. If Sugar's story is "we bridge CRM and ERP data," buyers running SAP S/4HANA will ask why they should not just use SAP CX. The SAP CX suite has been struggling, which creates real opportunity, but SAP is not walking away from its installed base.

Freshworks competes at the lower end of mid-market with Freddy AI and a simpler deployment model. There is no direct ICP overlap, but Freshworks is moving upmarket and Sugar should be watching the rearview mirror.

And a word about Zoho. Zoho actively moves away from a horizontal approach and is building interesting ERP and AI capabilities, focusing its messaging around value. Along with the company's upmarket move, there is another one to watch out for.

What Precision Selling Needs to Become

The concept is sound, more than sound, actually. Its defensibility might become a challenge.

"Precision selling" as a term is intuitive and appealing. But it is also generic enough that any competitor could adopt it tomorrow. Salesforce could fold it into Agentforce messaging. Microsoft could embed it into Copilot for Sales positioning. The term is strong. The moat around it is shallow, unless there will be a trademark around it.

For precision selling to become a durable category rather than fizzle out as a campaign, Sugar needs three things.

Customer evidence. Five to ten reference customers publicly attributing measurable revenue lift to the ERP-CRM bridge and AI-guided selling. With the help of partners like Technology Coast Partners, this shouldn't be hard to achieve. Analyst placements (Nucleus Leader, Constellation ShortList) are necessary but not sufficient. Buyers trust other buyers more than they trust quadrants.

Product proof. The AI guidance has to demonstrably change outcomes, not just surface insights. There is a meaningful difference between "here is a dashboard showing your account is at risk" and "here is the specific action that will retain this account, based on what worked in 40 similar situations." Sugar needs to be on the action side of this divide.

Repetition at scale. Category creation requires marketing investment that a PE-backed mid-market vendor may or may not be willing to sustain. Accel-KKR's appetite for brand-building spend will determine whether precision selling becomes a market term or stays a Sugar term.

What Buyers Should Do

If you are evaluating SugarAI for your shortlist, here is how to cut through the rebrand noise. Start by ignoring the name. A rebrand tells you what a company wants to be. A proof of concept tells you what it actually is.

Ask for vertical references who can quantify results. it's not about logos on a slide but about customers in your industry who will tell you what changed after they connected ERP and CRM data through Sugar. No references, no result. Just a vision.

Backtest the AI. Ask Sugar to run their precision selling guidance against your last two quarters of actual deals. Would the recommendations have changed outcomes? Would at-risk accounts have been flagged earlier? Retrospective validation is the fastest way to separate signal from marketing.

Compare against Microsoft, not just Salesforce. If your organization already runs Dynamics 365 or Business Central, the integration cost of adding Sugar as a separate layer needs to justify itself against what Microsoft delivers natively. If you are not on Microsoft's stack, Sugar's independence becomes an advantage.

The Bottom Line

SugarAI is a better strategy than it is a name. The vertical focus, the ERP bridge, and the precision selling concept are coherent and differentiated. The brand name bets on AI remaining a meaningful differentiator in a world where it is rapidly becoming wallpaper.

The next 18 months will tell us whether Sugar built a category or just changed a logo.

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts.

From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors, which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.

With David Roberts, who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.

As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.

This is what happened and happens with SugarCRM. The company had and has a strong leadership team, with new faces like Paul Farrell (joined in March 2024), Jason Glass, and soon a new Chief Customer Officer – although with Christian Wettre or Chris Pennington some other strong players left for various reasons.

As I have written in the past, the company has a great yet varied history and, more importantly, potential due to great software. What SugarCRM to some extent is missing is a distinguishable identity. In a market that is as crowded as the CRM/CX market, differentiation is of crucial importance. As I have said and written before, SugarCRM’s messaging needs to change to avoid being perceived as a “me too” product.

Functionally, SugarCRM has a competitive sales solution, and fair marketing- and customer service solutions, plus a number of add-ons, some of them really interesting, e.g., sales-i, its intelligence add-on or Sugar Connect, which makes Sugar available outside the application frame. Whenever I conduct a software selection for clients of mine, I witness the strength of the Sugar Sell solution myself. It regularly makes it at least amongst the finalists and often gets selected by my clients. This is not only due to its capabilities but also thanks to strong performances and demos by the Sugar sales teams. And this is in spite of Sugar Sell resembling more of a toolbox than a preconfigured solution with built-in processes. Again, this is testament to the functional strength of Sugar Sell (although it has some deficiencies, too).

From a messaging point of view, really everyone (and their dog) talks about platform and being a CX player. SugarCRM needs to change away from these two points, as they also do not communicate much about outcomes, let alone value.

And Sugar will do this. More about this in a bit.

So far, Sugar’s value proposition revolves around the platform, automation, and discovering opportunities. Targeted personae include marketing, sales, and service leadership, although the winning chances in marketing and service against formidable opponents like HubSpot or Zendesk are slimmer than in the sales area – which does not mean that customers who chose Sugar Market or Sugar Serve are unhappy, on the contrary! Still, I regularly heard from Sugar executives that “we tend to win, when the customer need is sales, and not marketing driven.”

In addition, the messaging is a little about everything for everyone. It is not that Sugar doesn’t deliver but the value is not immediately clear. Add to that the fact that the flexibility offered by Sugar lets the fresh application appear a bit like a toolbox rather than a ready-to-use system.

To be fair, Sugar initiated a transition already more than a year ago, based upon the realization that the company is highly successful in the manufacturing, wholesale and distribution markets, in particular in the mid- and upper mid-market. This created an obvious focus area for the company. Yet, the message didn’t evolve enough to support this change.

After the analysis done by David Roberts and his management team, this is subject to change. One of the words we heard over and over during the analyst summit is “focus”, the other one is “aligned execution”. Both are terms that I strongly associate with Bob Stutz, so I see a formidable alliance of seasoned executives with similar values and passions joining forces now.

Which leads me to the strengthening of Sugar’s transition

David Robert’s vision for SugarCRM can be summarized with “boldly focus on our strengths while not forgetting about our customer base – and be clear about it”. The new Sugar strategy, including an upcoming more specific tag line revolves around it, from a product- and technology view, but encompassing GTM and partner strategy. Stay tuned, I cannot and will not take away the thunder. So, a drumroll here …

My point of view and analysis

The strategy is straightforward and consistent. As said, it builds upon earlier realizations and extends a change that is ongoing for more than a year now.

Its risk, apart from the human aspect (not everyone lets readily go of ingrained habits) lies in not to antagonize the existing customer base outside the sharpened ideal customer profile (ICP). This requires a balance that is hard to maintain. Yet, keeping churn numbers low via word and action is of crucial importance.  So, careful balancing and execution is key. I am quite sure that Bob Stutz can and will give great advice, as he has executed this kind of strategic shift multiple times.

One thing that is really refreshing and creating signal in the noise is the notable absence of “agentic AI”. Instead of focusing on buzzwords, SugarCRM looks at AI as a means to achieve business objectives. I regularly advise my clients that AI is a means, not an end. Communicating it as such is far more powerful than jumping on the buzzword train.

The executive team that we met on the analyst day seems fully on board, which is extremely important, as following through do mean some changes, not in the least some more process rigor and some preparational work, which is ongoing.

Given all this, I am excited about 2025 and 2026 and very interested in seeing how Sugar evolves. Repositioning will take a bit, but I see a sweet future for SugarCRM.

Sorry, I could not resist this one.

The news

Today, May 22 2024, SugarCRM and sales-i announced the acquisition of sales-i by SugarCRM. sales-i is leading provider of a revenue intelligence solution that helps businesses maximize their revenue and profitability. It targets at making sales professionals more efficient and effective by providing actionable insight into every customer, product and sale.

The acquisition comes nearly a year after Sugar announced a partnership with sales-i to improve business-to-business (B2B) sales performance by delivering AI-powered revenue intelligence that leverages the data of a business's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and CRM. This combination provides businesses with actionable insights that improve sales, marketing, service and support, resulting in greater revenue and higher levels of retention.

You can read the full announcement here.

The combination of SugarCRM and sales-i combines the detailed transactional data residing in ERP systems with the rich sales data in SugarCRM. According to the release information, his shall create an intelligent data hub enabling customers to successfully execute impactful sales strategies to improv revenue, maximize profitability and increase customer satisfaction.

In this combination, sales-i delivers the revenue intelligence, while SugarCRM delivers the CRM data; both of which are needed for a better sales enablement.

Together, SugarCRM and sales-i intend to deliver the most innovative intelligent account management solution in the marketplace by utilizing leading edge sales enablement technologies provided by both companies and the rich revenue intelligence capabilities provided by sales-i.

The bigger picture

The market for CRM and CX solutions is crowded while only few vendors enjoy significant mindshare. And what is more, both terms, CRM and CX, get increasingly fuzzy as many vendors use them to endorse their own offerings. This results in oddities like a customer service software vendor claiming to have a “complete CX solution” or the term CRM used synonymously to sales force automation.

The same holds true for the term “platform”. Nearly every vendor claims to be a platform vendor – regardless of the breadth or width of the offering. And every single one of them is saying that the platform makes easier for employees and delivers better results for customers.

In addition, triggered by the enormous success of Open AI, every vendor jumped on the AI bandwagon – with most of them delivering more or less the same feature set.

The consequence is a cacophony. There is nearly too much noise to identify any signal.

At the same time, customers start to look more into margin and profitability, which requires targeted solutions that are ready to run without a lengthy or complicated implementation program.

For vendors this means that they need to increasingly concentrate on easy-to-implement business scenarios that deliver a fast return on investment. By nature, these business scenarios must work along and supporting, corporate value chains. Delivering to these business scenarios that show real business value, along with adequate and distinctive messaging, is one important way for vendors to get heard again.

My analysis and point of view

Why am I not surprised about this acquisition?

For one, the partnership has been deep. Second, the combination of SugarCRM and sales-i fulfills exactly the need for easy-to-implement and valuable business solutions that I described above.

Both, SugarCRM and sales-i share a focus on manufacturing industries and have a good standing partnership with a number of common customers. The short-term opportunities for SugarCRM lie in the ability to tap into the mutual other client base to increase its footprint, plus the ability to use sales-i as a door-opener to place SugarCRM in companies that run an ERP but not yet a sales-oriented CRM solution.

Implemented right – of which I do not have any doubts, the incorporation of sales-i into the SugarCRM fold also addresses one of the analytics weaknesses that SugarCRM has. While it is simple to create reports and to display them where it matters also in a graphical representation, the analytics system itself is fairly limited by being ‘in-module’. sales-i should give SugarCRM the capability to deliver more immediately useful, as it is directly actionable, analytics, along with the predictions and recommendations based on it. This complements and enhances what is currently available with Sugar Predict. The combination of Sugar Predict and sales-i does open up some interesting avenues for SugarCRM customers.

The longer-term benefits for both, SugarCRM as well as customers, lie within the data – and AI – realm. The combination of ERP- and CRM data allows for the far more specific and accurate identification of revenue potentials – and the way to realize these potentials.

Having the ability to combine and use both ERP and CRM data natively is something that not many vendors can offer. Top of mind are actually only suite vendors and not CRM (or ERP) specialists. This ability sets SugarCRM quite apart from the CRM/CX competition, which is something that becomes increasingly important in a CRM/CX world that increasingly lacks differentiators, both functionally and messaging-wise.

Plus, given customers’ consents, there is a treasure-trove of data that can be used for additional services, including the comparison of a company vs. an industry or a sector. This could help businesses adding to existing strengths and mitigating weaknesses.

Lastly, SugarCRM now has now increased its ability to get out of the cacophony of vendors. There are now some ways to communicate and demonstrate actual business value that should help in lifting the “let the platform do the work” message to the next level.

This acquisition opens exciting prospects, not only in the short term. Kudos to both, the SugarCRM and the sales-i teams.

On November 10, 2022, SugarCRM held its annual analyst day in the beautiful Chaminade resort in Santa Cruz. In attendance was an elusive crowd of 14 analysts and six customer representatives, along with the SugarCRM executives.

We gathered to inform ourselves about what is going on, what will be going on, and of course, to listen and talk to customers about how they solve their business challenges with SugarCRM. All of this in plenum- and individual formats along with good space for informal talks.

The event

Apart from the very important social activities that enabled SugarCRM executives, customers, partner representatives and analysts to mingle and talk, the event consisted of several informative briefings that ranged from strategy and roadmap sessions across the platform to all-important customer interviews. The last session was an open question and answer with the executive team.

The customers in attendance have been very diverse, including (for profit) social business, a jet charter and service business, educational, medical businesses, and a governmental organization. Some of them are fairly new Sugar customers, some of them are with SugarCRM for a long time. What all of them have in common is that they have non-run-off-the-mill businesses and processes and that they use at least two of SugarCRM’s solutions. Some key insights that they shared were that they are often able to adapt their systems to changing needs by themselves and that, whenever they needed the support, it was readily available. Two of the stories brought very notable points. One business explained its ability to merge twenty plus acquisitions in less than two years into their system, so that their sellers could sell more efficiently.

One of the medical companies essentially managed to cut all slack activities out of their providers schedules so that they can concentrate on treatments. To put this in perspective, this company was able to triple the patient time of their personnel by automating necessary administrative and billing processes and/or making them more efficient by smartly using the SugarCRM platform.

The customer interviews also didn’t shy away from looking into the bumps that the implementations, and hence the partnerships, did overcome. Nor did the customers shy away from asking the one or other hard question, too.

Another very notable session was about partnership with a focus on and especially the ISV relationship with Triblio that brings more account-based marketing ABM into SugarCRM – with SugarCRM being the first one to use this integration themselves. The excitement about this partnership is clearly visible, culminating in a story about a head of sales calling a prospect about an RFP, inquiring whether the interest is legit as the vendor doesn’t see prospect personnel researching their website – a fact that changed in an instant and caused the return question: How do you know? 

The answer was: Because I use SugarCRM – and yes, the head of sales was SugarCRM’s GM Americas.

The official part concluded with an open Q and A with the executive team that showed quite a cohesion. 

The bigger picture

The market with the biggest opportunity is the market of midsized companies, whereas midsized can be quite a broad range. This is one aspect that makes it interesting. The second one is that it allows for a mix of indirect and direct engagements which helps vendors scale and serve the development of specific functionality that a vendor alone would not be able to deliver. Third, it is where projects become bigger, i.e., where the cost of acquisition of any individual customer vs. the potential revenue goes down. 

Why not the enterprise market then? Because the enterprise market is mostly saturated. There are only so many fortune 5,000 companies. Additionally, this market is dominated by a smaller number of big vendors, most notably Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP when it comes to business software, or bigger niche players, looking at marketing technology or e-commerce, or other adjacent markets.

However, most of these players have one thing in common: They have a hard time scaling down and creating offerings – and offers – that are appealing to and affordable for the vast number of midsized companies.

This is similar for companies that focus on the midmarket but then there are so many more potential customers that the risk of being disrupted from below is significant smaller; and it can be mitigated further by defining the lower end of midmarket low enough.

To be successful in the midmarket, it essentially requires a few things 

• An appealing set of products with sufficient functional breadth and depth, that make users’ lives easier, integrate well and are easy and fast to implement.
• As a corollary, these products should be built on one common technology base (aka technology platform) 
• Advanced analytical capabilities that provide insight to the users across the applications.
• Productivity capabilities that boost collaboration and make the system valuable to the users by helping them to work more efficiently.
• An ecosystem with resellers, systems integrators, and ISVs that enrich the vendor-delivered solutions, sell them, and implement them.  
• A strong messaging that shows differentiation and resonates with the market.

The middle four points you will recognize as the components of the experience platform flower.

My point of view and analysis

The event was organized as a presence event. One interviewed customer was participating via Zoom, which immediately showed how difficult hybrid engagement is. It is a laudable to do, still, unluckily the customer representative did not get the attention that she and her story deserved. 

Amongst the vendors that I include in the Clash of Titans, SugarCRM is a smaller one, albeit growing faster than the competition. The ambition is to double revenues in the next year. SugarCRM clearly has right mix of people and attitude to achieve this in an organic and inorganic way. 

SugarCRM targets the mid-market which the company defines as businesses with 100 – 2500 employees, regardless of revenues. The team knows that their strength is the sales force automation software; hence SugarCRM is working hard on closing existing gaps, including some functional gaps in the sales force automation area (nobody is perfect). There is a clear view on what is needed – and a strategy to get it.

Looking into the success criteria I mentioned above, SugarCRM has achieved a lot in terms of providing the users with solutions that have sufficient functional breadth and depth to make their lives easier. The solutions integrate well and are quite easy and fast to implement. SugarCRM also put considerable effort in putting its applications on one platform and, where they are not – e.g., the acquisitions – make them appear to be from a single cast. This will be even strengthened by an upcoming release. So, the technology platform is clearly in place. 

The acquisition of Node and partnerships like the one with Triblio have strongly increased the insight part of the house. There are an increasing number of machine-learning based prediction capabilities, which will bolster this. Does SugarCRM has the strongest analytical capabilities in the market as one executive claimed for Sugar Market? Maybe not, still the ability to surface and deliver insight is clearly there, from marketing through customer service. 

These insight capabilities as well as some underlying AWS capabilities that SugarCRM leverages, also help to increase user productivity, whereas I count collaboration and “office-like” functionality in this category, too. This includes mail and meetings. Thanks to own capabilities, using AWS and other partners, many of these capabilities are technically there and some are ingrained in the applications. This also includes making the services of the system available without forcing the user to log in to the system. Sugar Connect is a good example for this.

Still, I see a chance here, considering what Salesforce is doing with Slack, Microsoft with Teams, or Zoho with its set of solutions. These companies make their business solutions available through communications and collaboration solutions. Plus, people are increasingly turning to conversational UIs, especially on devices, which supports these roadmaps. 

A vibrant ecosystem is a cornerstone for fast growth. With more than 150 ISV partners and more than 200 channel partners, SugarCRM clearly has an ecosystem to fuel growth. Channel partners include resellers as well as solution partners, e.g., systems integrators. The acquisition of Outfitters strengthened the marketplace capabilities. Supporting the resellers via a small network of strong distributors was a smart move that can further help with scaling. Enabling more partners to not only resell but to also add (industry) functionality and to implement SugarCRM, will be of crucial importance going forward. This is where tuck-in acquisitions like W-Systems or Loaded Technologies are incredibly helpful. They enable significant credible own implementation capabilities and can help in enabling partners to become better. I am keen to see how the partner network evolves.

The last criterion is the messaging. SugarCRM’s tagline is “let the platform do the work”. This gets underpinned by “automate anything”, “accelerate everything” and “predict what’s next”. This messaging is about giving value to the user, which is a strong message. Along with “I am a CX vendor”, “platform” is also probably the most used term in the industry. Plus, the underpinning – strong – messages are rather technical messages. Given the emotionality that the SugarCRM team shows, it might be a good idea to connect the brand and brand messaging of SugarCRM to strong positive emotions. Sugar, as a term, surely invites to do this. 

To sum it up, if people and culture, followed by products & services and growth technology are the foundations for success, SugarCRM is clearly on a good way. 

Let the mojo rise further.

Full disclosure: SugarCRM paid for travel, accommodation for my attendance of the analyst summit

The world is getting back to normal, which means two things: Vendors are shifting back to in-the-flesh conferences, and I’m writing again. The convergence of these two facts leads to me cranking out a short blog about SugarCRM’s Analyst Summit, held Nov. 10 in Santa Cruz, CA.

The real highlight of the event for me was speaking to Sugar’s customers, a healthy handful of whom were in attendance. This is a change from my usual experience, where I’m more absorbed in what the host company is doing in terms of strategy and/or product. These customers—I interviewed executives from an air travel contractor, a for-profit shoe charity, and a surgical instrument sterilizer, among others—were the stars of this show. It was a refreshing experience.

Feel the Message

The expected updates to Sugar’s product road map were there, along with some healthy discussion of messaging. As always, I appreciate Sugar's leadership team and its willingness to listen to feedback on how the company presents itself and adjust accordingly, or at least tell us why they will keep what they have. But the real message for me was those customers and their relationships with Sugar. Most of the time, there’s a certain sameness about the reference customers vendors trot out at events like this; they’re either recognizable brands or have easily explained businesses, they have a typical application and employee environment, and the ROI story is A-B-C. Vendors want you to understand why their customers chose them, and sometimes a challenging story can delay that understanding.

Truthful Tales, Timely Told

SugarCRM’s spotlight customers for this summit brought their passion for their work with them, and their appreciation for Sugar as well. Each one left me feeling that, not only was SugarCRM the right choice for them, but that no other vendor could have satisfied them. If there were parts of the business where they’d never consider switching to Sugar products, they said so clearly and explained why, but we never lost the sense that Sugar was a partner and a permanent addition to their tech environment. Hearing about how easy it was for the fundraising organization to add new fields or modules to the system on the fly, with just a few minutes of downtime to put it in place, told me that Sugar’s core competency—highly adaptible and customizable software—was alive and well. Same for the aviation services company and its ability to identify new opportunities in a very low-volume business, or the surgical equipment sterilizer’s balance of field service and freight-shipped repair jobs, despite Sugar not being especially well-known for field service. (Not to say Sugar lacks it, they’re just not the obvious standout.)

New technology, and new ways of presenting and using it, will always be important in enterprise software. Analysts are not going to get tired of hearing about it. But it’s the stories behind the tech that sell it, and that sell us on why one vendor’s got momentum where a similar one doesn’t. While I don't completely agree with Sugar CPO Zac Sprackett that CRM is "storytelling at scale," he's definitely onto something. Bring the best stories, the customers that we couldn’t imagine using somebody else’s product, and let them tell us why.

The year 2021 comes to an end. More than three years have gone by since the last look at the Clash of Titans, an analysis of how the then big 4.5: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe – along with some other players, are shaping the greater CRM and CX arena. A lot has changed since Thomas Wieberneit published his 2018 series that consisted of 4 articles:

• Platform Play
• Microsoft and SAP weigh in
• The War Cry: Oracle and Salesforce
• The IaaS Platform Providers

It is obvious that the commoditization of the business application continues, and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has even increased since 2018. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. Two obvious reasons for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences needs a consistent technical platform, or we end up with engagements that are fragmented across interactions. This results in inconsistent and poor experiences. The second reason is that it needs a technological platform to enable and grow a thriving ecosystem.

Vinnie Mirchandani in January 2020 stated that Enterprise Software Platforms have so far underperformed. Mirchandani looked at Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce. He basically argues, without providing too many details, that the major enterprise software vendors’ platforms are all lacking ambitious goals and do not aim high enough. One of his major points is that none of these vendors has put enough emphasis in empowering, nurturing and growing their respective partner ecosystems to take advantage of the software platforms by augmenting the applications delivered by the platform vendor with meaningful software solutions of their own.

Another colleague, Denis Pombriant, in his January 2018 article Let the platform wars begin, proclaims platforms as the new battleground in enterprise software. Pombriant sees software platforms for customers as “key to making and saving money” and for vendors as a way out of commoditization, as it is “hard to find true differentiation among competing products, which naturally leads to price wars.”

In our opinion the enterprise software platform is not that new a battleground, but as part of the Clash of Titansit is becoming more evident as a battleground, even the main battleground. An enterprise software platform was always part of the battle for dominance in the customer engagement – or putting it into (marketing) industry lingo – the customer experience market. As a technology platform, the enterprise software platform is actually an integral part of it. As Pombriant argues, this is largely because of the ongoing commoditization of transactional business applications.

Until a few years ago, the technology platform was more associated with boring topics like security, user management, connectivity, systems configuration, measurement, alerting, and so on. Even analytics was, and often is, regarded as an application of its own, and not a part of the technology platform. And while topics like security, GDPR, privacy and secure data utilization are becoming more urgent, they still do not have “sex appeal.”

Consequently, it was sexier to talk about shiny topics like engagement and experience than to talk about the grease and the machinery behind them, that drives and enables the technical delivery of engagements. Please note the choice of words. There are systems of record, systems of engagement, but there is nothing like a system of experience. 

And now topics like chatbots, machine learning, AI, ambient computing, IoT, to name a few, make the machinery – the enterprise software platform – the new black.

With all this, an enterprise software platform is no longer optional, but has become mandatory, for vendors to have, and for customers to employ.

So far, so well known.

A bit less obvious is the fact that a platform market is generally a winner-takes-all market. In the end, there will be only a few dominant platforms. Vendors who want to become and stay successful on a grand scale need to be one of these few platform providers and attract partners as well as customers. 

This is the chief reason why we consult our customers that one of the very first IT strategy decisions that they need to take is the platform decision. Many of them have already taken it without being aware of it. This is a dangerous situation for them, as they might have chosen the wrong horse for their race or, moving forward, may choose best-of-breed or point solutions that do not harmonize well with the core infrastructure that they already run. The result of this is additional cost and frustration in the IT as well as business departments.

In our report The Clash of Titans we will start by explaining the framework that we will use, thus laying out the very definition of what we talk of when saying that the CRM market has evolved into a platform market or a platform play. In essence we will define what a platform is. 

The subsequent chapters then cover the big 4 – Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP – the big infrastructure providers, which coincidentally also have been 4, plus a bonus one. It also covers some of the smaller and upcoming players like SugarCRM and Zoho. There are surely more players to be covered, like Creatio, Freshworks, or Pega, to name but three.

If you are interested in receiving a personal copy or a copy with distribution rights, please contact ClashOfTitans@aheadcrm.co.nz.

These days every significant software vendor and some others, too, is positioning itself as a CX- and/or a platform player.

By now, it is well known, what it means to be a platform player, and this is also not the main topic of this post. Just as much: In order to be a significant CX player, one quite simply needs to be a platform player. 

Also, regardless of whether one has a platform or not, if everyone is a CX and a platform player, then obviously this is nothing that differentiates one vendor from the other anymore. Customers meanwhile nearly expect a set of solutions by one vendor being built upon one platform – or at least to appear like they are built on one platform. This basically means that “platform” as a thing to emphasize on has reached its zenith.

And then, there is an additional problem associated with the platform game.

A platform market is a kind of a winner takes it all market. Following the analysis and argumentation of Ray Wang in his new book Everybody Wants to Rule the World, in a platform market there will be only two major players. All other players are becoming insignificant or will vanish. While this sounds somewhat dystopian the point that I want to make is that there will not be a great many successful and strong players in a platform market. To use a metaphor, at one point in time a few vendors will have created enough gravity to become the entity that customers are attracted to.

It is also visible that the first vendors have understood this and are acting strongly to create this required gravity.

Salesforce seems to be one of the first ones. Regardless of whether one calls Salesforce a platform company by design, it is doing everything to grow. Analysing the company’s last quarterly figures, one can come to the conclusion that it continues to buy growth at the expense of profitability. It essentially copies and transfers Amazon’s successful model to the (wider) CRM market. 

SAP is working from its strong ERP and supply chain footprint in a bid to get more ‘share of wallet’ of the enterprise applications, both in the direction of the supply chain as well as into the direction of customer facing applications. SAP practically ‘owns’ business transactions with around 80 percent of all business transactions crossing SAP systems.

Oracle uses its strong technology stack, coming from the home base of the most powerful database, augmented by an integrated hard- and software stack. 

Microsoft, finally, comes from a strong productivity, gaming and operating system footing, combined with a wealth of data.

And these are the Titans of the CX applications world, commanding a market share of something between 35 and 45 percent of this market. These four, plus Adobe, already had a market share of more than 36 percent in H2, 2019 according to the IDC worldwide semiannual software tracker of April 2020. The rest of the market is quite fragmented. 

Even though this number is quite old, we see that the marketplace is slowly moving towards the consolidation direction that Ray also sees.

All these players also have their share of buzz and their marketing messages.

All of them have a strong ecosystem that surrounds them.

Which makes it difficult for other companies who are in the market, too, and want to differentiate themselves from the others. Of course, they have everything that is needed for a successful ecosystem play, too. Including the very important ecosystem. There are only so many levers that are left to them:

• Connecting one’s brand to strong principles and ethics that are well beyond what the marketplace usually offers.
• Tying one’s brand to strong positive emotions
• Focus on the PaaS parts of the stack supporting easy extensibility and automation
• Providing deep industry experience in a number of relevant industries to become the de facto standard
• A price point that is lower than the competition’s, while still offering attractive functionality

There may be more, but let’s concentrate on these.

These levers are used by the many players, including the tier one vendors. For example, all tier one vendors offer industry solutions. They are also more or less successfully connecting themselves to principles like sustainability or giving back. Often, this runs under the flag of ‘purpose’, one of the industry’s most misused terms.

On the other hand, Zoho does credibly showcase an ethics story, with its strong focus on privacy, rural enablement, humbleness, and employees. It is not a marketing-story, but one that is lived in the company (e.g., check cookies). This story extends into something that is very tangible for customers: Pricing. Zoho showcases that it is possible to benefit from pursuing principles; this strategy reduces Zoho’s own cost, which makes it possible to offer solutions at a low price point while staying profitable. One could call this ‘social capitalism’. It is a very good message that appeals to empathy and rational thinking at the same time – and because it is credible because the company itself also lives it.

Freshworks ties positive emotions to its brand, starting from the company’s name. Fresh is not boring. The recent customer and analyst event took up the name and was called Refresh. The message that was sent out loud and clear during this event was “delight made easy”. This story was also how the event, with all the challenges that a hybrid event has to offer, was run. The website expresses the same. So do most people I had the pleasure to interact with.

This is a strong message, because this is reflecting on something that the whole CRM/CX industry suffers from since its inception: No fun, no ease, no help is offered by the software. And it ties into strong positive emotions. The challenge is to keep up with this message over time because it raises expectations and missed expectations are a great distractor.

SugarCRM is going the route of automation and ease, with the slogan “let the platform do the work”. In contrast to Freshworks, SugarCRM is focusing more on the so-called left brained people and the rational side, talking in outcomes rather than emotions. The outcomes are more accuracy, less effort and faster time to use. These are again arguments that appeal to the ratio, not to emotion – even though the slogan is quite catchy and certainly hits a nerve. It is also a statement that raises expectations that need to be met.

Similar, ServiceNow. ServiceNow focuses on workflow, automation and offers some industry solutions. The company says “Let the work flow from anywhere”, which is closer to an outcome. The most interesting part is that ServiceNow also positions itself as the platform of platforms, i.e., a meta platform. This is a step up in the game. It recognizes that it is probably unlikely to succeed in a head-on clash with the titans but better to focus on connecting different infrastructures, i.e., different platforms. This is a smart move, also considering that many companies do not have a single platform strategy in place often run best-of-breed strategies.

What does this mean?

As said above, with every vendor emphasizing on “platform” and “CX” it is obvious that these terms have reached their zenith. While CX is an outcome – an end customer (or a user if we include employee experience) creates experiences as part of engagements – a platform is more about technology than outcomes. Furthermore, a platform is a means to an end and not an end in itself. This is very similar to “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”. This means that it is more urgent to think about the term “platform”.

In the short term, for a company it is important to position one’s platform with a suitable story to be visible, recognized and sufficiently differentiated as a player. 

Still, while important, some of these ways to differentiate oneself might not lead to a lasting differentiation.

Having said that, tying one’s brand to high ethics and strong positive emotions is a very good thing, given that the company lives up to the promise. The positive emotions might even work better than the high ethical standards. This is because ethics appeal more to the rational being while emotions run deeper. We can see this all the time in (b2b) sales processes. 

If you have it, maintain it and tie it strongly to benefits of applications and solutions, to outcomes. If you don’t have it: Build it, but credibly.

On the longer run, there needs to be more. 

More focus on outcomes and users.

For users, outcomes revolve around three levers:

• Solutions are available wherever they are, physically and digitally
• Solutions show them what is important, and give them good advice
• Solutions work the way they do. This includes the user interface that needs to cater for text and voice

That way, the platform, that is more interesting for the IT department than the users, gets more into the background in favor of outcomes.

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.

On June 15, 2021, the CRMKonvos crew had the chance to chat with Andreas Schuster, Customer Success Director for SugarCRM in Europe, about the company’s evolving vision and goals. He did not disappoint.

Schuster has filled a variety of roles over the years, both in the software industry and outside of it, and has developed an appreciation of what well-administered CRM can do for a business and its customers. “I have been able to get to know CRM in the industry and in sales, and I keep getting to know it again and again,” Schuster said. “I never get bored watching companies actually supporting their sales management with software, but also just the way they work together with the customer and with the customer. And it is always exciting.”

One important thing that Schuster believes, though, is that CRM is more than technology; it is behavior and culture which technology can enable to be better. “CRM is not so much a technical tool; it really is an approach,” Schuster said. “It's a strategic sales approach, and there's a lot that goes into it now, but it's still the same.” The technology is an important starting point though, especially with larger and more complex businesses. Schuster added: “I keep coming back to this: the software that's used has to work great, it has to be intuitive, it has to look good. But taking this CRM approach is first of all a strategic thing in a company. You have to want it. You have to prepare for it. And you also have to set an example for your company from the point of view of the executives. Those who do this are very successful.”

CRM Language

It sounds like Mr. Schuster is speaking CRMKonvos’ favorite language—the language of customer and employee experience alongside raw quarterly numbers. The conversation moved on to other topics, such as the oft-mentioned 360 degree view of the customer. Does it exist? Can it exist? “It's always situational,” Schuster said, noting that a great number of companies mention the 360 degree view in their product claims or mission statements. “It is of course an approximation of such an ideal case, but 180 degrees would already be a super advance for companies that have no CRM approach at all.”

If one is to talk about a view, one must also talk about visibility, and that’s something that rarely remains consistent, especially in companies with multiple divisions and diverse stakeholders. “In CRM cultures, it's exciting to see how collaboration changes in companies where everyone has access to customer data, at least in the sales area, but also across departments,” Schuster said. “This means that by sharing access, we also have a joint opportunity. And then we can ultimately work together on reliability and team success in the interests of the customer.”

Unfortunately, the intent often gets lost. “The first thing that companies have done is limit the visibility. So the Rhineland sales channel is only allowed to see Rhineland customers and the branch in France is only allowed to see their own customers, and then again horizontally. So one distribution channel is only allowed to see its products, the other only the others. I take two steps forward and one step back.” This sort of self-limiting approach to consistent, broad-based information access is running out of time and space. “Today's customers are also global, they also look at me globally,” Schuster added.

Regarding another common term, the customer journey, there seemed to be agreement that sales and marketing tools needed to evolve from something that supports the hunter-gatherer-farmer model that has been used so often, into more of a tour guide image. “Customers rarely stay forever, but they should have a good time while they are with you, and if you lose customers … they should remember you well because you always see each other twice in life,” Schuster said. Thank-you emails, offers of favorable contract extensions, and similar things will leave a good memory, showing gratitude that they were a customer rather than punishing them for leaving. “A customer who is won over today should be won over sustainably. They should be accompanied, not won over and discarded. These are customers who will be lost again.”

The Platform and Beyond

Still, Sugar sells technology which businesses use to succeed, and the company is always moving forward in that area. Schuster went into some detail about Sugar’s direction and goals, including the company’s new motto, “Let the Platform Do the Work.” It’s more than the automation every vendor has been building for decades; CRM is starting to use artificial intelligence to provide support and guidance so workers can be both more effective and more efficient with their time. “Artificial Intelligence, most people think that's something difficult. But if you look at how simple the application possibilities are—say I look at my leads in Sugar. They are listed for me, one to ten, these are the most probable, these are the most improbable. I can plan a whole week around that.” Schuster adds that using software to do the grunt work to fulfill a request such as “How should I plan my week?” can take tremendous stress off of a person, so that they start each day energized and focused on what they need to do.

To hammer the point home, Schuster turned the focus to smaller businesses—consultants, like us. “You guys are essentially a one-man show. You live by correctly assessing sales opportunities. Is there someone who will actually become a customer, or do I potentially spend days feeding that sales opportunity and ultimately nothing comes of it,” he observed. “SugarCRM now has a feature, it's even called Predict. That means, if I create a sales opportunity or a step before, I want to qualify a lead, then the system already tells me: ‘So from this industry you had a lot of leads in the past, but you didn't win any of them. That means you can try again, but save your resources, be economical and realistic.’ With another lead possibly, ‘From this industry you have won a lot of customers in the past. That means, put more effort into it.’ That's what the system does today. You used to have to build reports, combine them, export them. That was a real science. Today, the system does that by itself.”

If platform is the word of the day, then ecosystem is one of the runners-up. The shift of major vendors to become platform providers has meant greatly increased focus on partnerships—something Sugar has always done very well. One of the reasons for this ties back to the idea of a good customer journey. “SugarCRM is an ecosystem. We offer services ourselves. We have a system there, a network of channel partners. But no matter who it is, we basically offer customers this customer journey functionality as well, because we simply believe it brings something to win customers sustainably,” Schuster said  “It prevents escalation. Escalations and re-acquisition measures are many times more costly and damaging for a company than customer acquisition. It really costs resources, it leaves a bad mood. Why should I win a customer only to fight for him next year? It doesn't make sense.”

To close, we asked Schuster what three wishes he would like to grant to a potential customer so that he has a successful CRM project. “What would I want to give him? Definitely an open ear, because you have to listen first in order to be able to advise. Then all the experience I've gathered that I can throw into the ring, into the pot, that I can offer. You can't avoid experience. You just get experience. It can be good or bad, but you can always help others with it. And the third thing I can give him is this: If he decides to become a customer, to stick with it, not to take for granted that it all just works now.”

This article has actually been written by my colleague Marshall Lager and is published with his permission

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.