Scribe CRM Trends

Best of CRM: May 18th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

5 Facets of the Highly Effective Marketing Organization
By: Lou Guercia (@louguercia)
Scribe CEO Lou Guercia reviews five critical components of effective marketing organizations. These include breaking down data siloes, taking action instead of assigning blame, mastering smart customer data insights, embracing best-of-breed technology solutions and aligning marketing and sales departments to drive revenue. And while this advice may seem obvious, it’s steeped in data – Marketo found organizations with aligned marketing and sales departments had a business close ratio 60% higher than those lacking alignment, and a CMO council survey unveiled that most CMOs don’t believe they received adequate resources from IT.

Five Conferences 2013: SugarCRM Next Up
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
Paul provides his thoughts on the recent SugarCRM conference, as well as SugarCRM’s overall strategy to become an enterprise-ready company. He highlights their partnership with IBM as proof of their ability to shift towards the enterprise, with one critical ingredient missing – a CMO. The company currently lacks a comprehensive marketing strategy beyond messaging, and they need to hire a CMO to drive influencer relations, thought leadership and general visibility. Regardless of their marketing challenges, Paul praises SugarCRM 7.0 as the company’s most important release in the last decade for its ability to provide scaleability and personalization for each user, while maintaining security and data quality.

CRM Pain Points: On-premise or in the Cloud, Still Room to Improve
By: Mary Shacklett
This piece by Mary highlights a critical component of CRM to keep in mind when planning an implementation – access. Without access, which in Mary’s example involved a financial services company trying to integrate their CRM system with their call center, even the best CRM system is rendered ineffective. Mary touts system integrators as a much-needed solution that helps lower overall cost and time, while also improving the manageability of CRM integration with other enterprise systems. And, of course, the specific integration solution software used by systems integrators will also play a major role in the overall cost and effectiveness of the integration, and should be weighed as a factor when selecting an integrator.

Data Integration – Delivering Wealth Management Value
By: Bill Rourke (@brourke)
Like most customer-facing industries, CRM has transformed from an IT issue to an essential business requirements in the wealth management sector. Bill covers the importance of CRM for improving client response time, eliminating double entries and streamlining processes for greater efficiency. However, the rapidly growing mid-size consultancy space must move beyond custom coding, instead taking advantage of data integration solutions like Scribe to provide enterprise-grade integration on a lower budget.

Putting the “Relationship” Back in CRM | #sapphirenow
By: Valentina Craft
At SAP’s Sapphire Now event, Sameer Patel and John Furrier discussed how to better integrate the “social” component of CRM and treat it as a value-add for enterprises. The major takeaways include using CRM for “relationship” rather than “record” management and keeping content front and center. In our fully digital world, the connected consumer demands one-on-one attention from brands, and when used properly, CRM systems facilitate this type of connection.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Data Integration – Delivering Wealth Management Value

Guest post by Bill Rourke, President, Salentica

Customer data integration is no longer just an IT issue; it has become an essential business requirement – especially in the wealth management arena. Clients expect their financial advisors to instantly dissect and deliver relevant information concerning their investments to keep up with the rapid speed of business and economic changes. And they want a personal connection.

But delivering exceptional client experiences can be a complex challenge that draws resources away from business development activities. Firms of all sizes need a hub of customer information to enhance the client experience and fully understand their needs. Integration of disparate systems with CRM significantly improves client response time, eliminates double entries and streamlines processes for greater efficiency. This gives advisors more time to dedicate to meeting with clients and building their business.

However, static, time-intensive integrations relying on custom code simply don't fit the needs of today's firms. This challenge is most profound for the growing mass of mid-size consultancies, family offices and independent advisors that make up the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) space, which is the fastest growing space in wealth management. While more advisors are leaving the behemoth firms behind in favor of smaller, more personal establishments, they still want enterprise-grade integration and resources. Tighter IT budgets don't mean that advisors no longer need full access to their clients' activities, relationship, holdings, etc. to continue delivering the same level of customer service.

Advisors at firms of all sizes need an integrated customer data solution that securely ties together holdings information, influencer history (lawyers, accountants, etc.), and a record of customer interaction to date wherever that data resides – be it on-premise or in the cloud. The solution needs to be easy to use while offering deep functionality that can quickly adapt to a host of changing systems, APIs, etc. Saving time and increasing efficiency, an effective customer data solution gives advisors a complete view of their customers.

Leveraging Scribe, we're able to give advisors instant access to the client information they need, anywhere, anytime. Scribe brings advisors the data that matters – across on-premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructures. Together, our solutions offer advisors a faster, more reliable way to access critical client data.

Connect via Twitter: @salentica

Technical Blog: Creating Orders in Accounting from Opptys in CRM with Scribe Online IS

For all you technical folks out there, if you're interested in learning how
to use Scribe Online IS to create Orders in your accounting application from CRM, take a look at this blog from Nate.  It describes how to do so with SQL Server as a backend from Opportunities in your CRM application.

http://blog.scribesoft.com/2013/05/how-to-call-a-stored-procedure-in-scribe-online-is.html

 

Best of CRM: May 11th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

Scribe Software Marks another Milestone Quarter
By: Heather Clancy (HeathClancy)
ZDNet’s Heather Clancy provides an overview of Scribe Software’s continued Q1 momentum, with over 23 new enterprise accounts and a growth rate of more than 150 percent. Scribe’s strong partnerships with SaaS providers like Marketo, Silverpop, FinancialForce and more also underscore the company’s momentum. And for good reason, as Senior Vice President Gary Peterson of Hitachi Solutions described our innovative new visual UI as one which “makes cloud and hybrid data integration between core business applications easily accessible and speeds the development of new integrations to drive business value faster."

CRM Idol 2013 Starts Today
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
Although it seems like CRM Idol 2012 ended just yesterday, this year’s competition has already begun. And, with 12.5% CRM market growth in 2012, this year CRM providers both large and small will become even more competitive. Past winners include Get Satisfaction and BPMonline in 2011, and Crowdtap and Artesian Solutions in 2012.

CRM, ERP Head up Mobile Applications Offered by SaaS Providers
By: Stephanie Mann (@SearchSOA)
As we all know, SaaS providers lead the cloud services market – Forrester Research reports that SaaS revenue will reach $92.8 billion by 2016, with much of this increased revenue due to a rise in mobile SaaS demand. And within mobile SaaS, CRM and ERP currently hold the most importance, with Salesforce blazing the mobile CRM path. As workforces become more mobile than ever, so too must their applications. Mobile SaaS solutions fill this need for instant access to data and services anytime, anywhere, and integrating these solutions truly opens up endless possibilities for working on the go.

Choose a Winning Combination of Customer Experience Metrics
By: Syed Hasan
CRM is all about improving the customer experience, but it’s impossible to do that without the right metrics to continuously make progress. When debating which metrics to focus on, Syed lays out areas of focus for customer experience measurement which include metrics focusing on industry, methodology, identifying brand promises, organizational hierarchy, channels and consistency. The most important consideration when laying out plans for metrics is to understand which metrics will help drive actionable insights fastest – like customer satisfaction – then focus on that low-hanging fruit first before moving on to more nuanced metrics.

SAP Customers May Overspend by 25%
By: Doug Henschen (@DHenschen)
To all SAP customers – you can save up to 25 percent on your software without the need to switch vendors. Integration provider HCL conducted a survey which found that 94 percent of SAP customers run multiple instances of the software, but due to the underlying complexity required for that approach it costs significantly more. In fact, companies running only one instance save up to 25 percent in costs. What’s more, SAP’s larger customers often run five instances of SAP software, upping the complexity and cost to even higher levels.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: May 4th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

Rank
Denis Pombriant (@DenisPombriant)
Denis delves into the high-level takeaways from the recent Gartner CRM market size report. Along with listing the top five CRM vendors, which include, from top to bottom, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, Denis takes a step back to think about the greater meaning – or lack thereof – of the report. Questions and considerations to ponder range from how these companies measure their CRM revenue (some have “fuzzier” definitions than others), how Gartner came up with these rankings in the likely absence of hard numbers, how they estimated the size of the entire market and what metrics/timelines they used to measure it. All these questions suggest that while these five companies are undoubtedly the top players, ranking them from 1-5 holds limited meaning, and companies should consider all five as equally serious contenders when looking for a CRM solution.

Is Big Data Going to Be the Secret Weapon for CRM?
Paul Anderson
CRM is all about using customer data to better market to that customer, and big data helps companies make sense of high volume and velocity data. It seems obvious that the two were made for synergistic benefits. By integrating big data into CRM strategy, companies can greatly improve customer understanding, improve customer experience, support better decision making, understand trends and set benchmarks. I know through experience that these benefits occur when integrating CRM with other business system, and big data brings on a level of scale necessary to improve the results and bottom line even more.

Gartner: Worldwide CRM Revenue Grew 12.5 Percent in 2012
Chris Kanaracus (@chriskanaracus)
Providing yet another take on Gartner’s CRM Market Size report, Chris focuses on the overall growth of the market in 2012 (12.5%), pointing out the fact that the growth rate was three times that of all enterprise software segments on average. The report also uncovers the extremely high rate of acquisitions over the past few years, with over 50 companies acquired in the CRM space between 2009 and 2012, solidifying the top players’ hold on the market. However, despite their dominance, small players also saw rapid growth over the past year – Zoho grew CRM revenues by 81.2%, and others saw similarly high growth. 2013 will be an interesting year to watch as the large vendors fight for market dominance while some small players creep up and either steal market share or face acquisition.

Why Companies Using the Cloud Are So Happy
David Linthicum (@DavidLinthicum)
Many companies deploying cloud solutions – especially in the CRM space – face a great deal of fear and uncertainty, frequently delaying or changing their plans based on these concerns. To allay their fears, David analyzes the results of a recent survey from RightScale on cloud adoption, and the findings point towards increased success the more mature a company’s cloud solution is. One important finding from the survey is that 80 percent of advanced-level respondents enjoy faster time to market, while only 25 percent of beginners see those results. Moreover, 87 percent of advanced respondents see faster access to infrastructure, as opposed to 30 percent of beginners, showing the importance of either hiring employees knowledgeable about cloud solutions, or working with an experienced partner to experience cloud benefits as fast as possible.

The Data-Driven Enterprise Marketing Revolution
By Russell Glass (@glassruss)
As any marketer knows, in this day and age there are a million ways to reach the customer, which also means there are a million ways your customers can be distracted by other messaging and content. With customers at the helm of the buying process, marketers must use CRM as the customer data repository, integrating all systems to bring in the most relevant data and then analyzing this data for truly relevant one-to-one communication with consumers. The future of marketing relies on integrating and making sense of the nearly infinite customer data needed to create value for consumers in an increasingly distracted world, and CRM will (and already does) play a central role in navigating and acting on this mass of information.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: April 27th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

New Salesforce.com Features Meld Social Media, Marketing and CRM
By: Jordan Novet (@gigajordan)
Big news for Salesforce.com users – the company just announced it will integrate its lead-tracking system with social-listening and social-media marketing tools to enable more targeted and tailored social marketing initiatives. Through combing Salesforce’s CRM and Social.com solutions, customers will be able to enjoy the best of both worlds, showcasing a prime example of integrated systems improving end results. Buddy Media and Radian6 both play an important role in the end product, also demonstrating a solid use-case for Salesforce’s purchase of the two companies.

Six Benefits of Combining Digital Data with Traditional CRM to Enhance the Customer Experience
By: Juliet Stott (@JulietStott)
This article covers a seemingly obvious but often overlooked topic. By combining traditional digital, mobile, social and offline data, companies can avoid duplication, engage in deeper 1-2-1 conversations, increase the real-time relevance of communications, conduct agile customer service, better personalize messaging and interactions, and track consumers once they leave your properties. Yet this centralization still poses a major challenge – at a Celerity data and CRM event in London, bringing all of the relevant data points into a single view was listed as a major challenge for big companies – a problem that Scribe’s January State of SMB CRM Integration report found also plagues SMBs. However, the challenges are worth it for those companies that successfully implement and integrate CRM. As an example of success implementing CRM to unite data, Juliet presents a case study of The Caravan Club, which used CRM to improve its member retention rates and reduced marketing spend by 40 percent!

Why Mobile CRM Rules
By: Erika Morphy (@emorphy)
With mobile computing rising at an astronomic rate as desktop computing loses favor, CRM is adapting to shifting habits. Diving deeper into Gartner’s prediction that mobile CRM apps will increase by 500 percent by 2014, Erika polls experts on the “why” of this shift. The benefits of mobile-first CRM apps touted by experts include convenience to work whenever and wherever, flexibility and malleability, functional parity with desktops, the ability to more easily engender loyalty and the value-add of the entire mobile UI designed to be sparse and streamlined.

Our Eloqua vs. Marketo vs. Pardot Case Study, Take 2: The Marketo S-1/IPO, and Going Big
By: Jason M. Lemkin (@jasonlk)
With ExactTarget purchasing Pardot for $100m a few months ago, Jason Lemkin undertook a case study to compare the trajectory of three of the biggest marketing automation players: Pardot, Eloqua and Marketo. Marketing automation ties into and enhances CRM results – essentially acting as a platform built entirely for marketers, unlike CRM which sometimes caters more strongly to sales people – so understanding the landscape holds importance for any marketer. In a bold prediction, Jason states that Marketo will IPO for $2+ billion. His reasoning includes the fact that Marketo has grown far faster than Eloqua and SaaS growth in general, losses don’t seem important while gunning for an IPO, it will take billions for the investors and founders to overcome stock dilution, and the world of SaaS values experience, which the Marketo team has. We’ll know the accuracy of Jason’s prediction in a few months, but regardless of the exact number, I’m inclined to agree that Marketo will go big for the same reasons, and because of this simple fact – they make a fantastic product that attracts great customers.

Reducing Hospital Readmission: Can Microsoft Dynamics CRM Help Hospitals Meet New Patient Standards?
By: Linda Rosencrance
While very specific, this case study of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to improve the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) demonstrates just how widely beneficial CRM can be across many fields and use-cases. In order to meet new governmental standards, hospitals across the nation need to reduce their readmission rates, and to do this cost-effectively, those hospitals need a technology that enables them to identify, reach out to and proactively treat high-risk patients. Solution Design Consultant PowerObjects built a solution on Dynamics CRM, using Dynamics to enable the creation of "bundles" of information that can be sent to patients and family/caregivers, while also automatically updating the system with analytics on the communications’ effectiveness. Moving forward, this CRM-based technology will help hospitals reduce costs while significantly improving results for their patients, and the system’s technology could benefit other fields where similar risk-management among individuals holds.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: April 20th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

Microsoft and Salesforce are Over 60% of all Gartner CRM Inquiries
By: Louis Columbus (@LouisColumbus)
As a major provider of market research and analyst insights, Gartner receives an average of 100,000 inquiries each year from end-user clients across the spectrum of IT topics. Their most recent statistics, released in March, show Microsoft and Salesforce as the undisputed kings of CRM inquiries, matching the generally dominant position both players hold in the CRM market. Interesting to note are the different angles taken by the major players. Microsoft has been shifting to promoting low pricing and ease of adoption to lure in new accounts, while Salesforce’s momentum is partially founded on the announcement of their bringing contextual customer data to mobile devices through their Platform Mobile Services and Partner Program.

Understand the BI Maturity Model to Improve Your CRM Implementation
By: Peter LePine
Despite its immense importance in better serving customers, Business Intelligence projects fail to fully deliver upwards of 60 percent of the time. Peter LePine provides useful advice to succeed in BI endeavors, starting with implementing an incremental approach to BI deployment based on a four stage BI maturity model. BI maturity stages begin with the “Initial” stage, where CRM is highly tactical in nature. The “Managed” second stage involves strategic use of CRM, while the “Enhanced” third stage includes strategic CRM and tactical BI usage. Lastly, the most advanced “Visionary” stage includes enterprise strategic thinking for both CRM and IT. As the low BI success rate makes clear, companies need a better plan before attempting BI – understanding and placing your company in one of the four stages before beginning a BI initiative will play a key role in attaining success and value from the initiative.

Salesforce.com Leads Growing CRM Application Market: Gartner
By: Nathan Eddy (@dropdeaded209)
Nathan provides further insight into the recent Gartner CRM report, relaying Salesforce’s dominant 26 percent increase in revenue from 2011 compared with SAP’s 0.1 percent growth. Along with the growth of overall CRM spending, Gartner predicts SaaS CRM solutions will account for more than half of CRM software revenue by 2016, up from 39% in 2012. With the growth of SaaS and continued CRM adoption in businesses, how these SaaS solutions fit into various ecosystems, and their integration between otherwise siloed Business Intelligence systems, should play a central role in any business planning to maximize their CRM benefits moving forward.

Stop Learning the Hard Way: Tackling SaaS Integration
By: Loraine Lawson (@LoraineLawson)
In line with Gartner’s prediction regarding increased adoption of SaaS CRM solutions in the coming years, TechTarget found that application integration now represents a top cloud challenge in two recent surveys. TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse survey revealed 34 percent of companies couldn’t make SaaS programs interoperate with other cloud or on-premise programs, severely limiting the benefits possible from such implementations. Loraine quoted David Linthicum’s analysis that “Data integration, no matter if you’re integrating internal systems or those in the cloud, is typically an afterthought. Companies now spend millions of dollars to migrate systems to the cloud without a clearly defined plan as to how that data will be integrated with existing enterprise systems. This makes the cloud project much more risky and costly than it has to be.”  Cloud integration is often more difficult due to frequent movement of data in the cloud – the most important takeaway from Loraine’s article is to conduct migration to cloud and SaaS solutions with  a well-thought out plan to integrate your systems, including finding an integration solution that doesn’t rely on hand-coding to save on long-term cost and time investments.

Microsoft Convergence 2013: Crossing the T’s; Dotting the I’s
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
Although Microsoft Convergence ended a month ago, Paul’s post on the show contains a thorough recap and valuable takeaways. In agreement with other Convergence attendees, Paul writes that this year Microsoft focused more on the customer experience and business value delivered through their solutions, rather than previous years of UI/UX focus. Major takeaways from this year’s Convergence conference include greater importance placed on Dynamics and Dynamics CRM as a part of Microsoft’s overall product/service offerings, Bob Stutz’s important role bringing Dynamics CRM into the 21^stcentury, and Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of Marketing Pilot and Netbreeze. Paul’s primary advice to Microsoft at this point is to fully integrate their new acquisitions into the Dynamics product offering to truly bring their solutions into the 21^st century, where collaboration and instant data access represent prerequisites to success, not added bonuses.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: April 13th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

How to Keep (Happy) Feet on the Ground with Cloud Integration: Four Key Considerations
By: Betsy Bilhorn
Integrating data in the cloud presents represents a pivotal aspect of enabling better business decisions through access to customer data, but also serves as a challenge for many companies who lack extensive experience in the space. Scribe VP of Product Management Betsy Bilhorn walks us through important considerations when integrating data. These considerations include understanding exactly what your cloud vendor supports in their API, taking both speed and performance of an API into account, reading the fine print regarding API governors to avoid exceeding thresholds, and looking into commercial integration solution providers to reduce custom coding, time to implementation, and total cost of ownership.

Mobile CRM Apps to Grow 500% by 2014 as Market Turns With Decline in PC Shipments
By: Alex Williams (@alexwilliams)
The decline of PCs and the move to the cloud both mark dramatic shifts in the software landscape as a whole, with effects strongly touching the CRM space. Gartner Research reported that mobile CRM apps will grow 500 percent by 2014, while SaaS providers will represent more than 50 percent of CRM profits in a few years. The rise of mobile, the cloud, and SaaS continue to complement each other and open the way for both higher software profits and lower operating costs for organizations that transition to these solutions. As this shift continues, however, companies must also plan for the integration of new systems, and often must manage integrating hybrid on-premise and cloud systems to maximize their benefits and enable the best decision making based on access to business critical data.

Last Month in CRM Software – CRM News Review for March 2013
By: Richard Boardman (@CRMAdvisor)
CRM consultant Richard Boardman covers key CRM happenings from March, focusing on the CRM acquisition war between Microsoft and Salesforce. With Microsoft’s purchase of MarketingPilot and Netbreeze, the company shows that they intend to continue to fight Salesforce and other CRM contenders. In response, Salesforce’s March announcement regarding  its potential $1 billion in convertible senior notes for “funding possible acquisitions of, or investments in, complementary businesses, services or technologies” shows that the two titans are far from ready to give up CRM market share.

SugarCon Speaker Reveals 10 Reasons Why Social CRM Projects Fail
By: Mark Brunelli (@Brunola88)
At Sugar CRM’s SugarCon conference, speaker David Myron enlightened his audience with a list of reasons why the high potential of social CRM often goes unrealized. Reasons he gave include the wrong organizational culture, a failure to implement compliance policy, no established focus or goals, a lack of managerial support, insufficient staffing, failure to listen or respond to customers, no influencer plan, and inadequate reporting. As others in the industry have mentioned, an additional major reason “social” CRM fails is because it’s treated as its own entity – social CRM is CRM, and successful companies will create a CRM plan with social incorporated into the core structure.

Gartner: CIOs and CMOs Must ‘Turn Sparks Into Flame’
By: Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman)
Michael’s video interview with Gartner VP Mark McDonald casts much needed perspective on the importance of a partnership between the CMO and CIO. With marketing tech spending forecasted to surpass that of IT by 2016, the two departments have struggled to understand their new dynamic. As Mark succinctly puts it: “Turning sparks into flame and growing that flame requires a scalable, sustainable platform. That’s what the CIO brings to the table. The most powerful combinations we’ve seen are the CIO and CMO working together with a shared goal to grow the business. When my goal is to grow the business, everybody has the potential to win. When my goal is to control costs, there is automatically a system of winners and losers.”

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: April 6th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

Evolving Social CRM to Become CRM—Again

By: Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky)

With the constant conversations about Social CRM, Esteban points out a key understanding that’s finally sinking in – Social CRM is just regular CRM now. In adapting to the new abilities the “social” aspect of CRM provides, Esteban recommends four critical steps for effective CRM implementation. These include using each channel for its respective purpose, rethinking your strategy within the new capabilities of CRM, focusing on bottom-line metrics over “fluff” metrics like followers, and embracing the change.

Scribe Online Platform Updated with New Visual Interface

By: Jason Gumpert

MSDynamicsWorld’s Jason Gumpert covers the newest version of our Scribe Online Platform, with a focus on the easy-to-use visual UI of Integration Services (IS). With IS, as Scribe’s VP of Product Management Betsy Bilhorn explains, "The concepts (of the customer data integration) are natural language based and easy to pick up if you have any level of technical background – for each record, if this, do that.” This opens up data integration to more users to enable better decision making, lower TCO, and faster realization of benefits.

CRM Winners and Losers

By: Chuck Schaeffer (@cschaeffer)

For those in the market for a CRM system, this post analyzes the relative Buyer Consideration (aka popularity) of the top 15 CRM systems in Q1 of 2013. Not surprisingly, Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics CRM hold top spots by a wide margin (72% and 51% of Buyer Consideration). For those interested in branching out from the two CRM titans, both Infusionsoft and Oracle RighNow are on the rise, but have a ways to go (19% and 5% of Buyer Consideration respectively).

Businesses Can Turn to Scribe for Integration in the Cloud Anytime

By: Mark Smith (@marksmithvr)

In a week full of data integration news (see Mulesoft’s funding), Mark covered another important data integration update – Integration Services (IS) for our Scribe Online Platform. Ventana found that 44% of organizations spend the most analytics time on data-based tasks, meaning that increases in data efficiency and integration can hugely benefit these organizations. Like Jason Gumpert and others have noted, the visual UI of IS greatly simplifies the process of data integration, leading to better, cheaper access to customer data. As Mark puts it, “Scribe Online is a great step forward. Having software that can align business and IT is essential, as less than a fifth (19%) work together well for the information needs of an organization, according to our information management research.”

MuleSoft Rakes in More Moolah to Connect Your Applications to the World

By: Barb Darrow (@gigabarb)

Barb covered this week’s announcement of Mulesoft’s $37 million funding round. The influx of cash into the data integration space is indicative of the massive wave of change coming and the importance of integrating CRM and other customer data systems – Mulesoft CEO Greg Schott estimates the value of connecting all enterprise applications at $500 billion. What’s interesting about these new funds is the fact that Mulesoft raised money from two competitors – Salesforce and SAP – underscoring the recognized need for CRM and cloud providers to connect their services using integration solutions like Mulesoft and Scribe.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Best of CRM: March 29th

Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

13 Tips to Get Business Teams to Use Your CRM System
By: Jennifer Lonoff Schiff (@JenniferLSchiff)
Regardless of a CRM system’s potential to improve your sales and marketing teams’ productivity, the reality can’t be realized unless the teams actually use that CRM system. Jennifer pulled together a list of tips from dozens of CRM experts and selected the top 13. Some of my personal picks include involving those who will use your CRM system the most in the decision and rollout process and keeping forms simple so sales users can easily and quickly enter information. Lastly, from our own CEO Lou Guercia, use your CRM as a one-stop data hub for your sales team so "all stakeholders can find the customer information they need, where and when they need it." 

Event Report: Microsoft Dynamics Convegence 2013 (#conv13)
By: R “Ray” Wang (@rwang0)
Constellation Research’s R “Ray” Wang wrote up a comprehensive overview of Microsoft Convergence, which drew almost 12,000 people this year. He highlights the success of Microsoft’s messaging and sales in moving up from the SMB market, as well as the importance of the Netbreeze and Marketing Pilot acquisitions for marketing automation and management services. The article closes with a question to readers, which I’ll ask of you as well: do you plan to invest more or less in Microsoft Dynamics (or any CRM solution) this year, and what do you like or dislike about your CRM solution?

CEO Marc Benioff Says Chatter Will Become Primary Interface for Salesforce, a Bold yet Risky Move
By: Alex Williams (@alexwilliams)
Following Marc Benioff’s announcement that Chatter will take on the role of primary interface for Salesforce, industry analyst and consultant Michael Krigsman questions the benefits and risks of such a move. On the surface, the information-stream style of Chatter provides an intuitive UI for people who frequently use Facebook, Twitter, and other similar platforms, but enterprise use differs from personal information consumption. Krigsman questions whether “enterprise will find activity streams as a natural way to communicate with enterprise data and systems.” If it does, competitors will follow suit, and the consumerization of IT will continue as Chatter brings intuitive consumption behavior to the enterprise.

CRM Watchlist 2013 Winners: Heading in the Right Direction
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
This week’s CRM Watchlist winners were selected from three sections, which include “CRM Idol 2012 Winners,” “Ready to Leap” companies and “Companies to Watch.” In summation, Artesian Solutions and Crowdtap took the “CRM Idol 2012” category, Allegiance, Demandbase, Tracx and ITC Infotech won in the “Ready to Leap” category, and Next Principles, DRI Global and Nearstream were selected as “Companies to Watch.” Paul considers the “CRM Idol” winners to be closest to remarkable success, while the “Ready to Leap” companies have great potential but for some potential holes, and the “Companies to Watch” winners provide exceptional products but need time to develop their ecosystems and thought leadership.

CxO Talk: Microsoft, Salesforce.com, CRM, and the Science of Hugging
By: Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman)        
On this week’s episode of CxO talk, co-hosts Michael Krigsman and Vala Afshar brought in Paul Greenberg to discuss Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com, CRM and enterprise software, and more. Key takeaways center on the importance of the customer, including Microsoft Convergence’s new focus on the customer story, Salesforce positioning itself as a “customer company” at a Boston event and Paul’s simple summation of the value of CRM: “If a customer likes you they will continue to do business with you, otherwise they won't.” As a bonus, the episode closed with a funny analogy where Michael applied Paul’s “science of hugging” advice to software vendors, which consists of not being afraid to close, throwing your arms around the other person, and squeezing – lesson learned.

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We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.