Just got back from our CRM Acceleration event in Chicago, where I emceed the event…it was a great success, and I met with a lot of great partners of ours, customers and even prospects.

The prospects, not surprisingly, provided for the most interesting conversations. It is always good to talk to people that have yet to deploy a CRM system. One of the prospects was actually looking for more of a project management tool, that would infuse data from a sales module as well as some financial data. Another was looking for something – anything to get the company away from the dreaded “Outlook and spreadsheets” approach to customer-facing processes.

But while these two business needs differed significantly, they were both also very similar in retrospect. Both of these firms were looking for one thing – to better serve their customers in the manner their customers want to be treated. Fortunately for Sugar, we are pretty flexible and the human interaction platform we’ve developed is all about doing just that. But it is good to see even very small business seeing the importance of a customer-centric philosophy.