And now, it is with a heavy heart that I write my final blog post as a core contributor of CRM Outsiders. Over the past three years, and more than 600 installments, I have come to find Outsiders as a place to vent, share my thoughts and (hopefully) help some people on their way to making their customer engagements more successful, profitable, insightful, etc.

While I will not be a regular contributor here, I do hope to pop in with some guest posts from time to time – adding some of my trademarked take on the CRM industry from an even more “Outsider” position going forward. This blog has had an independent feel to it – free for the most part from corporate posing and sales pitches. Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder has already proven he is up to the task with his last two posts – and I expect him to raise the bar given his keen ability to really get to the heart of issues and pull out what really matters to you on the business end of a CRM initiative.

Other new faces will pop up on the Outsiders blog and Twitter handle as well; people like Jan Sysmans, who brings a wealth of collaboration and social business experience to SugarCRM and Outsiders after years with Cisco-Webex.

In short, while I will not be coming to you regularly via this blog, the content and characters involved with CRM Outsiders will remain as strong as ever. Keep reading, keep learning, and please, keep making this a two-way communication by providing comments, feedback, ideas etc.

For now, farewell, but not goodbye!

Social is a transformative phenomenon – one that is taking businesses from yesterday’s approach to scale (one-to-many relationships and broadcast mentality) – into today’s world of scaling (or at least attempting to) personalized engagements.

So, where does sales fit into all of this? In a well-thought out article, InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti talks about sales and social in a recent Mashable post. Umberto points out an obvious “near paradox” in the sales/social development evolution: that while many sales people are “not technogeeks” – at the same time “sales has always been social.” (Side Note: I do hope and expect that Umberto will discuss these ideas in greater length during his SugarCon keynote next month.)

So, are salespeople ahead of the curve from a behavioral standpoint?  Or are they behind the social media learning curve from a technology standpoint?

I don’t think there’s an answer here, at least not a simple one. For many seasoned sales executives, they probably have the “in real life” social angle of sales nailed down pat: great at cold calling, soft closing skills, relationship management understanding, etc. But many of the new generation of sales people might have some great technology chops: building great online networks, scaling their reach while “keeping it real,” and creating effective outreach strategies to generate interest.

Both of these aspects seem highly complementary – but will one win out over the other?  Also, in time might we be in danger of losing old school “sales skills” due to upstart sales people relying too much on social technologies and not actually being “social” in the true sense of the word? It seems a fitting irony, but one with potentially drastic consequences.

Ultimately, people buy from people, and make purchasing decisions for emotional reasons. So, we can scale our reach, foster social channels as engagement platforms, etc. – but at the end of the day, the sales person with the best sales skills (whether they come from instinct or cool tools like SalesView) are the ones who will prevail.

Now…I set my sights on one goal – SugarCon 2011! This year’s event is going to be so bad-ass, with some amazing sponsors and keynotes, evening events and a metric crap-load of breakout sessions for everyone in the Sugar ecosystem.

This year, we again have another jewell in the crown – the “conference within a conference” that is the Social CRM track – this year dubbed “Going Global, Mobile and Social.” Between keynote speakers like Paul Greenberg, and sessions with Esteban Kolsky, Brent Leary, Chris Carfi, Becky Carroll, Laurence Buchanan (the list goes on…) – this is one of the greatest assemblages of social media thought leaders and practitioners ever. (Seriously. Ever.)

Not a SugarCRM user but love social media?  Hit me up or social CRM track manager Brian Vellmure (@CRMstrategies on the tweet-box) and receive a discounted rate!

More information and registration info is right here.

Hope to see all of you social media and social CRM enthusiasts at the event!

SugarCon 2011 is already shaping up to be an AMAZING event. Between awesome evening events, a full-on social media “conference within a conference,” and a bazillion other cool sessions, speakers, special guests etc. – this year’s event will be the biggest and best to date for sure.

Make sure you can join us and by registering in the next 24 hours you can get a one time LOW LOW LOW (seriously, this rate is ridiculous) registration fee of just $199.

Yes – $199.

All the sessions, keynotes, evening events, Sugar U training tutorials, networking, social media tips and tricks, everything included for just $199.

Register Here to lock-in this great rate. (This is the only time I will use the term lock-in on this blog in a positive sense).

Well, I thought – since it ’tis the season of giving and carols – let’s have a contest to see just how creative our Sugar community can be!

So – we are kicking off a quick contest to see who can write and/or record the best SugarCRM-themed holiday carol. Points will be given to creativity, humor and presentation. And, don’t be afraid to take aim at our competition as well .  And, if you can actually RECORD you singing the carol (audio is cool, video is even better) – well that just might give you an edge.

The rules and regs can be found at the “Night Before Dreamforce” page.

All you have to do is post your lyrics and/or audio/video to the SugarCRM facebook page to be eligible for the iPad. Hey, you might just get an extra holiday present, and awesome one at that! Winner will be announced Dec. 20.

Good luck!

So, the marketing team got together and penned some “holiday carols” that tell our side of the CRM story, as well as throw some light-hearted barbs towards salesforce. All in fun, right? You can check out the complete carol book and lyrics here.

The main thrust of the campaign was to guarantee salesforce.com users at least 50% off their CRM subscription fees by switching to SugarCRM – and to make the switch seamless, we will waive the data migration fee.

To top it all off, we hired some professional “carolers” to sing selections from the song book outside the Moscone center as the attendees of Dreamforce piled in for the kickoff keynote. The crowd loved the carols, many chimed in, and tons of people snapped photos and videos and took home souvenir carol books for themselves.

Here are a few clips of the singers singing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All in all, it was a fun event and we had a great time with all the singers and all the people who stopped by and chatted with us about SugarCRM.  Thanks to everyone who helped make the caroling such a fun and successful event!

It was an interesting talk – and brought up some interesting points. I think the most interesting one was not necessarily around SaaS, cloud or open source technology but rather about what the culture of “open” means in the age of the cloud and the age of social.

Really, I think more and more people are feeling less “locked-in” by companies like Salesforce.com or other older proprietary vendors. People are seeing the myriad alternatives and the emergence and growth of all of these companies in the cloud proves that there is opportunity and a clear migration path from proprietary and closed SaaS apps.

End user organizations of all types are starting to reject the notion of traditional SaaS – finding point products on a single server farm an untenable scenario. Of course, there are a ton of organizations out there that do not care about the limitations of traditional SaaS – but there are sooo many companies that need access, ownership, control, etc. – all the things that “open” offers. This is not a zero-sum game here: Salesforce.com can continue to grow even as open cloud companies like SugarCRM become huge as well.

I’ve seen a lot of ridiculous documents from competitors trying to bash Sugar as a product based on it being open source. They liken the application to a pile of car parts – claiming you have to assemble parts to make Sugar work. That is obviously a bogus analogy: in reality as Larry notes SugarCRM is more like any car you’d buy off the lot that enables you to open the hood, make changes to the cosmetics and/or drivetrain, etc. You OWN the car! Traditional SaaS in a lot of ways is like leasing a car, where the hood is welded shut and there is a gas cap that only the dealer can open to fill – at their rates. (I hope Larry doesn’t mind my extending his analogy.)

But ultimately – as Marten and Larry point out – by empowering customers and giving them control of their data – you enter an engagement lifecycle that provides value and a relationship built on real benefits – and that is more powerful than any artificial lock-in strategy out there today.

OK, as I get back into the swing of things – I wanted to give a quick recap of the past week or so. In a word – things are amazing. Sugar 6 is turning out to be HUGE in so many ways. And social CRM is just one of them. I am showing some of the simple SCRM additions that can be made to Sugar 6 all over Europe and people are loving it.

I want to make a quick note about one of our newer SugarCRM partners – Romcad. I spent a day with these guys and they are great, and see that there is an amazing opportunity for CRM in Italy. On Outsiders we get caught up in the “next big thing” with CRM, but there are still thousands of companies looking for basic, fast-to-deploy and fast to adopt CRM systems, and Sugar is playing a pivotal role in shaping the way small businesses in regions like Italy see their customers and their growth strategies. It really is a great wide world of opportunity for our partners and SugarCRM out there…

The SugarCRM world wide road trip rages on however, and we’re off to Holland tomorrow for our partner Brix CRM’s Acceleration event. Register here if you are in the area – and get a chance to talk with our CEO!

Speaking of Larry, and speaking of speaking engagements – Larry will also be presenting at LinuxTag this week – check out his session here. Also at LinixTag is SugarCRM’s own PHP genius John Mertic – presenting on “SugarCRM -Your Next Business Application Framework” on June 9th.

We hope to see you at some of these events!

I am getting ready to depart for Europe myself, and will be leading a session on the social CRM features that Sugar 6 enables in Dublin on May 25th. The event is being put on by our partner Provident Technology. Provident is our leading partner in Ireland and has an amazing knack for understanding how to unlock the value of technology to support your people and processes.

I’ll be talking about the value of social media and engaging your customers through these new channels, and showing how Sugar 6 enables you to easily bring in social data and networks into the CRM.  Like this:

These events are a great way for anyone who wants to get going on social CRM, but more important – looking for some advice and info on best practices for deploying traditional CRM.

Check out details of the event here, and definitely come see us if you’re in Dublin!

While in NYC, I personally had the opportunity to speak, engage with and listen to Clint Oram, Greg Kieser of The Robin Hood Foundation and Arkady Kleyner as well as an active audience, willing to jump into the conversation. On the panel, we dug into topics like adoption and value to the end users, it was a good conversation. After the event, I was able to spend some further time with Clint as we dissected our own topics, and CRM ‘next’. The theme there was, ‘we have been at this so long, how do we make sure we have not lost touch’ and ‘is “Manual” a bad thing; but more on that in a couple minutes.

I spoke on the topic of ‘CRM in the age of Social’ – this is the kissing cousin of ‘Social CRM’. I chose to alter the title of the presentation, and it will also likely be the topic of my book, as soon as I get busy writing it. The distinction is that while Social CRM is receiving a lot of attention, the basic ‘blocking and tackling’ of CRM is still top of mind for many. As a matter of fact, many, while interested in the artifacts of Social CRM; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, are even more are concerned how this fits into their organization.  Clint did a stellar job of talking about the CRM Adoption curve and in a way organizational readiness. The audience was engaged and the topic hit home

Is Manual a bad thing

After the event, while we were discussing and dissecting our own talks, Clint and I began to wonder out loud. Two CRM veterans, with battle scars to prove it, trying to figure out what impact over engineering processes, and optimizing front office and back-office to point of pure optimizing was really about. Is process efficiency getting in the way of focusing on your customer? How can that be?

I am not going to put words in Clint’s mouth here, these thoughts are my take away from our conversation. Part of the ‘People, Process and Technology’, which we all talk about is, the process part, of course. More often than not, process optimization is completely Inside-out, hard to argue that. You can try and we would love to hear it. So, what? Well, how is this for a thought: what impact does your process optimization effort have on the Customer Experience? Is it all good? To certain folks in your organization, saving 10 or 15 minutes, multiplied by 10 a day, a hundred a month has to be good, right? Or, are you passing on an opportunity to spend some time on the phone with your customers?

I do not have the answers right now, but it did get me thinking…

Atlanta – Social CRM in the South

While Mitch was up in NYC, I was speaking on an interesting panel at the Silverpop annual Client Summit in Atlanta. The panel covered the topics of social CRM, inbound marketing and lead generation for modern B2B organizations.

The panelists were great – we had David Raab of Raab Associates, who I see as a godfather of demand generation, in short a very bright guy. Also, Jep Castelein from Lead Sloth also added some great insights for the audience. Rounding out the panel was moderator and B2B marketing evangelist at Silverpop Adam Needles.

Before taking audience questions, we went through some of the issues facing marketers today, and talked about some of the ideal (or less than ideal) processes and systems we now need to consider on an everyday basis. I offered up this tangled model – to show just how much technology and process we must be tracking in the age of social:

The audience was great – and if you were in attendance, thanks for your great questions and feedback. I got the feeling that marketers are now starting to think about HOW to add social media monitoring and inbound/outbound social media strategies; were are getting past the IF, WHY and “Is This Valuable?” stages.

I had some side conversations with attendees representing some Sugar customers, as well as some interesting brands like Muzak – all interested in keeping a nice balance between broadcasting brand messaging and actual lead management in social channels. Some great ideas out there, and glad to see people are getting the idea that they simply have to apply social concepts to their business – there are no magic bullets – and this is not a rip and replace by any means. We are simply adding new channels of communication to our marketing activities.

In all, a great panel at a great event. I think Silverpop is doing so cool things in terms of empowering B2B marketers with a broad tool set. It’s a nice complementary solution to their more B2C focused offerings.