I really like talking with CRM journalist and all around smart guy Chris Bucholtz. Whenever we have an interview – it always beings around one topic and very quickly tangents off into a great conversation about what we as an industry could be doing better (as well as some side stops discussing WWII aircraft and strategy).

I especially enjoyed Chris’ take on one of the roadblocks to CRM success - Executive Fear – that he describes in his CRM Buyer piece. These are all great ideas. The notion that too many executives are afraid to take chances is a scary, but all too often true, situation. In a shaky economy, I believe this problem gets amplified, as top-level execs are too frightened to lose positions etc. – and simply go the “safe” route.

So – in your organization are you a CRM leader, follower…or just in the way?

As Chris so eloquently notes in his article – “Best practices are made, not born.” I love this statement. The sales and marketing leaders in your organization have to know what is important (lead generation, pipeline, the bottom line etc.) but cannot be afraid to shake things up a little. Instead of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, a great CRM initiative should always foster a “how can we continually make this better?” mentality.

There are very few “turnkey machines” in the business world. More often than not, we are not in an organization with the luxury of ubiquity or near total market share – what I’m saying is that we are not all Google basically.

It is not always bad to “follow the leader” in terms of taking on proven CRM best practices. Startups and entrepreneurs can learn from larger, successful organizations while finding their identity. But, once found, companies need to differentiate and create their own killer experiences for their customers, develop new ways to pull in new leads, etc.

In the past, the technology supporting a CRM initiative was expensive and time consuming to deploy, configure and change over time. So, it made sense that a conservative approach won out more often than not. However, with today’s less expensive, ultra-flexible web and cloud-based CRM tools – there is far less excuse to take the safe route.

The tools are here now to better align the imagination of sales, marketing and customer service leaders with the actual technology solutions in place to make it happen.

One of the curious things I have seen, however, is that Salesforce.com continually seems to be moving away from its core product message. While SaaS and “the cloud” have permeated the company’s message to date – at least in the early years when the company was ramping up we heard a lot about the actual business software it was developing.

Now, apart from Chatter, I have not heard much about actual CRM features from Salesforce.com in what seems like years. Now, I am sure they are developing the apps – don’t get me wrong. It just does not seem a focal point anymore.

Why? Well, there are a number of possibilities. I’d like to explore two potential options. (Both, one, or neither could be true as I am just postulating here.)

One explanation about the perceived lack of actual feature/CRM development is that the actual Platform capabilities of Force.com are a reality. (And not, as one observer called it – “Farce.com.”) What I mean is that if Force.com is even half as easy to use as say Sugar Module Builder and Sugar Studio – customers can build features they need so that Salesforce.com does not have to do so. This is a possibility – but the limitations of the multi-tenant model make truly deep code-level customizations hard to perform and manage in terms of upgrades etc.

Another option, and this one is far fetched I admit, is that Salesforce in time will shift its revenue model away from application subscription fees and into data services fees of various types.

Huh? You mean Salesforce.com would STOP charging for what has proven a potential multi-billion dollar business?

Well, yes and no. Salesforce.com has created a huge revenue stream for itself, granted. However, it’s prices are proving too high for the market in terms of value received. Even Microsoft is coming down to SugarCRM price levels. For Salesforce.com to compete effectively against better engineered CRM software and highly competitive pricing – it needs to innovate in new ways.

Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant model makes it difficult for the company to offer a lot of different vertical, geographic, etc. solutions, since there is technically “one version” of the system. But – Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant model makes it perfect for another concept – data collection, segmentation and other data-centric services. Having one HUGE database of customer, product, sales information, etc. about thousands and thousands of companies – coupled with data from it’s Jigsaw acquisition and the type of customer sentiment data from Chatter – and that becomes a valued asset.

Salesforce.com seems to be on some sort of track around this, with plans to offer  a free, stripped down version of Chatter to any interested party in the coming weeks. This would allow non-Salesforce.com users to enter data into their huge environment and allow Salesforce to leverage that data in any number of ways. I think of Salesforce taking the cue from Google – understanding thew value of data and information, not plain out of the box apps.

I do not think Salesforce.com would abandon what is a highly valuable revenue-stream any time soon.  But it does seem to have an innovation gap happening in CRM. And if it were to couple seriously interesting (to marketers especially) data services with its core CRM tools, it might be able to at least sustain its bloated pricing rates for the time being.

I have railed against the company’s multi-tenant architecture as limiting for some time. But here I think its huge database might be how it remains a relevant company in the future.

I Really Do Not Want to Search

I use FireFox (and Chrome, Safari,….) and the little box at the top right, yes, the one with the Google logo has an icon of a magnifying glass, and when you place your mouse over it, the word “search” pops up. Great, we are all set, I can now search. I am not sure about you, but when I type something into that little box, I really want to find something. The only time I really want to search is when I open up the refrigerator at 10pm and I really have no idea what I am looking for, but standing there with the door open is a requirement of all males, whatever it is I am ‘searching’ for will certainly find me!

Bing seems to get it, just a little anyway. “Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.”. Google on the other hand is just search: “Google – Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.” What about Wikipedia? “Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.” oh, and they have a search box. So, who gets it? Ah, found one, it is movie about a fish. If the title were done by Internet techie folks, it would have been ‘Searching for Nemo’, lucky for us, it was not, thus the title stands “Finding Nemo”. (By the way, I am not even going to touch Twitter here, just sayin’)

What is the Relevance?

When you, or your users get ready for work in the morning, or planning your day, you want information to find you. The last thing you want to do is search for things. There is an abundance of information, too much information actually, you need it to find you – when you need it. I am not sure about you, but I open up my calendar and there it is, my schedule for the day (most of it anyway), I did not search for it. When I have an appointment, deadline, phone call, I get an alert, one of my choosing. When you open up your CRM application, whether that is email, SugarCRM, or some other application, how does it help you organize your day? Do you need to search for people to call? Do you need to search for trouble tickets, service requests or support cases? Here is my preference, in order, vendors listen up please:

1. Help the information get to me, the way I want to see it
2. Help me find the information efficiently, quickly and easily
3. If 1 and 2 fail, ok, give me a way to search for what I need, but please focus on finding it!

I am done searching, I want to find what I need, when I need – even better if it finds me!

Think about it, we have our data, our applications and our infrastructures in the cloud – why would be need anything but a thin client laptop and a browser? (After all, isn’t this what the hype around Apple’s tablet/netbook is pointing towards?).

Esteban had an interesting response – essentially pointing out that with RESTful web services – the desktop can become the browser, and thus application development is all about total desktop mashups. Developers need not write to support IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc. – just keep the APIs simple and open. So, Esteban went in another, very profound direction here.

An interesting post I read today at Mashable posits four (really three if you split hairs) identifying trends of the web of the future: ubiquity (from both an access point and device front), a rich media focus, and social networks owning the web.

I think if we look at this more realistic near-term prediction (Esteban’s makes more sense from an interoperability standpoint – but in my opinion too many players on the apps, web and OS level stand to lose control and dollars, so I think roadblocks would be thrown up at Esteban’s vision at every turn.) and place it next to the evolution of CRM, some interesting things pop up.

First, both the Web and CRM are becoming more media-rich and more social. Greater mobile access, embedded Youtube videos in home screens, myPortal dashlets exposing external content, and social media integration – and I’m just talking about what SugarCRM alone has done in the last couple years – clearly mimics these trends.

But what is the next stage? Does the “ubiquity” concept merge with CRM data access (and social/media saturation) to involve a new look to CRM? One that is less about logging in to a browser screen and more about accessing data and automating processes in a more seamless, natural manner?

Perhaps both the Mashable article and Esteban are correct. While “the web” is evolving – that does not mean the way we think about accessing the web – the browser – has to follow along. The web-based interactivity of social features like iPhone games, has proven that the web has – and will – deliver a lot of data, applications and value in general without the involvement of a traditional browser.

Looking over the results – it is clear that ERP and E-Commerce are the main areas where people see the benefits of an integrated approach to their business processes. Both ERP and e-commerce took 32% of the votes each.

I am inclined to agree with the poll respondents. SugarCRM’s partners have been doing a lot of great stuff around linking Sugar with both e-commerce tools, as well as great ERP solutions such as Compiere. I’ll have some more info on this exact topic to share soon.

Other systems included in the poll were content management systems (CMS) – which received 20% of the votes, and project management which grabbed eight percent of the votes.

There were some write-in candidates, so to speak. The clear winner was “email.” And I guess it was my bad for not including email/Outlook as an option. My defense: I think most of us old salts in the CRM world simply assume any valid CRM tool will work with your email system.

Google Sites was also brought up as a potential integration point with a CRM system. This tells me that while we have not really seen critical mass around the Google Docs and other offerings, it is on the minds of a lot of people – and could be an interesting area of innovation in the CRM world soon.

The most interesting item not mentioned?  Social media. Surprised (or maybe not) that no one thought these tools should be integrated into CRM.

Thanks again for participating, and I’ll have a new poll up shortly.

It reeks of the lame lock-in strategies that companies like Salesforce.com employed early on in the SaaS game: once you put your CRM data on our servers…we got you.  Good luck accessing it when you leave (or in some instances like for data backup and cross-departmental reporting – ever) .

None of this is new, of course. From cell phone platforms, to IM clients, to applications – the development usually starts in silos, and thus creates problems when users try to do things that span across networks. We have seen these types of issues: I can’t send a video message to someone not on Verizon; I can’t IM with someone on Yahoo! IM when I’m on AIM; I can’t tweet from Facebook etc.  – all solved by open standards that usually come after the initial development of the functionality.

Google is acting in retrograde here. Instead of offering a quality experience and the ability to – say – keep your stuff in Orkut but have it appear more freely in other sites like Facebook, it is damaging the openness that the social web promises. Google should realize that ultimately – it is not important to Google where the individuals live online – since Google has a huge opportunity to work with every platform to expand its ad-driven revenue empire.

One thing I instantly thought about is how well the Sugar platform is poised to meld this type of technology. Yeah, I know, would I honestly blog about this if Sugar was NOT a good fit?

But seriously, the dashlet style interface of the Sugar home screens, as well as the simple ability to add i-frames from ANY web property inside the subpanel displays and other areas of the core modules in Sugar makes Wave an interesting candidate for some next-level mashup ideas.

Colin mentioned customer service…and to give a specific example. The Wave UI could easily be embedded in the Cases module in Sugar – allowing a customer support agent to aggregate support tickets and answer them as interactive, multi-party chats. So, instead of emailing back and forth on a one-to-one basis with customers needing help – an agent can multiply their efforts. And the data in these Wave conversations could easily be cut and pasted in Sugar’s KnowledgeBase tool.

Sales? Well, the Wave tool embedded in the Opportunities module could enable a sales rep to talk to multiple people at an Account or Prospect firm, without congesting the system with a lot of extra contact details for individuals who are part of the sales process, but not material to the Account record. Also, by engaging right inside the Sugar system, pertinent sales information like product catalog, pricing and purchase history data could easily be pulled into the Wave engagement.

Marketing is a no-brainer. The aggregation of social outreach – or social CRM as it is becoming known – could happen right in the Sugar system. Wave could help marketers better respond with personalized, or micro-targeting communications to the communities they create through social media and other suites like Twitter, all tracked and managed through Wave and embedded in the Sugar system.

We have a lot of really inventive engineers here at Sugar. I was just looking over some really cool UI ideas from one of our longer tenured engineers Majed Itani – and my mind reels when I think o all the cool stuff someone with his Sugar expertise could do with a tool like Wave embedded into the UI and process functionality of Sugar.

With Google Wave, the idea is to provide a user with a Web 2.0 collaboration platform where users can collaborate via email, IM, photos, documentation, files, etc., in real time, edit that content, and track those interactions across a single “wave.”

From a business/CRM perspective, I could see how Google Wave could change the way businesses interact in big ways. In terms of collaboration, the platform could have a big impact on how employees communicate and interact with each other, lending to the model of dispersed employees and home-based call center agents.

From a customer service perspective, the options and benefits are nearly limitless, as the idea of tracking multiple Web 2.0 communications and interactions across a single “wave” really gets to the heart of what social CRM is all about. For example, a customer in need of support could use Wave to start a dialogue with an automated support system, which can auto populate contact and account information back into a CRM system. If the service interaction requires escalation to a live rep, the customer can request a CSR, who joins the interaction and has streaming video, documentation, IM, unified communications and a host of other tools at their disposal to resolve the issue.

The fact that Google Wave is open source certainly helps from a developers standpoint, and I think the idea of Wave as a platform on which users can extend into specific applications is the grander idea. From a business perspective, it certainly bodes well. In addition, I’ve heard rumors that Google is mulling the prospect of a “wave extension store,” according to an official blog post, through which applications could conceivably be sold.

That said, Wave is clearly a work in progress, and certainly not ready for enterprise primetime. But as is always the case with Google, it will be interesting to see how the proverbial 800-pound gorilla throws its weight around and influences the manner in which businesses operate and interact with their consumers. When it comes down to it, and just like a CRM system, whether Google Wave is a big hit or falls flat on its face will come down to the user interface and end-user adoption.

But enough talking on my end. Here’s a quick look at some of the top features Google is currently embedding in Wave:

I like the fact that Google has made an interesting move to aggregate and rank content around word-of-mouth and user-generated reviews around web pages. But, does a Yelp!-like feature for every single web page in the world really help?

I mean, sure we want to refer to like-minded people with reviews and advice around travel, electronic devices, etc. – but do we really need to be reading what people think about a web site itself?

I am sure there will be some confusion and noise stacked in SideWiki blurring the line between a web site and the content or products/services offered. This can make a marketers’ job a living hell.

Think about it – if you are getting barraged with comments – probably mostly in the negative – about your site AND your offerings in the social web, how can you prioritize?

The “analysis paralysis” concept (having too much data to decide which to move on first) existed even before this explosion of web 2.0 content. For some, this may prove too much. We can only be so nimble when it comes to catering our offerings to the most fickle of consumers.

I realize Google will throw a lot of these comments into an algorithm to determine which ones are relevant and rank them accordingly, but still, what seems like a cool tool in theory might simply be overwhelming. Could have simply been easier for Google to acquire or strike up a deal with Yelp! to add a relevant sidebar to certain sites, not all of the web.

I am not so sure.

What I mean is that Google could enter the CRM market in at least two distinct ways. One, on the very low end of the CRM spectrum, its Outlook integration tools are very similar to base CRM capabilities. In the old contact management world, all that was missing was strong email integration. With that, Google has the basics in place.

Secondly, as a cloud provider, Google could partner with the right application providers to deliver CRM functionality – either simple or complex permutations – to end user organizations. Google could also open up its huge cloud infrastructure and have companies store apps they’ve licensed from other CRM providers on their own Google server account. So, while Google is not building any full-fledged applications, this is not to say it has no plans to get in the game in some other way.

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…