Paul Greenberg, one of CRM’s most respected visionaries, just launched CRM Idol 2011, a wonderful competition from the CRM Entrepreneurs among us.   If you are a young CRM start up with a great idea but frustrated how you can the word out, get some great advice from some of the brightest CRM minds in the world and get market traction, this competition is for you.

A quick overview of the competition (as taken from Paul’s blog post)

The Criteria

This competition is for small companies in the CRMish/SocialCRMish world. – see the categories below for some guidelines though please feel free to make the case if you don’t see yourself in the guidelines.

• You have to have software that is commercially available by the time of the demo – that would be in August – again see below. No betas, alphas, release candidates allowed. If we find that you’re not commercially available, and you have a time slot, you’re out and someone else will fill the slot. So please be sure that you can verify the claim if you want to participate.
• You have to have 3 referenceable customers that, if we care to, we can contact and ask about you.
• You have to have revenue under $12 million U.S. your last fiscal year. As far as disclosure goes, you have the choice of making the claim that you do – though that will have to be stated in your submission and we’ll trust you or you can disclose your revenue in the submission with the knowledge that only the permanent judges will know what it is. If you make the claim, please be prepared to back it up if we ask. Your call on how.
• You have to be willing to make a ten minute video if you get to the finals. More on that later.
• You have to fit a category – though there is some leeway there.

The Categories

The categories that Paul and his team have identified to start are:

1. Traditional CRM Suites
2. Social CRM
3. Sales – Sales Force Automation, Sales Optimization, Sales Effectiveness
4. Marketing – Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management, Social Marketing, Email Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management, Database Marketing
5. Customer Service – all permutations
6. Mobile CRM
7. Customer Experience Management
8. Social Media Monitoring – requires the possibility of integrating with a CRM technology
9. Customer Analytics – including text/sentiment analytics; voice based analytics; social media analytics, influencer scoring, etc.
10. Enterprise Feedback Management
11. Innovation Management
12. Community Platforms
13. Enterprise 2.0 – collaboration, activity streams etc.
14. Social Business
15. Knowledge Management – this one requires the possibility of integrating with CRM systems
16. Vendor Relationship Management
17. Partner Relationship Management

Once again, if you don’t see yourself in this list, don’t worry. Just make the case as to why you have some customer-facing possibilities and the likelihood is that we’ll be cool with it. We’re trying to make this easier for you, not hard.

What Are You Waiting For?

Go to Paul’s blog to learn more and find information on how to enter.

The two main acquisitions by Salesforce that give me pause are its puzzling $250m+ acquisition of hobbyist Ruby platform Heroku that no one was actually paying to use in production. Now, Benioff and Co. are shelling out $276m or so to acquire Radian6, a social media monitoring and analytics company.

What the #$%& is going on here?

Salesforce.com has spent more than half a BILLION dollars on a) platform tools that no one really cares about and b) a “cool” set of tools that really doesn’t add anything major to its core offerings (where, I should point out – Salesforce.com makes all of its money).

I think Radian6 does some cool stuff, really I do. But this multiple is ridiculous – and dangerous for the industry. It was bad enough hearing everyone freak out about Color getting a trillion dollars in funding (OK, maybe I’m off by a hair or two here) – but this type of overspending makes those shouting “BUBBLE!” seem like wise sages right now.

Salesforce paid a ridiculous multiple for a company probably struggling to grow profitably in a space that has not matured into a “must have” portion of the app stack for small and mid-sized businesses and may not for several years. While it is great to get insightful data from social channels, what companies have proven to have the right actionable processes in place to leverage this data in any valuable way?

Agin, social media monitoring is a useful tool – BUT – Radian6 was already tightly integrated into Salesforce.com. AND – I imagine that only about 15% TOPS of Salesforce.com’s user base really gives a damn about the kind of social media intelligence that Radian6 provides. Remember, Salesforce’s bread and butter is still the SMB and midmarket – areas where “brand monitoring” are not as critical as in, say, the Global 2000 (where Salesforce.com pretends to be a big player).

So, to recap, Salesforce.com has spent upwards of $500m+ to bulk up a platform that does not serve its core user base, and for a social media monitoring tool that its core user base has no desire or need to use.

Wow.

Just imagine, if Salesforce.com spent that money making its core CRM product actually easier to use, contain a less “Siebel in a browser” look and more of a modern web app feel, more reliable and less vulnerable to universal outages, etc. Imagine if they kept their actual core user base happy and actually still built CRM tools?

I guess we’ll never know…

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!

I mean, it is important to think about your advocates and influencers – but how can we really standardize someone’s level of influence? I am not sure the Klout algorithm actually has the ability to scour public, private and semi-private customer networks. And, many people with only a few followers or a small sphere of influence may be terribly important to one company’s social strategy.

As more and more purpose-built communities and networks come in to play, thanks to platforms like Lithium, third-party tools like Klout can be less and less useful. This is because these purpose-built communities can capture and analyze data in a far more profound and useful way than the generic system Klout uses across public networks – in my humble opinion. A company can identify, nurture and work with its influencers more closely and gain so much more in an interactive platform like Lithium versus simply fearing potential “big follower list” influencers and kowtowing to their demands.

The latter model is just bad business. Or,I should say is a symptom that you have broken service models in place or simply are not as customer-centric as you think. I have blabbed ad nauseam about using social as a band-aid.

How do we stop fearing the potential damage to our brands on the part of influencers?  For starters – create a consistent experience for all customers. Set expectations and apologize when you fall short.

If you truly believe in delighting customers, and do your best to see that happen, no influencer sending a few choice negative tweets or blog posts can do any real harm – the rest of your intelligent customer base will know the truth. And – if you can quickly manage the issue (by either addressing it on your community platform or pulling that influencer in and showing them you care) – the unhappy influencer can present an opportunity – not a problem.

In getting ready for this event, going over slides and ideas, an interesting topic came up. In describing the transition from traditional CRM into modern CRM that enables social channels – we made remarks about how older CRM systems were all about agents putting information into the system. This is an important facet of CRM, but most sales reps for example are left with a “what’s in it for me?” feeling if they see the CRM as a burden and data entry point.

However, modern CRM tools that leverage social channels and a fluid flow of data from external sources can be a tool that GIVES sales reps information. Instead of a productivity drain – the CRM system is a hub, and central area where sales reps learn about prospects, collaborate with partners and customers, and simply gather information supplied by other networks or sources.

(Look, I know a lot of traditional CRM use cases give a lot of information – i.e. reports. However this is stil based on static data entered by users for the most part.)

I like to think of modern CRM as a bank. You make deposits (entering opportunity data, logging calls, etc.) but you can also make withdrawals (leveraging embedded LinkedIn connector to find untapped relationships, monitoring Twitter streams right from Contact records or dashboards, aggregating data in one touch using Cloud Connectors, etc.).

In short, a modern, social enabled CRM system makes it a two-way street. Yes, the traditional tasks need to be performed – which helps management and executives gain visibility over top-level operations. But, the cool resources inside socially enabled CRM systems give the end users a lot of data, insight etc. to do their jobs better, make quota faster and actually enjoy using the system.

But Chatter and some other thoughts started jumbling around in my head this morning (one that is congested and hopefully not on the verge of a full-scale cold – so pardon me if this comes out garbled). The thoughts were around the fact that everyone using social media (on either side of the equation – business or consumer) is an end user of some sort of technology.

One of the things that has made social networks, Twitter etc. so popular is the zero-learning curve effect of super simple web 2.0 tools. A lot has been made of this fact, but it bears reminding ourselves. The ultimate social media success case is, well, social media. People gathered around these concepts because they were compelling and easy to adopt.

So what can we learn from all this?

I think we need to consider this “end user” mentality when we craft our social engagement strategies. As I have noted in the past, it is important to make social as non-intrusive as possible.  We need to think of our customers as end-users of our system – whether technology is involved or not. Put yourself in your customers shoes…do you present a culture that is engaging, transparent, simple? Is there a learning curve for customers looking to your business for help, advice, support, heck even to buy your stuff?

A lot of us throw around the term “getting out of our own way” a lot these days. But it is something to think about. And this “thinking of your customers as end users” does not just apply to customers. Think of your employees – the actual users of your system – as customers. Do your internal policies and processes lend themselves to delight, misery or somewhere in the middle? Would your employees, having seen behind the scenes, still want to do business with you?

These are some early thoughts – admittedly not very well fleshed out. But I think if we ask ourselves these tough questions as we put together social and other customer-facing strategies and programs, we might be a little more ahead of the game.

On the other hand, I think Chatter has been over-hyped in a dangerous way, one that will lead to failure for Chatter as a product line for Salesforce.com.

And since I’m feeling particularly snarky on this pre-Labor Day Friday, I thought I’d jot down a “top 5″ list of reasons why I think Chatter will prove yet another one of Salesforce.com’s interesting, but ultimately unprofitable ventures.

Here we go…

1. Chatter is only an internal collaboration tool. There are many of these available, but more important is the fact that if Chatter is the lynch pin of Salesforce.com’s “social” strategy it is missing one very important thing – customer engagement. Unless Chatter “opens up” and becomes a true community/social engagement tools for users to collabroate and engage with real customers in real time, it is going nowhere in my opinion.

2. Chatter is not enough to unite departments and override data and people silos. I get that millions of users are on salesforce – but they are all ONE department inside an organization. To really benefit from the tenets of Enterprise 2.0 – all departments need to be on the same page – and I simply do not feel Chatter is equipped at this stage to be a unifying app to make an externally hosted system THE main collaboration platform. Not yet at least.

3. Chatter (and Salesforce.com) costs too much to have wide appeal. At $15 per non-CRM user, Chatter’s pricing will creep on a large organization. And smaller firms can simply collaborate in person or using IM or other tools – and resist adding even more fees to an overpriced CRM bill. I think Salesforce.com has some cool ideas around Jigsaw and adding data updates to the CRM and alerts to new data changes via Chatter – but at that rate we are looking at $45 per user, per month for someone using Chatter with Jigsaw alerts – and they get ZERO CRM capabilities to boot! If a user was using Salesforce’s Enterprise edition and Jigsaw they could be paying nearly $2000 per user per year!!!! Compare this with SugarCRM which gives you all this stuff for $30 per user.  Yes, there really is the opportunity to cut your CRM and collaboration costs SEVEN TIMES with SugarCRM versus Salesforce.

4. (Do I really need to keep going after pointing out how ridiculously expensive this stuff will be for a company?  Ok, I’ll go on…) Salesforce.com’s outdated multi-tenant model will hold Chatter back. Look, Salesforce has a lot of cool ideas for Chatter and its web site shows some suggestions for use – document sharing, etc. But is there a Chatter developer kit?  can there be one?  Will salesforce.com let people really take Chatter and run with it to create collaboration engines that integrate between applications, departments, inside and outside multiple firewalls, leverage Oauth to activate engagements through multiple social networks? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Chatter seems like a great idea locked inside a limiting architecture – yearning to break free.

5. Adoption will be underwhelming. CRM vendors sell into sales and marketing and support departments. These guys have a lot on their plates, and most have no “social agenda.”  Salesforce.com in my opinion would be better off simply selling the value of its core solutions, which are solid well-built apps, instead of branching off into these new areas where it has no domain expertise. I toyed with #5 being “Salesforce has lost its focus” but I think that happened years ago. But seriously, as noted in #2, I think there are way too many barriers to success for a concept like Chatter as a paid-for tool. I am not saying Chatter doesn’t do what it says it does 9for the most part it does) but I think that Salesforce.com must leverage Chatter as a “cool add-on” or value-add rather than expecting this to be a profit center, because I think they are too far ahead of the pace considering their true target market.

…OK, those are just a few of my thoughts around Chatter. Ultimately, I think Chatter is cool, but underwhelming as a standalone product line. Maybe that is why I did not make more hype around Sugar Feeds – I simply see that most companies are wrestling with getting core CRM right, social-collaboration is rocket science to them – foreign and scary. Being asked to pay extra for these kinds of features must feel like a slap in the face.

Maybe I’m wrong. I mean, the Jigsaw capabilities could be really hot for Salesforce. Or, maybe the majority of small businesses are still learning to walk with CRM and getting social…paying a ton of additional money with no clear ROI path to start running with social and CRM might not make sense for a lot of companies right now.

Sugar Feeds - Social Collaboration without the hype or high price tag.

For many in the CRM industry, I think they see “social” as a sort of magic bullet, one that will create a scenario where seemingly overnight, their boring and ugly applications will turn into apps sales, marketing and support teams can’t live without – with widespread and total adoption rates.

Not likely…

Why? Well, I believe this will not happen for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there is no magic bullet when it comes to user adoption. Social may be cool, but it alone will not get your users to log in to the CRM system and properly add and use the data. What is needed are well outlined usage expectations, ones that well define the value of using the system for each stakeholder. Otherwise, you have done all this awesome process modeling for nothing. Sorry.

Also, just because people freely give up information to public social networks and collaborate more in the public web – does not mean that a) your co-workers and employees are going to change their behavior whole hog, nor b) will your customers file into a neat mode of dealing with you via your prescribed social channel.

I do believe there is a bleed going on between work life and private life – aided by “social” in all its forms. But “work” (and let’s face it, CRM systems are for the foreseeable future internal tools for companies not collaborative social networks) still presents many obstacles to the type of unfettered social collaboration promised by the new social tools out there.

We have data silos, departmental roadblocks, and hey for many sales people – collaboration mean LOST COMMISSION. Moving towards a sharing culture is the last thing many sales people want – Unless of course it will enable them to close more deals and take more commissions (even if they are part of a more profit-sharing type).

Just as we needed to evolve past the traditional idea of the rogue-ish sales guy to see the promise of traditional CRM, a lot of barriers need to come down and policies change in many organizations to see the true benefit of social.

Any type of CRM, social or otherwise, is more about People and Process than it is about technology. Technology is a great enabler – when the right groundwork has been laid out to let the technology accelerate business in an unfettered manner.

Both are very related actually. And in an unusual manner for CRM, the product actually led our adoption of stronger social strategies; we did not facet the product to adapt to our existing social strategies. This is important to note – because we do a LOT of social and non-traditional marketing and community building as a company with open source roots.

However, from a corporate sales scenario, we were a bit disconnected from “social” in a lot of ways, and were acting like any other B2B sales team: heads down in the CRM system, following up on leads and managing opportunities.  But as Sugar the product started sporting all these cool facets: the LinkedIn connector, the Twitter connector and the social feeds inside the app – things started changing. Sales reps were more connected – to both each other and to their leads and opportunities. And the great thing about it was that they were doing all this in a system they already knew how to use, and all that data was available right inside a central app – not locked in seperate silos.

Just as the data silo approach of products like Act! made it difficult for early CRM initiatives to show value, social silos can present the same problem. If your CRM users are going to three or four different sites to find out about prospects, talk and collaborate with each other, and leverage tools like Twitter for discovery and support – it can drain productivity. In addition, with all the data “somewhere else” it can be hard to get any insight into how your teams are using the information, which data or source is most relevant, etc.

That is why I am in such strong agreement with the analysts and observers who are so skeptical of “social CRM” as a concept in its own right. Rather, social CRM (or SCRM) is just a channel or branch of a core CRM strategy that leverages these emerging mediums.

It is pretty simple, really. Many companies already have – or should have – a CRM platform in place. The more flexible ones can now accept new data sources and types (social data) and leverage new marketing, sales and support channels (social networks, tools like Twitter) as part of existing overall CRM processes.

Just as we see the value of keeping all of our prospect and customer data in one place, social is no different. Do yourself a favor early on and ditch the silo approach and look to merge these new-fangled CRM data and processes with your existing CRM initiative and technology. It may take a bit of thought and in some cases creativity (depending on how suited your existing technology is to accept new data and sources) – but I am positive in the long run it will save you more time and resources.