OK, here is day two of my SugarCon Spotlight series, highlighting what I feel will be some of the “can’t miss” sessions at SugarCon.

Today’s Pick:  Navigating Sugar – Less Clicks, More Action

Now, every single CRM system will tell you – “hey, our CRM system has every feature in the world – AND it’s easy to use!”

They’re lying.

The simple fact is that we have built up some pretty darn amazing features into the CRM suites offered today. It is a lot to digest for a new CRM suer, and some old CRM salts can get lost.

But, with a sesssion like this, you can learn some shortcuts, productivity tips, and other ways to get around in the system without getting bogged down on forms, screens, views etc. that are not conducive to completing your daily tasks.

To boot, the session is presented by my good friend and senior director of product management Jason Nassi – who has lead the support team (among other roles) in his many years here at Sugar. Jason knows the app inside and out, and is the epitome of a power user.

I hope you can catch the session.  If you have yet to register for the event, you can quickly sign up here.

After attending Jason ’s session your Sugar navigation will go from:

To:

Wanna come check out all the awesome sessions and killer events at SugarCon?  (I know I am stoked for the evening event at the Academy of Sciences – we literally have the whole place to ourselves – sweet!)

How would you like to do all this for FREE?

Yes, Free.

Simply get on Twitter – and tell us why you want to attend SugarCon. You must be following @sugarcrm to be eligible – and you need to add the hash tag #SugarCRM in the tweet!

Get Tweeting and Good Luck!

First, please allow me to introduce myself; Mitch Lieberman here, making a guest appearance on CRM Outsiders. Some of you may know me already, and for some I am an unknown. I do lots of different things for SugarCRM, among them is to beat up the regular author of this blog, asking him to write about this or that…So, Martin said in his best mannered Philadelphia tone – “Mitch, if you think it should be said, then start typing” (For those of you who know Martin, that might not be exactly what he said, but we are trying to keep this blog PG-13).

It is interesting that my first post is about an upcoming event in Boston. The interesting part is who the keynote speaker at the event is going to be and if I read and understood the book he co-authored, my job is to make this post as interesting as possible, without being too pushy. I am confident that I can do that, and even went so far as to interview him for this post. Throughout the next couple months, I will be joining Martin here more frequently to help set the stage for some of the events SugarCRM will be attending or hosting. Call it the pre-game show if you will. I have been known to bring March madness into the commentary for the US folks and maybe we can even weave a little World Cup into the discussion as we get closer to June.

The first stop is in a few weeks, in Boston, MA on March 23rd to be exact. The event theme is bridging the gap between Social Media hype and business value. I am excited about all of the upcoming events, but this one in particular is a great way to kick things off. Keynoting the event is Dharmesh Shah, Co-Author of Inbound Marketing and Founder of Hubspot.  Full details of the Agenda and other presenters can be found here:

As a lead-in to the events, I conducted a few short, informal, interviews with the presenters. First on the list is Dharmesh, who I was able to catch-up with prior to his trip to the SXSW conference in Austin. I suppose that I am a bit jealous, SXSW would be a great time! To all that are planning a trip to Austin, safe journey but I might just unsubscribe to your plancast for a few weeks. But, I digress, back to the topic at hand:

It is about business value, it always has been and it always will be

For those of you that have not read any of my posts before, while I am a technologist, I am much more interested in people and process first. The technology should facilitate and augment your most prized asset as a company – the people. Since the objective is always to derive business value from all investments (make no mistake, people and time are investments too) we make as a company, it is important to understand where investments can and should be made. Being on the ‘bleeding’ edge is not always the best place to be, nor is being a laggard. With this in mind, I asked Dharmesh where on the traditional Geoffrey Moore adoption curve (Crossing the Chasm) businesses are with respect to acting (culture) and being (tools and process) Social. Here is what Dharmesh had to say:

“I don’t think we’ve quite hit the early majority quite yet as it comes to social media marketing.  Though there are millions of users joining services like Facebook and Twitter, much of this activity is still individuals making connections — often with no commercial agenda or motive. Many businesses are discovering the potential of the new media and the more ambitious ones are already finding ways to connect to their prospects and customers through these channels. Forward-thinking businesses will capitalize on the shift and encourage their employees to interact online. “

Next I wanted to explore a bit more on the specifics around sales, sales process and engagement. Here is my (long winded) question:

Inbound Marketing (getting found) and leveraging Social Networks (alerts, notifications and process) seem to be two sides of a very important coin. In the context of business to business, the process from getting found, to Prospect, to Lead, to Opportunity, to Customer is not always simple. Since trust is such a big factor, how do you envision a hand-off from Marketing (team) to Sales (team)? In BtoB Lead nurturing might need to be a little more personal 1 to 1 than other consumer types of business, no?

“Absolutely.  In a B2B selling environment, the need to allow the prospect to move through the sales funnel at a pace that makes sense still exists (with or without Inbound Marketing).  My position here is:  Online channels can be used very well to “educate” the prospect in a non-threatening way.  This helps build trust and allows the person to engage the business in ways that are comfortable.  For example, in the “old” B2B selling context, the sales professional would often hold much of the power and release information slowly and deliberately to help “push along” the process.  It was very one-sided.  Now, people expect to find much more information about a business and its offering on the web — without the need to have to go through a gatekeeper.  Whitepapers, customer testimonials and case studies are all content that helps the prospect make a more informed decision.”

There are lots of great ‘nuggets’ in his answer, but there is one that needs highlighting. Online channels absolutely need to be used to educate in a non-threatening way. In other words, we are working to create buyers not sell to people. This approach is what allows you to build and create trust. Gatekeepers, command and control are things that get in the way of building trust. Help people to find what they need, do not simply tell them what they need. This is what the Social part of CRM is about – treating people with respect, as you would a friend.

I would like to thank Dharmesh for his time. If you are in or around Boston, I hope you can join us!

We are in the home stretch leading into SugarCon, the biggest CRM event of the year (as far as I’m concerned).It’s going to be an amazing event.

Originally, I wanted to do a series of posts a-la Steven Colbert’s “Better Know a District” which highlighted every session we were putting on. Then, I realized that a) there are all told about ONE HUNDRED sessions (yes, 100) and b) there are only about 30 or 40 bloggable (is that a word?) days left until SugarCon.

So, instead I decided to pick about 30 of the sessions I am most looking forward to and give them a shout out. So, here is the SugarCon Spotlight for today:

10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With SugarCRM

I always like hands-on, “in the app” sessions at conferences. The way I see it – if you’re paying to attend a tech conference, you should come away with a few things that change your life for the better. A lot of what will be revealed in this session will do just that.

While some amazing new features in Sugar will be revealed over the course of SugarCon, there are still a ton of cool tips and tricks in the present edition that can increase productivity, drive adoption, or simply make your CRM initiative that much better.

Presenter Susie Williams is a Sugar star, so I know she will have a lot of awesome stuff to demonstrate. (Knowing Susie, this might have to be renamed 11 or 12 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With SugarCRM.)

Hope to see some of you at this session…and if you haven’t registered yet, you can easily sign up at the SugarCon site.

I just had a series of great calls with analysts today, including the always erudite Denis Pombriant. And I also met with the founders of a cool new company called BeRelevant. Both these meetings got me thinking, as usual.

Denis and I had a great talk about getting back to the business value of CRM – getting away from all this talk about delivery models and focusing on the real reason why people should be deploying CRM.

But it was a tangential conversation that really got me thinking. Denis and I were talking about tools like Jive and Sugar feeds and Chatter, and what role they play today and in the future. Denis made a great point of noting that most of these tools will find usefulness beyond what they are being positioned as today.

And what is that position? It is essentially that of “A Twitter (or Facebook) for the Enterprise.” OK, I get it.

But where is the value today? Twitter is free and has mass adoption. Facebook is where the people you want to reach already are – why try to migrate a community or hijack existing conversations?

Well, if MySpace taught us anything, it is that consumers are fickle and Facebook can lose attention/audience/relevance as quickly as it stole members from MySpace. And Twitter has no revenue model. Its continuing outages and growing pains could be hints at larger issues.

So, what happens when the de facto social platforms of the day go away? How does a consumer base, a generation so used to being “out there” and sharing and engaging, communicate with your brand?

Hmmmmmm.

I think this is where companies like BeRelevant, CubeTree and Lithium can come in to play in a very meaningful manner. As purpose-driven social networks, the kinds of engagements through these channels may not be as prone to the ups and downs of broader social networks.

What I mean is that brands have a life of their own – which are very closely managed by marketers. Facebook and other non-affiliated (in the product marketing sense) social networks are just “gathering places” – one can easily become cooler than the next. But brand-owned communities are centered around something. Facebook just is, but brand-driven social networks have a purpose.

And – these networks can be intentionally short-lived: around a specific promotion or launch. And the marketers are free to dream up other purpose-driven networks later. That can be a lot of fun.

Plus, these brand-owned people aggregation sites could be some of the best ways for people to meet and engage with not just your brand, but with each other. If generic sites like Twitter and Facebook become passe’ (not saying they will) then the owners of purpose-built networks become the gate keepers to many forms of online engagement.

That is serious power.

Use it wisely.

Again, not saying twitter or Facebook will be obsolete as marketing and outreach platforms any time soon. But it may not be the worst thing to happen to social CRM and social engagement strategies in general.

Just a shout out to all of the German and EU at large readers of Outsiders who are attending CeBIT this year. SugarCRM will be well represented at the event – with some of our partners showing off cool integrations and customer success stories.

Sugar partner PSTech will be exhibiting its Sugar/Cisco integration – powering next generation telephony tools. The CTI value proposition in a Sugar/Cisco combo is very strong – with automatic capture of call details in the Sugar record; screen-pops; click-to-call; and other cool integrations with Sugar activities, and the ability to search the Sugar database right from an IP-enabled phone.

Also, IT services provider and Sugar partner it-novum will present its integration between SugarCRM and SAP. The strong back-office features of SAP coupled with the flexible CRM tools in Sugar are a great “complete solution” covering most processes and activities within any organization.

Both it-novum and Sugar partner Genius4U will be manning the SugarCRM booth in the CeBIT Open Source Arena.

In addition, two customer case studies showcasing SugarCRM will be presented at the event. Bernecker  & Rainer’s Owen Davies will outline how his company worked with Sugar partner Kinamu to integrate Sugar, SAP and Lotus Notes – check it out here. And Matthias Brück , IT Manager and Manager Global CRM at Roxtec International AB will discuss his firm’s successful international roll out of Sugar to more than 200 users (more info here).

If you’re en route to Hannover for the show next week – come check us out and say ” GutenTag!” to our partners and customers in attendance!

I had a very interesting talk with one of our great Sugar users, Martin Umeh who is a sales manager at Control Technology. Apart from having an awesome name, Martin is a very bright guy when it comes to CRM adoption, and just has a great sales mind.

We were discussing the fact that major telco providers are dropping their “unlimited” rates for their cell phone plans from $99.00 to $69.00 (you may have seen some TV spots on the topic from Verizon). This in itself is a great example of value-based pricing, but that is a discussion for another blog.

Martin made a great point – he basically said (I’m paraphrasing somewhat): “Hey, these guys basically baked the cost of Sugar into the cell phone plan. Now there is no excuse for people not to equip all their sales guys with CRM and a blackberry.”

Apart from this being a great sales gimmick, this is an interesting point on a lot of levels. For one – most businesses did not blink an eye when they were asked to pay a hundred bucks (sometimes more) per person to imply use a phone and access emails. Yet, a lot of CRM companies are still trying to convince decision-makers that a CRM system is a tool they can’t live without.

I would like to think that core SFA systems have moved from the “nice to have” into the “must have” bucket. But this is not always the case. Hopefully, more people will see that with a $100 per person, per month budget – they can equip their sales agent with a complete desktop, laptop and mobile solution connecting them to their important data, their prospects, and each other.

Even though I spend every day thinking about markets, and lately the idea of “creating buyers” versus pushing products (thanks Paul Greenberg), I am still sometimes befuddled by the buying mentalities (and priorities) of companies.

How many times have you seen a major expenditure in your organization – one that will have zero effect on your customer’s success or satisfaction? Was it really 100% necessary?

Look, I know all businesses have to spend money to make money – and not all of that is on stuff that “touches the customer.” But as we move into a world where Enterprise 2.0 and social CRM concepts penetrate our operations – these are questions to ask…

What is your buying mentality? Are you investing in ways that – in some way – has the benefit of your customers in mind? The answer might surprise you.

I am supposed to be finishing up a slide deck for a conference speech I am giving (which was due on Friday) and also extending invites to customers for SugarCon (maybe if some of you readers register I can kill at least two birds here – please?). But in my usual scatterbrained manner I was checking out my blog reader and came across a few things that got me sidetracked.

The first was the fact that Salesforce.com has made its Chatter beta available – only three months after it was announced at Dreamforce. (Does anyone ever actually debut software or devices the day people can actually get them?  I mean, does anyone have an iPad yet?) The tools are part of what the company calls its “Collaboration Cloud.” Cute.

I get the concept, and I like it. But I think Salesforce misses the mark here. For one, all CRM apps are collaboration tools. It is just that as Facebook and other platforms have proven, there are more simple ways to collaborate in the 2.0 world. Chatter has most of what is needed to do this – feeds, profiles, etc.

But what is the benefit of making an enterprise wide collaboration tool embedded into your CRM system? How can this span departments when only sales people use the CRM? How can this internal and expensive tool be pushed to customers to enable that fable mix of enterprise 2.0 and social CRM?

The answer?  I don’t know. Or at least, I don’t know how a customer could do it without being really overcharged for their CRM deployment. Yes, Chatter and other “cool” tools make a CRM sticky. But it also seems ridiculous to spend a significant amount of money to merge 2.0 collaboration tools with your CRM system for an additional fee (or a fee for the non-CRM users that want to be part of cross-departmental collaboration). What I mean is – collaboration is boundary-less, and traditional CRM systems are all about boundaries: from user-level security, team hierarchies, and simply being based on relational databases – boundaries rule CRM. Next generation social and enterprise 2.0 tools should be the opposite.

There are a lot of platforms and tools out there doing stuff like Chatter: Jive, Lithium and even cool tools to analyze the interactions happening in, around and about your company or brand such as Radian 6.  These products are dedicated to collaboration, engagement and measurement of your internal and external interactions, and can be integrated where needed with a CRM.

To boot, there are also some very cool Chatter-like tools coming out that can even be access and trialed for free, such as CubeTree (just checked it out and it is very cool and very easy to use).

Look, I get the need for application stickiness (I should note that SugarCRM has pretty much the same tools that Chatter offers and has had them for a year – Sugar feeds, myPortal Dashlets, Cloud Connectors etc. – but we don’t charge for them). But when driving cool factor and driving adoption becomes more of a cash squeeze than a user enablement and success tool, I have to cry foul.

Unless your collaboration and social media tools become a way of enhancing CRM processes in a meaningful way and not simply a method to “sell more seats,” then we won’t see much progress in melding traditional and social CRM any time soon.

I often forget these days how the world of technology used to be…closed systems, expensive and exhaustive buying cycles, frustrating integration scenarios. It’s amazing that in just about a decade, open source was able to supplant entrenched industry leaders in many sectors, and continues to disrupt and force major re-thinking across every IT sector.

But where is it all going? Has open source simply become the de facto way of doing business in some form or another?  Can anyone survive without some form of “open” in their business model?

Or, do you feel “open” isn’t a business model at all?

Well, you can have your opinions heard in this year’s “Future of Open Source” survey…

North-Bridge Venture partners is again sponsoring this survey – which seeks to determine where all this open stuff is headed in the next year. So, have your opinions heard, and come see the results of the survey at OSBC next month at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco (also where SugarCon is being held in April – shameless plug alert…)

A small side conversation I had with some of the participants in the Social SCM Summit in DC this week revolved around successful social CRM strategies. I know, isn’t that the whole reason we braved the snow in the first place? But this was more of a discussion around what intangibles are involved in successful initiatives, not what tools and features people use.

The talk was very similar to a lot of the issues around traditional CRM – and the reasons for failures, low adoptions, etc. When technology is the driver and not cultural change – or simply a business goal – CRM can be more of a hindrance than a help. (I actually had a quick conversation on Twitter today with a SugarCRM user seemingly frustrated with the system. Upon uncovering the issue, it wasn’t the Sugar technology, but rather the way it was setup in line with the company’s policies that was causing the frustration.)

CRM systems are designed – in theory – to make your worst sales person as good as, or least have the same tools as, your best rep. This is a tough promise to fulfill. Why? Because what makes your best sales rep so great usually has VERY LTITLE to do with typing data into a system or pulling a report. Yes, CRM systems can increase productivity, visibility and give sales people awesome tools to make their life easier. Will a CRM system instantly help you close deals?  Not really. If someone tells you that, they are lying. Plain and simple.  it may help you close MORE deals, and get to more prospects, and see where you’re falling down, but a software system is not a sales person.

Great sales people have people skills that can not be replicated in a software application. The application only helps these people spend more time leveraging these skills, not performing administrative busywork.

Social CRM is not all that different. If you are a great marketer, with a great message, a remarkable voice in your industry, with a solid sales team to match – social CRM can be a great tool. However, if you’re a boring, “me too” type company with nothing special to offer the social universe, that will immediately be apparent.

The soft skills that sales and marketing people leverage across these new channels are what is making some companies excel at social media. The lack of these skills, coupled with the lack of understanding of social media etiquette (dare we use the term “netiquette” in 2010?) can be deadly.

We saw a lot of what is needed to “get social” as CRM entered the call center. While the tools made it easier for call center agents to reach more customers – satisfaction numbers did not necessarily go up. This is because if your agents with no social soft skills touch more customers – you are simply providing the same mediocre service levels – just to more people.

As the social CRM experiment continues – make sure the right people are becoming the social face of your organization. Technical know-how and understanding of the vastness of the web are great, but a little people-person skill goes a long way in the social media world.