Third Idea Consulting

(Disclosure: Sage is a former client of mine.)

A theme running through the CRM industry’s discourse lately is that of social CRM. This is a good thing because it means I’ve started my practice in a hot market space. It also means there’s a lot of hype and hoopla coming from all corners of the vendor community. The old guard are adding social components to their CRM offerings, defending their honor as the vendors that have survived the Darwinian meat grinder of enterprise software; the newcomers are starting from the premise that old-school CRM has earned its supposedly negative reputation and it’s time for a fresh approach, hitching their wagons to the social trend.

Not long ago, I took a briefing with Larry Ritter, senior vice president and GM of CRM solutions for Sage North America, about the company’s plans for ACT! in 2011 and beyond. I thought I’d written briefly about it here, but it appears I was in error—apologies to Ryan Zuk, Sage’s PR ace, for my oversight.

Also not long ago (Monday, in fact), I took a briefing with Jon Ferrara, the creator of ACT!’s long-time rival GoldMine (now owned by FrontRange), and now the CEO and founder of Nimble. Nimble is one of the new wave of CRM vendors, while ACT! (and GoldMine, for that matter) represent CRM’s roots. The opportunity for me to compare and contrast is just too sweet to pass up.

Let’s start with Sage. As you can read here, the company has been doing a good job of following the will of its audience by adding more Web services, improving (and changing the name of) workflows, and keeping the design easy to use. ACT! is more of an entry-level CRM product than a premier suite—that distinction in Sage’s catalog fits better with SalesLogix—but it provides a good range of functions and customizability for its price and target market. The product has been around for more than 20 years in one form or another, and Sage knows better than to mess with success.

It is possible to integrate social networking features into ACT! if the customer desires, but it’s not something that comes in the yellow ACT! box. You’ve got to customize for that, which helps drive business for Sage’s army of partner-resellers. The message here is that Sage expects the typical ACT! user to be a small business that either doesn’t understand or isn’t likely to derive much value from social CRM, but there’s enough meat on ACT!’s bones for most SMBs to get an okay meal.

I should probably fault Sage more for this, but I just can’t work up a whole lot of indignation. While I am excited by the possibilities of a social approach to CRM, I know that not every business is ready for it, not every business can really exploit it, and the ones that fit those descriptions don’t want to pay for something they won’t use. Sage is saying, “We’re the same we’ve always been, and we’re here for you. We’ll let you move at your own pace.” This is a comforting message for an SMB executive who isn’t striving to push the business into the Fortune 500.

In the destinationCRM article I linked, CRM godfather Paul Greenberg makes an important distinction describing ACT!: “It’s as close to CRM as it ever will be,” Greenberg says of the contact management solution. “It will never be full-blown CRM — but do they provide business value to small businesses? Oh, God, yeah.” He is, as usual, right. ACT! is still very much a contact manager—one that can do some really neat things to be sure, but it’s still not a CRM suite. It can be turned into one, and the e-marketing module added to ACT! 2011 blurs the line a bit, but what we have here is one of the progenitors of modern CRM trying to remain viable (and succeeding, I think) by providing a safe, easy, entry-level option that can grow for a while with the user. At worst, I wonder why a contact management-plus application isn’t doing more with social networking contacts, but there doesn’t seem to be much grumbling about this by anybody other than curmudgeons like me.

Which brings us to Nimble. Jon Ferrara got out of the contact management business about 10 years ago to concentrate on building a family instead of a company. He’s back with a reimagined approach to CRM, built from the ground up to account for and take advantage of social media.

In our briefing, Jon hit a lot of the best talking points about social CRM. Businesses always need to attract and retain customers, and the old methods are becoming outdated. Companies must get as social as their customers, listen to the conversations, and participate in kind—and a company can’t be social externally without being social internally as well. So, if most of the CRM systems deployed today are used primarily for contact management and SFA anyway—a claim that rings true even if I don’t have any data in front of me to back it up—there’s a need for a system built to combine social networking and basic CRM.

Ferrara contends that Nimble is that product. When it becomes available, Nimble Core will give individual users the “3 Cs” of Contacts, Calendaring, and Communications by providing a single environment for viewing and sending emails, tweets, Facebook updates, and pretty much everything else, and will do it for free. The design of Nimble is as comforting as ACT!’s, in its way; it looks a lot like any of the current social networking tools in use by the general public, as well as more business-focused things like Yammer. There’s lots of white space, the view can be easily customized, and all the immediately relevant info (and only the immediately relevant info) is up front.

After Core, there will be more. For $9 per user per month, Nimble will provide a Team edition. For $19/u/m, the sales functionality shows up. If you go for the full $39/u/m, Nimble reveals its full CRM capabilities. Mind you, I have no idea what those are; all will be revealed at a later date.

No matter what I say about Nimble, it’s important to remember that the product is still in private beta. The higher-end functions—teamwork, SFA, and CRM—are a long way off yet. I haven’t touched the beta yet, though I will be doing so in the very near future.

When a veteran like Jon Ferrara fronts a product like Nimble, it says one thing: “It’s time for a change.” He’s got a point. GoldMine was one of the products that changed—nay, created—the CRM software industry, and Nimble is going to try to serve the same purpose for social CRM. The new discipline is composed of older, proven CRM apps augmented by new tools that only enable the social components, so a social CRM app designed to be a social CRM app would be a great start. The message is there’s a new wave in business, and you’ve got to surf it with a new board or get swamped riding the old.

My fear is that there will be too much focus on social and not enough on CRM. People like to say that CRM fails, or even that it is a failure. I disagree with the notion that a $12 billion industry, complete with innovators and success stories, is a failure. A change is necessary, because the behavior of customers has changed. But there are still things that a CRM system has to do that aren’t about social media, and there is danger that the move to social CRM will go like a political campaign: So much time is spent hearing about what’s wrong with the incumbent that we never get a handle on the challenger’s qualities.

Both ACT! and Nimble will have a place in the CRM world, and I’m not about to recommend one over the other (especially because one isn’t available yet). But you can start making your decision based on the language each company is speaking. Is Sage following a careful and sensible agenda, or is it in denial? Is Nimble the next game-changer, or is it a box of hype? Your answer to those questions will say more about your needs than about the products, but that’s good. If your choice doesn’t reflect your needs, you’ll have a failure on your hands no matter which way you turn.

Sage Summit has begun, even if the official welcoming keynote hasn’t yet been delivered. This is a customer event, y’see, so it’s fitting that Sage started by recognizing some of its more notable ones. In other words, it was the Sage Customer Awards Program luncheon. Here, in brief, are the winners, with a few comments by me where needed.

• MyBizCounts.com Contest Winner: INDIE PEACE, an Atlanta-based fashion design company that focuses on sustainable, eco-friendly products and manufacturing techniques. (This contest called for original video commercials and essays from people with new business ideas or young startups (two years and under), with $20,000 and a bunch of Sage software—Peachtree, ACT!, and Timeslips—as the prize. The company made a cute presentation, and has some really nice wearable designs that won’t kill the planet. Good stuff.)

• Rookie of the Year: Coilhose Pneumatics, East Brunswick, NJ, using MAS 500; Net@Work is the Sage implementation partner. (Product costing and inter-company transactions are some of the more onerous parts of a business that deals in specialized products. Guess what Coilhouse improved with MAS 500? Net@Work is known to me as a talented integrator, so kudos to that team as well.)

• Best Use of Customization: Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS), Rockville, MD, using Sage MAS 500; Blytheco LLC is the implementation partner. (MRIS got more than 32,000 customers to use the online bill-pay system it built this year, something that wouldn’t have been possible with its legacy accounting system. Automation is a good thing sometimes.)

• Community Stewardship: Teach For America, New York, NY using SalesLogix; Infinity Info Systems is the implementation partner. (I’ve met with IIS before, and its founder Yacov Wrosherinsky is one of the most-recognized Sage partners there is; I’m not surprised one of his clients took an award.)

• Best End-to-End Deployment: Curbers, Inc., Salisbury, NC, using MAS 500, FAS, and SalesLogix; Practical Software Solutions is the implementation partner. (Combining ERP and CRM throughout the enterprise makes tremendous sense for many businesses, especially those in heavy industry. Power Curbers makes, customizes, and sells machines for making sidewalks, curbs, barriers, bridges, and other concrete items—that’s about as heavy as heavy industry gets.)

• Best Innovation Award: Entertainment Lighting Services, Inc., Sun Valley, CA, using MAS 500; Information Integration Group is the implementation partner. (ELS really needed to get enterprise software in place, and the results are telling. It reduced inventory shrinkage by half, and reduced the month-end close process from four weeks to five days—their monthly close used to take a month. Think about that.)

• Lifetime Achievement Award: Amix Salvage & Sales Ltd. , Surrey, BC, using Accpac and SageCRM; Plus Computer Solutions is the implementation partner. (Too often, especially at the Oscars, lifetime achievement awards are a way of saying, “you’ve never won a real award, so here’s a pat on the back to thank you for hard work.” That’s not what this is; Amix has been a Sage customer for 17 years, and had its first software package installed under MS-DOS. Sage has seen Amix through booms and busts for longer than I’ve had a writing career. Clearly both companies are doing something right.)

Congratulations to all the winners. I’m hoping to track down Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group and one of the contest judges, to talk about what went into the award decisions.

I’m about to start a guest blogging project for Sage Software, the company that brings you ACT!, Sage CRM, and SalesLogix. With their partner summit starting Monday, we figured it was a good time for me to introduce myself to the Sage user community, and here’s how I did it:

“Hi, I’m Marshall Lager, and if you read the ACT! by Sage blogs you’ll be seeing a fair bit more of that name in the coming weeks. That’s because Sage has invited me in as a guest blogger to provide my own perspective on CRM, Sage products, and customer experience. I’ll be kicking it off at Sage Summit, the annual partner conference, but I wanted to introduce myself and give you an idea of what you’ll be in for.

“You may be wondering, “Who is this guy, and why should I care?” Fair questions. I’m the founder and managing principal of Third Idea Consulting LLC, a consultancy focusing on CRM, especially social CRM and the increased power social media have given to customers. Those of you who read CRM magazine may also know me from there, where I was senior editor for four and a half excellent years. I’m the guy who wrote (and still writes) the back page column, Pint of View.

“That tells you a bit about who and what I am, but it might be just as useful to tell you who and what I am not.

• I am not a Sage implementer, employee, or partner. I am being paid formy writing, and I respect Sage’s products and am familiar enough with them to not make a fool of myself or the company. If you have specific technical questions about integration, business processes, or software capabilities, though, you’ll be better off talking to a Sage exec or ACT! Certified Consultant (ACC). I’m more of an ideas guy.
• I am not a spokesperson for anybody’s brand but my own. But maybe I can help you with yours. One of my chief contentions is that businesses don’t have the monodirectional control of their communications or their brands that they once did, and I think it’s a good thing. I’m all about customer empowerment, and how it can ultimately make businesses better. As such, I don’t really care what CRM system or techniques you use, as long as you are doing whatever it takes to keep your customers coming back with smiles on their faces, cash in their hands, and referrals in their mouths.
• I am not always serious. Writing is a pleasure for me. Thinking about CRM is also a pleasure. Combining them makes me do a little happy dance in my brain. At the same time, I realize that serious business shouldn’t always be serious, and we all need a change of perspective from time to time in order to prevent tunnel vision. Again, readers of Pint of View already know what I’m talking about. You might not always agree with me, or laugh with me, or find my comments in good taste, but they should make you think. If that’s happening, I’m doing my job.

“So, what can you expect from me? Over the next couple of months, I’ll be providing you with my perspective on the CRM industry, Sage news, and the state of customer/company dialogue in general. I’m starting with Sage Summit because it’s a big event, so you will see me all over the conference, talking to people like you about what matters to you. There will probably be some video podcasts or Q&A sessions along the way, so you can interact more directly with me.

“I’m also available for phone consultations, on-site visits, white papers, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. But you’ll have to pay me. The guest blog is entirely at your disposal. I hope you find it useful.”

There it is. If anybody’s going to be in the Atlanta area this week, look for me with notebook and Flip video in hand, trying to provide my perspective on what’s going on with Sage. I’ll be continuing the guest blog for a couple of months, and will mirror it here. I’m looking forward to the access to Sage that this will give me, as well as the chance to affect its users and partners in a (hopefully) positive way.

Right after the opening keynote at CRM Evolution ‘09, Sage North America (as represented by Larry Ritter and Ryan Zuk) gave me the lowdown on the next iteration of the venerable ACT! contact manager/CRM system. The official announcement dropped via Pitch Engine today, complete with social media integration, so I figured I’d provide my thoughts on what Sage has got going on.

I always refer to ACT! as “venerable”; it has a much nicer sound than “old,” and conveys a certain degree of respect. The product has had its ups and downs since its birth 23 years ago, but it’s hard to argue with success. A software product line that survives 20 years is rare enough, but ACT! has managed to thrive. According to Larry Ritter (senior VP and GM of Sage CRM Solutions, in case you didn’t follow the link), 2008 saw a 12 percent revenue increase year-over-year for ACT!, which is impressive given the economy and the competition. As much as we like to say that CRM needs to be in every part of a business, the fact is that many companies (especially small ones, where ACT! has most of its customers) do very well with contact management, sales force automation, and some marketing tools—which is pretty much what ACT! provides.

ACT! By Sage 2010, the new version, presents itself as a big change from previous installments. The interface is different, very clean. It reminded me of SAP’s new user interface for SME.

The redesign isn’t merely cosmetic; Sage employed keystroke-level modeling to discover how users perform tasks and made its changes based on ease and efficiency. The results give Sage something to sell against: based on seven standard activities (see below), ACT! 2010 allows 25 percent higher productivity Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and 37 percent more than Salesforce.com—figures I’m sure both companies will refute or minimize if asked. Those tasks are:

• Find information about last meeting with a contact
• Create a new contact
• Search for all contacts in a specific area
• Schedule a call
• Record notes about a contact/customer meeting
• View your work week calendar
• Mark an activity complete and schedule follow-up

Still, if that’s all you really need from CRM or contact management, Sage makes a compelling argument for its product instead of Microsoft’s or Salesforce.com’s.

The other cool thing in ACT! 2010 is the social media integration—you knew I’d be getting to this sooner or later, right? ACT!’s Web Info tab will keep you posted on a contact’s social networking profiles and updates, links their Web site to the contact record, and lets you add data feeds to the record (Hoovers, Twitter, and ESPN are the examples given). Web searches from this tab pass information back and forth between ACT! and the activity, and it’s persistent, so you can do a Google search or get travel info without leaving the screen and update the record with what you find.

Marketing isn’t forgotten in this release. It ships with several email marketing campaign templates and a campaign designer. Drip marketing—a series of touches over time—and customer surveys are two of the functions Sage showed me. Everything is tracked and reported, of course, so hot leads with high open and forward rates can be piped directly to sales when appropriate so they can schedule a call or meeting.

In a nod to the changing face of the inbox, those meetings can be sent as iCal invitations—which work in Google Calendar as well as Microsoft Outlook. It’s a minor benefit (unless you don’t use Outlook) but it’s still very nice to have.

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So that’s the product. Let’s talk about the press release. If you follow the link provided above, you’ll see that the release has social connectivity built right in. There’s a short Twitter pitch in addition to the full-length announcement. Share buttons abound. There are links to fact sheets, images, videos, tags, related news … it almost makes me feel useless. When I discussed timing with the highly media-savvy Ryan Zuk, he indicated that there was little sense in setting an embargo date because all of the information was already in the hands of Sage partners and customers because of Sage’s blogs. Fluid, free exchange of information is a beautiful thing, huh?

I’m sure there will always be press blackouts, whether for legal reasons or just because a company wants to deliver a nice surprise. But information wants to be free, so I applaud Pitch Engine for a terrific delivery format—and Sage for making use of it.