IBM Midmarket CRM Google+ Hangout Wen 1-1:30pm EST

I will be on a panel which is bringing together a group of CRM thought leaders to discuss the industry and how social media contributes to the success of your business.

Wen, April 16th at 1pm EST on Google+, go there now and get connected properly before the Hangout starts, https://plus.google.com/100114568100087952904/posts

Panelists, their linkedin profiles and blogs.
Paul Gillin (Moderator) of Profitecture
Lori Richardson and blog of Score More Sales
Paul Foucher and blog of SugarCRM

Steve Lokam and blog of OpenLogix

Keith Brooks and blog of VoiceRite

Some topics will include, but
SugarCon 2013:  News and any interesting trends or themes?
Is there an industry in particular that we see a growing demand for CRM?
How do we use social media to keep up with what’s happening in the CRM industry?

Please tweet me or leave messages at the Google+ hangout location for more topics.

Analytics and Crickets

While hanging out at #Sugarcon this week with good friend Stuart Mcintyre we were struck by what we saw as a lack of socialness (made that word up) from the attendees. Granted this is in contrast to the obscenely over the top socialness of my fellow IBM friends which can be zealous in their path to be social.

SugarCRM itself is fairly active as are Larry Augustin CEO and Clint Oram CTO on Twitter. Keeping in mind we can only really see the tweets or posts if #sugarcon was in the tag or discussion. So where is everyone?

In this graphic on the left, courtesy of NextPrinciples, which by the way you can click on and move any of the links and connections, a very nice benefit, you can see who had tweets retweeted or was the primary creator of the original tweets. You can see about 30+ accounts were pretty active although over 700 tweeted something, see Engagement below. If I presume about 1,200 people attended then about 2-3% are active socially. And since I know many of the names, they are business partners. Begging the question, where is the audience? Where are the customers? The lines to the small balls in the graphic are more customers but still the audience was not heavily active. Even at the voting for the AppTakeDown winner it was about 25% that voted. See graphic on the right.

How do we engage people better? Are we happy with this little or this much engagement? 

Let's look at this information, again from NextPriniciples. Keep in mind these are just for the few days of the show and do not imply anything other than what went on at the show. In some cases SugarCRM people themselves or their accounts were excluded in these graphics.

Sugar7 is announced, but no you tube videos for it? Lost opportunity. Customers like videos, social media people love graphics. perhaps they were posted, but just not included in the analytics.

 

This is hopefully untrue, but only 10 blog posts? I wrote 2 and Stuart 1, but surely there were more. maybe my friends at NextPrinciples can help with this.  A lack of primary bloggers may be hurting. then again, if we look at a week long view, will we see better details? 

The last graphic is probably not as helpful because I do not believe @sugarcon is an account on twitter so it is not surprising that there was no growth in followers.

Large numbers of followers, attendees that are social, bloggers and more all help to provide proper analytics but I was surprised at the details for the conference. If you can't get people excited enough at your annual show, I wonder what the analytics look like during the year.

Now look at  this graphic that shows the top 20 7 Hashtags:

IBM was a Diamond sponsor, no doubt this helped raise the Hashtag, but also many people expressed there impression that IBM was not the older IBM. Nice to see IBM getting that traction and awareness.

We were probably too small to get #sugarcon to trend on Twitter, but then I don't think the keynotes were livestreamed for those that could not attend which could have helped grow more awareness. 

I'd like to see more reach out to the world by SugarCRM. Their product is great, they have a great executive team, they are priced appropriately. How will they reach the goals that Larry Augustin mentioned at the opening keynote? Without leveraging their social customers they are missing a great opportunity to enhance the brand and value of the product.

SugarCon 2013 Day 1 - Synopsis

Sugarcon 2013 opens with some strong riffs. Guitar riffs that is, care of the SugarCRM band, playing in the same ballroom as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame plays their introduction ceremonies here at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

Unfortunately one can not go to the basement, they have 3, where the Presidential train and "secret" railway station lies. Read more here.

Larry, Clint, Lila rock the house with Sugar7 details around social and collaboration efforts, mobile client improvements, inline editing and more.  The theme for this year is:

Every Customer, Every User, Every Time

The belief is there is an under served population of workers who should be using CRM and SugarCRM wants to grab that market. This led to a keynote that was one of the best I have heard in recent months.

Paul Greenberg, His book, CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, is in its fourth edition and been called “the bible of the CRM industry”, gave an excellent keynote which left many of us in the audience wishing he could continue through lunch and afterwards. When I caught up with him at the evening event he said he would have spent lunch with us if we asked. One opportunity lost, but I had a great discussion with him and look forward to getting the slides from his session.

Paul reminded us that it is just as much about what customers want from us, as what we want from them. I could spend paragraphs on his session.

Back to SugarCon. IBM is a Diamond sponsor and has a mini theater at their stand where I have been doing a mini session on how VoiceRite integrates SugarCRM and IBM Connections.

The vendors here are very into social, marketing automation and analytics. It is all about CRM after all. For the estimated, by me, 1,200 attendees, there should be enough for everyone to find something they are missing.

Sessions in the afternoon, an average of 5 sessions running at the same time, were all well attended and provided best practices, experiences, coding examples and beyond.

The evening event was held on a rooftop bar in NYC and luckily it was a beautiful night, no clouds and reasonable temperatures prevailed. We had an excellent view of the Empire State Building and the skyline from north to south.

Looking forward to today's sessions and my own session at 3:40 in the Morgan room.

Sugarcon 2012 in Review

This was my first Sugarcon as a SugarCRM Business Partner and user. As we saw on BP day, about 2/3 or 200 people in the room were also at their first Sugarcon, many of whom became partners this year, some as recently as the Friday before it started.

Impressive for any vendor to have that type of growth.

We also found out in turn that SugarCRM nearly doubled in size their employees to about 350 total including contractors/consultants. Many of the employees were here and it was great to meet so many people. Oddly enough for me, I met few developers, but then I have few issues with SugarCRM that require me meeting the developers. On the other hand, the executive teams and regional sales execs were openly available and mixed with everyone and most importantly answered questions uniformly without the  usual "go ask him" or "let me get back to you" or any spin. Very refreshing. Plus they want input and encourage it from different angles as they are poised to grow into more enterprises.

More numbers for you to think about:
11 Million downloads of the Free Community Edition 
1 Million active users of SugarCRM

380 Business Partners
40 New Business Partners in Q1 2012 alone
30,000+ developers
1,000 projects
400 VARs

I met many partners and we had discussions around go to market ideas, competitive discussions and where people have come from and where they want to go with SugarCRM. Some look forward to the IBM efforts but are wary as a Business partner what this means to them. Size matters, so does certifications and smaller partners will face similar issues to what the IBM smaller business partners have faced the last 2 years. If you are on the path towards growing your business and reaching higher levels of customer numbers life will be good for you.

The event itself was run like a large user group meeting which extended the more family and friendly like atmosphere, not bad for about 1,000 people. I compare it to other IBM events which is probably unfair given their size and stature, but in my world few events are this size, they are either smaller or larger. Not very formal about anything, they had a nice app for iPhones (My Android device had issues), good breaks and healthy snacks (It was in San Francisco) split into technical tracks and sales/sponsor tracks as well as more private business partner training sessions.

Guy Kawasaki was a great presenter, he had also spoken at Lotusphere this year I wonder when I will hear him next this year.

The analysts and pundits that provided their insights were for the most part on the money but also not tight or heavy handed. Basically everything was light and informal and I credit the SugarCRM motto of "User First" with being so open as well as being an open sourced company.

The Exploratorium is a great place to go and everyone should go when in San Francisco.

Partner training was an added bonus and I spent my time not on the tech side, I am not a developer, but on the sales and business sessions looking at the SugarCRM methodology to encourage sales with a process that works. Bruce, Olivier and Erin did some great enablement sessions and roll plays.

On a personal level kudos to the Kosher caterer in Oakland, that steak was huge and a big surprise. I also had a "baseball card" signed by Clint Oram, the SugarCRM CTO. Key speakers had these cards made up by SugarCRM which were handed out. The uncut sheet is probably very valuable.

My only complaint, aside from my android issues, is that the sessions were not recorded. When you have 6-8 parallel sessions running much is missed and slides don't cut it. A number of customers expressed this as well something to think about for next year. My session on the "Boss is Anti-Social" will be set up as a webinar or podcast at some point soon.

Congratulations to Chris Bucholtz and everyone involved in making the event so successful.

See you next year in New York, Waldorf Astoria, April 7-11, 2013. If you want more details they have the website up already over here.

SugarCRM Integration with IBM Connections

Over the course of the last few days here in San Francisco at Sugarcon 2012 I have had some interesting discussions around IBM, integration points, IBM SmartCloud and of course Lotus Notes and Domino.

What you probably know is there has been a few integration points for SugarCRM that have included a Lotus Notes plugin for the Notes client from the iEnterprise acquisition and the LotusLive plugin to SugarCRM itself to share meetings and files.

SugarCRM and IBM have shown the integration of IBM Connections into SugarCRM. and it's pretty sweet too, even if it isn't quite ready for GA(ETA Q3). The basic principle of the integration was put together over a few weeks and was aimed at procviding a bridge between SugarCRM and the IBM Connections environment. Built-in to the SugarCRM side is a connector where you set up your logins and locations and then you have the communities and members to be listed inside SugarCRM.

A great job was done to get the business card settings to work so you can click straight over to the Connections sections like wikis, blogs, profiles, communities and activities, etc.

This may be a huge boost for SugarCRM as they strive to reach more Enterprises. Given the size of most IBM Connections installations, this may be an opportunity for Business Partners to make a huge play with their customers.

The flip side is not so great. IBM Connections is overkill to SugarCRM's bread and butter customers of the under 25 user organizations. IBM SmartCloud Engage, a slightly reduced version of IBM Connections, but one wholly based in The Cloud should be a good play if it gets packaged or bundled together at some point in the future. This is my guess at what we may see down the road. I missed the IBM session that outlined some more details.

IBM Sametime looks to be the next product to find it's way. Most likely due to Yammer being built-in to Salesforce.com. Naturally an organization can also use an online version or on premise version of Sametime but today there is no integration inside SugarCRM.

IBM Business Partners, you may want to start brushing up on SugarCRM. We have been a SugarCRM Silver Business Partner for the last year and a half and happy to discuss it with any of you.

Business Anti-Social: Why the Boss Doesn't Get It

This is my slidedeck from the Sugarcon 2012 session I just finished about ways to help executives be more social. It also covers some ideas around out thinking your competition and how to get stuff done without approval.

The link to my slides page is here. Slideshare link as well.

SugarCon 2012 Starts Today

Business Partner day starts today. I flew in last night and got a phone call at 6am from a client with a server down. So much for sleep.

Took the 5 block walk to the Palace Hotel where the conference is located. Along the way saw many examples of inner city art, sculptures, exhibitions of artists work in almost any and every place. The things I miss working a 1/2 mile from home normally. Will try to get some pictures later this week. On the flip side sad to see so many homeless and questionable activities going on in this part of the city.

This morning Larry Augustin opened with the state of numbers. Where Sugar stands, where we as Business partners stand. He made a point, which I had put into my sessions, making life easier for the user is key.

Some great marketing plans coming out, Google ad-words campaigns now part of the ecosystem as well. Nice to see when a Vendor knows how to help their partners. The Zift program is really nice and easy to use.

Great to see other Sugar Partners in person finally and to see SugarCRM employees as well that I haven't met in person yet.

Social online helps with social in person. Now if my memory worked as well.

Will post more over the week. If you are out here, catch me either on the SugarCon app or find me at my sessions.

I will be Speaking at SugarCon 2012

Decided to go back to where it all started for me. Databases and CRM.

Eons ago I wrote some of these in Dbase 3+ and through the decades went through the ACT, Goldmine and Lotus Notes home grown written CRM apps. Speaking of which John Ferrara of Goldmine has a new CRM offering, check out www.nimble.com if you like Tweetdeck and are in Marketing or Sales it has some great promise.

Since looking into CRM's again I realized something has not changed. It's still a "look at me and use me" world but it's full of "let someone else do it people". So in the spirit of Social, Collaboration and CRM, and a bit of competitiveness, I submitted an abstract:

  

Business Anti-Social: Why the Boss Doesn’t Use SugarCRM

CRM is a huge investment by your organization. Yet why do many Executives not take an active role in it's usage? Don't they want to be social? The answer is not so simple and sometimes even the opposite of what you may expect to hear.
We will discuss some reasons for this problem and how to work around them.
We will encourage others to take the first step to a better dialogue with your clients. SugarCRM is that first step in so many ways but so few make good use of it.
Strategies used by other vendors will be touched upon because there are personality types you need to understand.
How to encourage management to embrace the Social Business aspects is key to helping your business go up against your competition...shouldn't your executives be in on this?

I know a bit self serving of a title, but the reality is some of the same issues we face on the Lotus side appear on the CRM side as well. The SugarCon blog posted this about my session:

This one’s not just about Sugar, but really about all CRM applications; one major reason for failure in all CRM implementations is the lack of executive buy-in. Keith Brooks of SAS Group plans to talk about the reasons behind this phenomena and he’ll suggest ways to negotiate different executive agendas. What does he want people to learn from this session? “How to be a social business no matter what your executives think, say or do,” he says.

So there you have it, a little social, a little CRM, a little psychology and we will learn some things along the way too.

On behalf of my partners at the SAS Group  I look forward to representing us in San Francisco at SugarCon 2012. April 23-26 at The Palace Hotel.

Maybe this time I will get to hear and meet Guy Kawasaki, sadly I missed him at Lotusphere last month.