The World Series Of CRM
Understanding The Top Customer/Contact Management Systems
Baseball and statistics have a long history. So do baseball and data visualization. While I am not certain of any strong ties between baseball and CRM software solutions, it doesn’t seem to be a hard analogy. It is all about making contact. You need to close. You get the idea.
We have had a lot of fun with BI Madness the last two years. So let’s try something this October that fits the theme and focuses on a critical aspect of many companies decision-making, data collection, and (of course) analytics. CRM solutions are everywhere these days and whether the C stands for customer or contact, whether your emphasis is on relationships or sales — they are shaping the nature of business in the 21st century.
While the greatest teams in the world will compete for the title of World Series champions this October, we will run a contest of our own. One in which all of you can participate or just watch, if you prefer. Over the next three weeks we will publish new articles on CRM solutions and their impact on your business, your decision-making, and your ability to develop true analytic success. Like baseball, we will do it with plenty of statistics. In fact, we will make this a rotisserie competition.
For those not familiar with rotisserie contests, this is a single event (not head to head like BI Madness). From now until the end of October, we will compile every vote for or against each competitor, in each category provided. The results will look a lot like a typical shopping comparison chart — only all the data is crowdsourced and transparent.
Who is competing?
For this we turn to Gartner, Forrester, and (newly added favorites) Capterra & SoftwareAdvice. The list here is daunting. But let’s boil it down to:
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Freshsales
- Oracle (+Netsuite)
- Prosperworks
- Insightly
- bmp’online
- SAP (CRM)
Disagree? Great! Leave your alternative in comments below. Perhaps you love all of these? Tell us that, too. We will use your feedback to make some final adjustments during the next week. But the voting starts now!
Now we need some categories for them to compete under. We will chose nine in honor of the Fall Classic (baseball for those non-insiders). As analysts we will have a bit of a bias — but it will be informative and actionable.
- price (investment)
- ease of use
- scale (number of users, concurrency, etc)
- data capture (etl & structure as well)
- segmentation (territories, campaigns, etc)
- reporting/tracking
- visualization
- flexibility to define custom elements
- impact on your organization (return)
How will you score it?
Good question. We are going to do it with balls and strikes. Think of it as a good/bad ratio or pick your favorite baseball sabermetric analogy. It may not be as empirical as we’d like but our goal here is to inform and inspire dialogue and learning.
So start the dialogue. Share the post. Grab some popcorn (or crackerjacks) and enjoy the contest!
Comment below. Follow us on twitter — #CRMWS2017. Check us out on Facebook and LinkedIn. We value your feedback. We want to hear your opinion. But please keep it professional. And please — no charging the mound.
Thanks for reading!
