CRM Timeline tells how we made it to Social CRM
This past week I was contacted to review a CRM Timeline. This timeline covers many of the high points in the evolution of CRM and is very interesting for a general overview of the evolution of CRM (Know more now as Social CRM) as an industry. One of the recommendations I made was to include the open source movement for CRM that really began with the SugarCRM project. Since projects like Joomla! CMS have help to pave a way for open source and the adoption of Social Technologies for small businesses so too has the branch of SugarCRM called info@hand and it's powerful integration with the Joomla! CMS. This combination is an ideal solution for Social CRM or as we affectionately call it "Social CRBM".
Discovery of the Info@hand CRBM
Our company CNP Integrations jumped on this bandwagon of "CRBM" (Customer Relationship Business Management) early on just as Sugar was gaining momentum and generating buzz in the open source community. After using the Community edition of SugarCRM we found that it just did not have a complete solution so we started exploring other options that were more inclusive. It was then that we found Info@hand CRBM which has more features useful for business management rather than just salesforce automation and it seemlessly integrated with Joomla! CMS.
Since this new CRM system integrated with Joomla! CMS as a frontend customer portal solution and I was already on my was as an evangelist for this amazing new platform, I quickly grabbed Michael Whitehead's book "Implementing SugarCRM" and a few others including Paul Greenberg's' "CRM at the Speed of Light" and I set out to become "An Expert". Well the journey I found to be quite significant and I will never gain the depth of knowledge a CRM guru like Paul Greenberg has, but I was able to become a power user of the info@hand CRBM platform and found that our experience was worth sharing with other customers to offer extended support as a VAR partner for the info@hand CRBM. Support for Info@hand was a natural addition to our portfolio of services to the Joomla! CMS community since we already had this expertise.
One great integrated platform is a lot to keep track of
Well that was four years ago and though the CRM timeline introduces the birth of SugarCRM they did not include the birth of the Info@hand CRBM solution in this evolution as they rightly should have. Folks like Paul Greenberg have been keeping track of the massive complexities and ongoing growth and transitions of the overall CRM industry while we have been closely involved in the specific evolution with info@hand CRBM as a VAR partner. Believe me, I do not know how Paul does it since we have our hands full with just staying on top of one mighty platform and what we believe it is by far the best choice for small b2b and b2c businesses that use Joomla CMS!.
Keeping Pace and Stride with the big players
We have watched a significantly smaller well focused development group at the Long Reach Corporation combined with a dedicated user group and partner network surpass products with big money behind them. While many of the CRM platforms like Salesforce which have significantly deeper pockets both for development resources and marketing, the Info@hand CRBM platform has been steadily growing in features functionality and stability to offer a competitive edge for features but significantly lower cost of entry for small to midsized business enterprises. With the gigantic buzz around Social technologies and "Social CRM" Joomla was the perfect marriage for info@hand since Joomla Now has one of the best platforms for building out Social Communities.
Time fly's when you are building any business
This has been a fast passed path and keeping up with the comparisons has been a rather time consuming process we are not always able to keep up on documenting but every time we do we see Info@hand clearly taking strides over their peers. In our own info@hand timeline, we have seen the evolution of integrations with QuickBooks, Microsoft Outlook, and eCommerce transaction management (Sync with Virtuemart Shopping Cart System for Joomla! CMS) with inventory, shipping, and ERP functionality. Integration with DimDim conferencing and GoogleDocs, Calendars, event, email campaign and subscription management and much more... Perhaps someday we will have the spare time to gather our own timeline and present it but for now we are just happy this platform delivers such robust features with a fraction of the overhead costs.
"Surf's up"
One day very soon this best kept secret of the Info@hand CRBM with Joomla! CMS is going to catch the right wave in popularity with the big boys and we will see small businesses flocking the call out of "Surf's up for Social CRM"
Drop buy http://www.learningcrm.com or http://www.crbm.net or http://www.joomladesignservices.com to dig into this a bit more.
