CRM: A LAND OF PURE IMAGINATION?
InsideCRM

March 25, 2008

Article by Chris Bucholtz - read the original post

My little book is full of scrawled notes based on the rather exciting conversations I’ve had the last couple of days. Two of ‘em stand out: Rand Schulman, the CMO of InsideView, and Michael Harvey, Executive Vice President of Concursive. The two conversations don’t necessarily seem linked in my mind by the similarities of their products. Instead, I see their products as indicators of a new class of business applications that do something we have not seen in a long time: their versatility will challenge the end users by making the users’ imagination one of the crucial factors in their own success.

Let me explain a bit. Schulman is currently beating the drum for SalesView, a bit of software that works with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft and Landslide. What it does is pretty remarkable: it takes data from 20,000 sources – structured Web data like LinkedIn, unstructured data from sources like Google, and data from subscription sources – and aggregates it into what he calls “socialprise data.” Then, the SalesView applies algorithms to it to determine the most accurate version of the online “truth” about a prospect. “Our scoring would take into account changes I made to my LinkedIn profile four months ago, and if I’m the one making the change, it gets a higher score than something I didn’t change myself, like Zoominfo,” said Schulman. “We attempt to score the data and make inferences as to the ‘truthiness’ of the information.” The resulting refined version of the truth is then employed in CRM to accelerate the sales cycle. Paul Greenberg was all geeked up about this last week (which is a good barometer of how far ahead of things Paul is); go to his blog to get a real in-depth view of what InsideView is up to.

Concursive’s story is a little different; it partnered with a customer that wanted to integrate a Web content management system (WCM) and e-commerce capabilities into the ConcourseSuite 5.0 system. Now, not only can the customer (Brand Fuel Promotions, which runs ecommerce sites for 1500 companies) export data from Websites into its CRM system (like orders, for instance), but it can use the CRM system to change the Websites on the fly. Since Concursive is an open-source company it was a natural that this change would not be offered solely to Brand Fuel, which is already using it, but to all its other customers as a free download starting today.

In addition, ConcourseSuite’s WCM tool supports JSR 168-compliant portlets, so users can add application-based windows to web pages, meaning it’s easy to add additional features, like blogs and wikis and other neat stuff.

Hearing about these products is exciting, because they’re flexible enough and insightful enough that the emphasis starts to slide away from the technology and back toward the creativity of the people using it – not the IT guys, as important as they are, but the marketing and sales people. They will allow you to do so many different things that the emphasis will move to picking the right things for your business and employing them with sufficient creativity, always with your customer in mind. Customers and the people trying to reach them are in for an interesting future…