The Waterfall Method is a sequential design process that involves an extended amount of planning that can lead to an execution time of months or even years depending on the scope of the project. The thought is that time spent early in the process, making sure requirements and design are exact, will save time and effort later in the project.

Waterfall execution takes place in various stages, with the idea that the project should only move to a new phase when the preceding phase has been completed and perfected. The stages of execution include:

1. Requirements
2. Design
3. Construction
4. Integration
5. Testing
6. Installation
7. Maintenance

While using the Waterfall method has worked well in the past, the level of technological innovation taking place on a daily basis lends itself well to a more Agile approach. Companies are constantly being challenged to further develop their businesses, make their products better, faster and do so while using fewer resources.

They must be able to meet the needs of their users, but also adapt to rapidly-changing needs from customers as well. Additionally, if your group works with multi-team projects or enterprise level customers, you may have several key players with conflicting ideas about how the end product should look and function. This is the point when engaging an Agile Methodology would be most helpful.

Agile Methodology is an iterative and incremental development strategy that allows for continuous improvement. Using short iterations of one to four weeks in order to build the project in short batches, or increments, keeps development aligned with changing business needs and allows Agile projects to see a higher rate of success. The mindset when engaging in an Agile project should always be that of striving to be not necessarily the best, but always better than the previous version.

Highlights of the Agile Method:

• Promotes productivity at all stages of the process.
• Allows for continual innovation and improvement to meet the overall end goal.
• Significantly improves the wait time from idea to market.
• Requires continuous collaboration and involvement from the stakeholders.

One of the reasons an increasing number of companies have already adopted an Agile Methodology is primarily because of the significantly improved results it can deliver over a Waterfall Method. According to the Standish Group, software applications developed using Agile techniques have three times the success rate of applications developed using the traditional waterfall method. The Standish Group defines a successful project as one delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features and functions.

We have adopted and been using the Agile Methodology for some time now and have found it to work quite well for our needs and the needs of our customers. Something to think about: What method does your business use? Why? What are some of the reasons why it works best for you?

With 4 stops in major cities during their cross-country tour, Pardot did a terrific job packing the afternoon line-up with the best in the business!

After a short welcome from Pardot’s CEO, Adam Blitzer, key speakers included Pardot’s own Mathew Sweezey, who presented “The State of Demand Generations 2013”, and Sheryl Pattek from Forrester Research who spoke about “Lead to Revenue in the Age of the Customer”.

A few points from Mathew’s presentation:

• There is more power in a Google search, than all of the power NASA had in 1960 to put a man on the moon.
• In terms of the channels we use for marketing, they are increasing at such a high rate:
  • 1960 - 5 marketing channels
  • 2013 - 60+ marketing channels
  • 2060 - 100s of channels
• 68% of people lie on forms, so aim to capture only the most necessary information.
• 96% of consumers start their research on Google.
• Everybody likes to buy but no one likes to be sold to!

Sheryl informed us that the average attention span of an adult is only 8 seconds. She also provided the following inspirational quotes to keep in mind:

• According to Ernest Hemingway, “it is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end”.
• From Peter Drucker, “marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest or costs”.

Afterwards, there were quickfire presentations from 2 Pardot customers who have been leading the pack in terms of innovative use of Pardot’s software. This time of ‘Client Inspiration’ was presented by Adam Waid of Media Current and Jodi Rodney from CareStream Dental.

One piece of advice from Adam was to work closely with your sales team to see what content is working and what’s coming down the pipeline so you can plan your marketing efforts appropriately. Jodi stressed the importance of list segmentation, to ensure that you’re sending the right message to the appropriate customer groups.

If you’re located near any of the other cities on their tour (Boston, San Francisco, or Seattle), I highly recommend attending if you are able. On the flip side, I’m always open to hearing about great B2B, marketing, or tech events in the Atlanta area. Feel free to contact me directly to let me know if you hear of a good one!

Many startup business owners are wonderful at building intimate relationships with their customers and like to maintain a handle on the comings and goings of the company’s customer base. While this may work fine for short period of time, if you have customers and your company is growing, you need a CRM! It makes no difference if your company is small, medium or large.

Aileron, a professional contributor for Forbes.com recently posted an article, Why Your Small Business Needs CRM, which was a great overview of the 5 most important things to remember when choosing and implementing a CRM system.

1. Make it simple.
The employees using the system need to be able to key in only the most important information in as few clicks as possible. Making the process too complicated will lower the team’s use of the system, regardless of the awesome features it may have.

2. Make sure it integrates with other company systems.
In order to maximize the tracking and reporting capabilities, you’ll want to ensure that the system you choose can sync the necessary data and allow it to be imported and exported.

3. Train them over and over again.
People tend to stick with what they know and are comfortable with. Ensuring that the users get adequate training increases the chance that they’ll use the system the way it’s intended.

4. If the activity isn’t in the CRM system, it never happened.
When working with customers, it’s important that your team understands the value in capturing everything in the system.

5. Reports.
Being able to track customer information, see sales team progress and track target goals is the point of having a CRM in the first place right? Being able to automate reports, as well as pull them as needed in real-time would be most ideal.

If you’ve found yourself looking for the perfect CRM for your company, or need help with training your team or customizing the system to your processes, we’re here to help! Contact us today so we can help you maximize your CRM investment.

Now, of course we can’t take full credit for the amount of growth that Caterpillar has seen, but they have been implementing GroundBreakCRM systems in locations across North America and Canada that may have helped facilitate this growth.

For the Caterpillar locations that are already using GroundBreak, their sales teams are able to maximize the time spent in the field and ultimately close more deals. GroundBreakCRM is a cloud based equipment rental and equipment sales software solution that streamlines the entire customer process:

• Home screens that cater to the individual salesperson, equipped with call frequency management that keeps top customers ‘top of mind’.
• Automated geocoding of all Accounts, Contacts, Leads and Job Sites in the system so sales teams can capitalize on any free time by visiting sites nearby.
• Custom quick quoting capabilities for both sales and rental products.
• Inventory management allows users to receive current information regarding inventory rates and availability.
• Jobsite management that links Accounts, Contacts, and Leads with specific jobsite roles.

GroundBreakCRM has been able to help not only CAT dealers and rental companies meet the needs of their customers and boost their sales, but other heavy machine rental companies as well. If you have an outside sales force that could benefit from GroundBreak, take a look at the additional features on our website or contact us to schedule a free demonstration or to get more information.

In order to manage our daily engagements, we use a customized version of ‘Projects’ and ‘Project Tasks’ in SugarCRM which are only visible to the engineers that are assigned the particular project, rather than the entire engineering team.

These security rules in SugarCRM allow us to:

• Keep customer details and project details secure.
• Only display data to the personnel that requires access to do so.
• Keep the list views of other team member’s Sugar homepage much cleaner.
• Refrain from cluttering other team member’s view with unrelated data.

The Issue:

When we added a consultant to a SugarCRM Project, they didn’t have access to all of the related data. Meaning, they could only see the Project record. We needed them to be able access to all related data including Project Tasks, Project Contacts, Account details and any other pertinent records.

Our Solution:

A quick code customization, called a Logic Hook, was added so that when we assigned a consultant or other resource to a project SugarCRM would traverse the related records and give that person access to the data that they needed to be efficient.

We are constantly working to create the most streamlined processes we can in order to maximize our team’s efficiency using SugarCRM. Steady optimizations ensure that the organization is always becoming more efficient!

If your team could use customized options to help make their SugarCRM instances more efficient, take a look at our Managed CRM services or feel free to contact us to speak directly with one of our Sales Engineers to develop a personalized plan today.

As a result, we are happy to announce the release of DeDupit 1.4, which incorporates 3 brand new features to make automated deduplication even easier.

• Last in or First in - In version 1, if there was a conflict between two fields of data, the first record ‘won’ and the second record was removed. For the 1.4 release, we have added a dropdown option in the DeDuplication process where the user can choose whether the first record in or the last record in wins.

• Merge Multi-Selects - There are certain instances where you may not want a field to overwrite itself with data based on the date it was entered. DeDupit’s capability to merge multi-selects is perfect for these situations.

• Execution Order - This new feature provides the ability to set the execution order of the deduplication jobs. It allows you to run more strict deduplication jobs to help clean up records initially, resulting in fewer records to go through manually. It also lowers the likelihood of merging first positives.

If you’d like to learn more about how your business can automate their record deduplication process, check out our DeDupit module for SugarCRM or feel free to contact us directly for more information.

Matt Hamilton, Branch Manager for MacAllister Rentals, was the first presenter up for the line of Sales Management Solutions Track Sessions. Matt’s presentation, entitled Using Collaboration to Transform Your Entire Business into a Sales Team, was an in-depth look at how GroundBreakCRM has changed the nature of the way their sales team conducts day-to-day business.

GroundBreak is a specialized web-based CRM that has been purposefully built to enhance support and sales opportunities for any business that has an outside sales team. Matt gave a great presentation that showcased how MacAllister Rentals uses the main features of GroundBreakCRM, including:

• Advanced Territory Management allows users to be assigned to multiple complex territories, which can be configured on any combination of Area Codes, States/Provinces, and/or Counties.
• Jobsite Management lets you track jobsites and the many interconnected relationships that are involved with a jobsite.
• Service Management is a full management portal for service-related inquiries and service call management.
• Dispute Tracking provides their sales staff with immediate access to any information regarding account disputes so that flagged accounts can be quickly resolved or managed accordingly.
• Mapping capabilities allow Matt’s team to outline all Accounts or Contacts within a given radius.

Using a customized version of SugarCRM, Matt was able to ensure their team (even those primarily off-site) remain connected with the latest customer and account information. Addiiotn

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Presenting in the track session for Tech Trends: Big Data, Mobile, Social & Cloud was Matt Braman, the VP of IT and Administration for Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Matt spoke on the topic of Increasing User Adoption: The Carrot vs. The Stick, which focused on how Hillel was able to vastly increase their adoption rates of SugarCRM (from 50 to approximately 2,000 end users) through an extreme focus on the needs of their users, which are primarily college students and interns.

Hillel provides opportunities for Jewish students at more than 550 colleges and universities to explore and celebrate their Jewish identity through its global network of Hillels on campuses and communities around the world. Their deployment options included browser-based, mobile, and Facebook. However, they needed to customize their SugarCRM to be more appealing to college students and even had an artist help design the look of it.

In order to streamline the process and facilitate the ease of use for their students, Hillel also needed to reduce the initial sub panels from about 19 different screens, down to 1. In order to do so, changes were made to the user interface, analytics options, as well as mobile and social media integration.

We also built and implemented a social media integration for Hillel called the Sugar2Facebook module which provides a way for businesses to interact with their target audience using social media that can then record the interactions within their SugarCRM records.

As a result of the changes Hillel made to their system, they’ve seen a huge jump in their levels of user adoption. Here are just a few of the metrics that Matt provided in his presentation:

• They boosted their campus adoption of the ‘Reach’ (the name they used for their SugarCRM) system from 7 campuses to 145 campuses nationwide.
• They increased their ability to track the ‘Jewish Journey’ for their students from 15 to 66 campuses.
• They saw an overall increase in constituents from 88,000 to 200,000.

It’s no secret that navigating through a successful campaign of user adoption is one of the most challenging aspects for any business implementing a new CRM, but Hillel has proven that the key is customizing the system to the needs and actions of the end users.

Contact us if you’re interested in finding out more about GroundBreakCRM, the Sugar2Facebook integration, or if you want to learn more about how we can create a customized SugarCRM solution for your users.

Recipients of the SugarCRM Annual Partner Awards were chosen “based on their commitment to the Sugar suite of products as evidenced by major joint customer wins, as well as overall new business revenue.” This year’s winners include:

• Most Valued Global Partner - Technology Advisors
• Most Valued Partner (by region):
• Technology Advisors, North America
• Synolia, Europe, Middle East & Africa
• GrowIT, Latin America
• CRM Online, Asia Pacific

SugarCRM also awarded the following companies with Technology Alliance Awards:

• Act-On won the award in the Lead Machine category.
• Endeavor won the Top Dog category for closing SugarCRM’s largest deal last year.
• NextPrinciples was named Marketeer of the Year.
• DocuSign received the Rookie of the Year award.

Closing out the annual event was the ever-popular App Throwdown competition, where extremely creative and clever presentations are made from partners showcasing unique extensions and integrations with SugarCRM. Below is a list of the companies, their presenters, and a brief overview of what was presented:

• Jeff Bickart, NEPO Systems, showcasing their time tracking Harvest integration.
• Sean Myers and Vince Puente, Endeavor, showcasing EndeavorCPQ integrated with Sugar quoting.
• Christian Wettre, W-Systems Corp, showcasing enhancements done to the Sugar campaigns module that make getting a campaign up and running by a salesperson much easier than before
• Aaron Wine, Epicom, showcasing their FedEx application which allows Sugar users to maintain a handle on high volume shipping issues, in terms of product tracking, expenses and customer service.
• Brian Reale and Fernando Ontiveros, Colosa, showcasing ProcessMaker, new functionality that allows companies to design approval driven workflows based on a visual process map that takes advantage of native Sugar elements.
• Blake Robertson, Alertus Technologies, showcasing Callinize, an app that connects to your company’s CRM, pulls important customer information, and displays this information for all incoming calls on your mobile phone.

Voting was conducted immediately following the final presentation using an online survey for a popular vote, which resulted in the 1st place being awarded to Brian Reale and Fernando Ontiveros of Colosa’s ProcessMaker, while a close 2nd place finish was awarded to Blake Robertson with Alertus Technologies’ Callinize. There was even a Twitter award presented to Stuart McIntyre for the most #SugarCon tweets made throughout the conference!

And of course, we couldn’t post about SugarCon winners if we didn’t mention that as a result of our partnership with SugarOutfitters, we were thrilled to give away several of our modules through SugarOutfitters during a promotional giveaway at the SugarCon expo hall. Included below are pictures of just a few of our winners...

Module Giveaway Winners: Joe LaClare from Auto Alert, Sarah Every and Kimberly Coady from Modernizing Medicine, and John Lee from Frontera Consulting

As I mentioned in a post last week, Everything In Full Swing..., the overlying theme at SugarCRM and all throughout SugarCon has been: Every Customer, Every User, Every Time.  And in keeping with that theme, every session and speech was geared towards maximizing every interaction with customers and users.

• The CEO of SugarCRM, Larry Augustin, opened SugarCon with the fact that for every 1 person using a CRM, there are still 25 other people who work directly with customers and are not using a CRM. There’s a huge gap, which also makes way for huge opportunities.

  

  • As we think about our customer base, Larry provided the following challenges:
    • How can we better understand the needs of every individual customer?
    • How do we empower every user to engage successfully with their customers?
    • How do we deliver experience every time?
  • Then he offered the following mission: Make every user more effective every time they engage 1-to-1 with every customer.

• We were also given a preview of the new Sugar 7 by SugarCRM’s CPO, Lila Tretikov, and Co-Founder/CTO, Clint Oram.

  

• Smart, Fast and Social!
• Powered by HTML 5
• Intelligence and Lead Management panels
• Enterprise forecasting
• Complete new user experience
• Flexible, configurable, and scalable

• Steve Laughlin, VP of IBM’s Smarter Commerce, spoke about the Empowered Consumer Era in one of the keynote speeches.
• • Customer’s expectations have been raised.
  • Building a trusting relationship with your customer creates a better overall environment by tailoring messages to them that they care about.
  • They will be more willing to work with you if you:
    • Listen and learn
    • Enable and execute
    • Empower the consumer
• We also heard from Macquarie University’s Marc Bailey who taught us:
  • Customer relationship management should be about making what your customers want and what you offer synchronize and match up.
  • Proactive engagement has a retention side effect.

A few other great points we heard were from Pardot’s Matthew Sweezey who quoted Jay Baer saying that “helping is the new selling” and Terry Jones, who said that “customers aren’t searching for your product name, they’re searching for what it does.” As a marketer, these ideas really resonated with me. We put so much emphasis on SEO and search terms to create name recognition and brand awareness but sometimes forget that we need to be focusing on the overall service that it provides to our customers.

While there were far too many awesome speakers and takeaways from the conference to list everything, I hope you’ve enjoyed this spotlight on just a few of the highlights. We’d love to know what was your favorite part of SugarCon?

“Every Customer, Every User, Every Time”

This mission has been replicated throughout SugarCon and it pertains to the fact that we need to be fully engaged with our customers and users at every chance we are given.

I also want to take a minute to share a few of the highlights from Larry’s presentation:

• SugarCRM is the 3rd largest CRM product of users worldwide.
• SugarCRM has had over 12.5 million downloads.
• SugarCRM has a user base of 1.2 million users.
• The CRM industry as a whole has 18 million users of commercial CRM.
• The CRM industry spends an estimated $422 billion annually.

Let’s let those numbers sink in for a minute... That’s huge!

He challenged the SugarCon attendees to figure out how we can better understand the needs of every individual customer, how we can empower every user to engage successfully with their customers, and how we can deliver a great experience every time. Along with this challenge, Larry also gave a few suggestions on how to help make that mission a reality for your company.

Every Customer

• Treat each customer as an individual.
• Make all of the customer’s information available.
• Deliver the customer’s information when it matters.

Every User

• Help users do their job, and gather data as a side-effect.
• Deliver value to the user for every action you ask them to take.
• Help users decide what to do next.

Every Time

• Every customer is important.
• Every user needs to be a customer expert.
• Every connection counts.

With 60% of today’s labor force in customer-facing roles, it’s crucial that every employee is taking the time to fully engage every customer and every user, at every opportunity. Doing so will help raise the expectations that customers have with your business and in turn, solidify the trust that will naturally develop when you have their best interest in mind.