Last Tuesday I met with the Vice President of a local non-profit. She was looking for help with her organization’s CRM initiative and I figured that like so many non-profits, her organization was struggling to find the resources needed to invest in a decent system. I was wrong. This non-profit has lots of CRM technology, multiple systems in fact. They have tons of executive-level support, a clear understanding of what they need from their systems, and a willing and able
Read moreLast week I was asked to speak at the University of Texas at a gathering of K-12 CIO’s from Texas school systems. The event was sponsored by Apple and the theme was “Designing Mobile and Cloud Environments to Support Learning.” Apple wanted to foster an open discussion among Information Technology (IT) professionals about the challenges of mobile device deployment in the education environment. I came away from the event with two conclusions. Users are driving new technology adoption and IT
Read moreChris Bucholtz wrote a great post in the CRM Outsiders Blog entitled “Going the Extra Mile for Customers – Even When it Bends Processes.” I wrote a comment to the post with my thoughts on how to create a culture that fosters the sort of risk taking that Chris advocates. You can read my comments at the bottom of Chris’ post. This week, I faced the opposite problem to the one Chris presented. A business associate called to discuss a
Read moreAt Epicom we get to see the inner workings of many different sales organizations. Some are organized, goal-oriented, and process-driven, but most are fairly disorganized and unfocused. An easy way to tell great sales organizations from average sales organizations is to measure where managers spend the majority of their time. Is it at the front end of the sales pipeline, helping reps generate and qualify new deals? Or is it at the back end of the pipeline, trying to get
Read moreSugarCRM executives are the first to tell you that they are squarely focused on the SMB (Small/Mid-Sized Business) market. And why not? The SMB space is growing fast as CRM costs decline and progressive companies adopt cutting edge technologies to gain a competitive advantage. The SMB space has lots of other advantage too. Shorter sales cycles, less complex projects, fewer decision makers, and minimal bureaucracy. Compare this to the typical enterprise CRM sale with its long sales cycle, complex pre-sale
Read moreOver the last six months, Epicom has repeatedly sent engineers to work on collaborative software development projects with our partners. The purpose of these events is not to develop products for Epicom but instead to help make our partners’ products better. To participate Epicom typically pays for the engineers’ time, plus the travel costs of having them attend collaborative development events. Recently a business associate asked me “Why in the world would you do that?” “Why are you spending money
Read moreOn Tuesday, June 15th, Epicom hosted the 2010 CRM Acceleration event at the Westin Galleria Hotel in Dallas, TX. We had a great showing and were able to provide a valuable session of information. The presentations provided guests with additional knowledge about customer relationship management, social media, online marketing, marketing automation, and cutting-edge data integration tools. For an overview of the presentations and to download the slides, please follow the link HERE:
Read moreI just updated the job postings on our website to add a job description for a PHP/MySQL Software Engineer. Epicom is continuing to grow and we are always on the lookout for good talent. We have an immediate need for one full-time engineer with 3 to 5 years of experience and we’ll be hiring more later in the year. If you know of any good candidates, please send them our way. Resumes should be sent to jobs@epicom.com
Read moreEric Wikman, one of Epicom’s engineers, forwarded me this email from SugarCRM support recently. Turns out that the servers we use in our SugarCRM Performance Hosting Platform are just too fast! They exploited a weakness in the SugarCRM software that had to be fixed in a new release. Does this mean we’ll have to get slower servers????? Here’s the text of the email we received from our SugarCRM support engineer, Chris Raffle: Chris Raffle has created a new Note: Case
Read moreTechCrunch featured one of Epicom’s customers recently in a story about online storefronts moving to social media platforms like Facebook. The story featured BigCommerce, a flagship product of Interspire, the Australian software provider with offices here in Austin. Interspire has been an Epicom customer for about a year. Great to see Interspire get some well-deserved publicity.
Read moreFind Us Elsewhere
