The evolution of CRM-systems
Interest in CRM-systems is constantly growing, they solve the problem of resource loading and business efficiency. That is why this class of software deserves close attention not only from the standpoint of functionality and practice, but also from the standpoint of history. We took up this work and wrote a small history of CRM. From the article you will learn:
And of course, the CRM industry does not stop there. And this is not necessarily a big date, the cars are leoning and everything else. However, about everything in order.
Caricatura.ru
The first CRM-systems were one-dimensional, that is, all customer information was presented in the form of cards. In fact, these were card files that contained basic information about the company's counterparties.
')
A classic example of such a card file was the legendary Rolodex (Rolodex) - a rotating catalog with cards that kept customer contact information. By the way, the name Rolodex comes from a combination of the English words rolling and index, which in itself reveals the purpose of the subject - such, in general, a manual search engine. The data in the Rodelex could be entered manually in a special form or it could be taken from the client on a business card on Rolodex letterheads.
By the way, about a year ago, a wave of demand for “rodexes” swept across Russian Facebook - users shared links and images of outlandish business card holders, albeit already Chinese ones. The present Rolodex was invented in 1956 by Arnold Nystadler and Ildor Nilson (Arnold Neustadter and Hildaur Neilson), and gained success in the market two years later, in 1958.
Modern view of the Rolodex
The device was an improved version of Wheeldex and a relative of the equally well-known Autodex, an electronic telephone directory management system that automatically opened for the selected letter. Generally, talking about the inventions of Zephyr American, one cannot help stopping for a moment and list some more breakthrough “gadgets” for that time: Swivodex is a non-spill ink pot, Punchodex is a paper puncher, Clipodex is an auxiliary device that was placed on the stenographer’s knee. There was another "ex" - Memex - the conceptual predecessor of hypertext. A part of inventions, as unnecessary, has sunk into oblivion, and rolodex has become a household name for personal organizers and for the process of accumulation and storage of business contacts.
Until the end of the 80s, sellers in Western Europe and the United States rotated rubbed rodexes, wrote comments to transactions on paper, stitching them into folders. It is scary to say, but in Russia, some companies still do this - and then the notebooks leave with the employees, and the folders gloatly sink into the shredder before dismissal.
In the 1970s, personal computers began to appear in companies all over the world, and with a light hand of IBM, the so-called era of mainframes, huge universal high-performance and fault-tolerant servers with impressive memory resources, began.
Nowadays, mainframes are used for complex resource-intensive computational operations, and modern CRM systems are less demanding of resources. At the same time, mainframe systems were used to digitize data that was manually created at one time — this greatly accelerated the search and saved physical storage space. Then the first sales automation systems began to appear. Interns for years could sit in the offices and drive in the data obtained manually in an automated system.
While the old Rolodex coexisted peacefully with mainframes, a revolution in business automation was being prepared in Dallas. In 1986, Pat Sullivan and Mike Mooney founded Conductor Software and created a product as close as possible to what is installed on our PC with you - the ACT! System. First, the abbreviation was decoded as Automated Control Technology, but in 1987 it became famous as Automated Contact Tracking (contact management system). Deciphering the name did not convey all that the system was able to do - in fact, it was the software for managing the sales process and customer interaction. By the way, in 1993, the company, renamed Contact Software International, was sold to Symantec Corporation, and in 1999 - SalesLogix. In 2001, all this was taken over by Sage, the system was renamed ACT! Sage, it became known to the Russian market with the last name - Sage ACT! (sometimes in not very professional reviews found Sage CRM). In 2013, the system became again simply called ACT! .. The company is developing, its headquarters is located in Arizona.
But back to the progenitor of the CRM-systems ACT! and let's take a closer look at what he was like and how the idea that turned the whole business world in general came. Our story is based on an English-language interview with the founder, Mike Mooney. And this is a really cool story.
In the 1980s, there was no talk of a CRM market; there were three categories in the application software: spreadsheets (Lotus), text editors (Wordstar and WordPerfect), and databases (dBase and Paradox). Pat Sullivan and Mike Muni were sales people and knew for sure that quality of customer relations was an important competitive advantage at the heart of successful sales. By the way, the partners themselves at the time used the Rolodex. Having received $ 100,000 of investment from a business angel, friends created a program that helped computer store salesmen to configure bills, set discounts, write goods out of stock and print it all. As is often the case, contrary to expectations, the novelty crashed and $ 85,000 went into the tube. There were two ways out: to close the business and return to the investor $ 15,000 or a second. The second solution was the decision to sell the company MarginMaker. It was then that the general director of the computer network CompuShop, one of twenty-five influential people in the US retail, appeared on the way of the partners. He advised friends to have a 4-hour brainstorm at breakfast.
On July 4, 1986, friends took paper, pencils, went to a nearby restaurant and asked each other what they wanted and what would help them personally. The idea was to use familiar paper tools on the computer. On the napkin was scribbled system with the code name YES (Yes, All Sale - Yes, all sell). ACT was conceived that morning! ..
The very first ACT prototype! on a piece of notebook. To a true genius, the tool is not important.
Three weeks later, there was a meeting with an investor in which he saw the schemes of the future system on paper and learned about the goals of YES. The investor gave $ 50,000, then arranged several meetings with interested partners, and friends raised $ 400,000 in investment over the week. After 9 months, on April 1, 1987, ACT was released! .. Mike Mooney considers one of his masterminds ... a laptop. Even then, he was delighted with the mobility of the device and he predicted the widespread penetration of mobile technologies. Although in many respects it was CRM that did not learn to be truly mobile - in part because there is no need for it.
One of the first users of CRM (then this name was not yet) were traders and FOREX-companies (in the best sense of the word). These guys had an insane sales and no technology in service - but it was with CRM that their personal progress started, turning these companies into high-tech, with blockchain and high-frequency trading.
In the mid-1980s, the era of data-based marketing began (and this was called database marketing). For the first time in history, information began to integrate with the sales strategy. The future of the corporate software market for some time turned into the hands of marketers. Just because it was not those marketers who are now SMM spamming, but real data professionals. They consolidated and integrated analytical platforms, transactional databases, customer data, and based on all this they learned how to manage sales and relationships. At the back office were accounting, marketing and support systems. At the same time, the concept of cold calls appeared in the usual sense.
At this stage, banks and insurance companies became the main engines of progress. CRM (the market of which was no longer limited to ACT!) Followed by industrial companies, medicine, pharmacy, retail, utilities (well, that's where, like in Russia, there was then the USSR, the command economy and the secret talented automated control systems raped by the bureaucracy and the authorities' fears - but how would scientists and developers know the real state of the economy and national economy ?!). Even then, the business of Western Europe and the United States understood: whoever serves the customers better and builds relationships with them, he sells and, therefore, makes a profit.
The beginning of the 90s has already become the time of enterprise resource planning all over the world - in the conditions of tough competition and constant growth in production and technology, the problem of cost optimization has come to the fore. At the same time, database marketing has been transformed into sales automation. The first SFA-systems (Sales Force Automation) appeared, which combined the management of the company, the management of contacts, opportunities and transactions. The term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was introduced in 1995 (according to one of the versions, in the depths of IBM).
By 1997, trust in CRM systems temporarily declined, ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which provided automation of business operations, production planning and production processes, shipping, logistics, finance, etc. — came to the fore. CRM was only a module of these giants. However, this did not last long: the operational work was quick and clear, sales people understood their business and did not want to understand the production, they needed solutions for the front office.
In 1984, Thomas Siebel was hired by Oracle and soon became a distributor of software for relational databases — his main task was to train Oracle sales representatives and consultants. He gave them a comprehensive idea of ​​how to present Oracle solutions to potential clients. Zibel was not just a salesman or coach, he became the best of the best in a surprisingly short time. By the way, the secret of his career and the advancing of his colleagues is simple to disgrace: unlike the others, he was technically savvy and because of this he easily translated all the nuances from a complex technical language to a simple human one. Such a success could not pass by Oracle co-founder and CEO Lawrence (Larry) Ellison, who very quickly raised the talented Siebel to a top manager.
Three years after starting work at Oracle, Zibel became direct marketing director and found himself face-to-face with the problem — his subordinates (consultants and sales representatives) were losing time, effort, and resources due to poorly structured customer information. Inefficiency had to be urgently eliminated, and Zibel developed a program that was designed to simplify the interaction of salespeople within Oracle. The results were impressive.
In 1989, Siebel offered Allison to sell the OASIS program (Oracle Advanced Sales Information System, Oracle Automated Sales Information System) to external customers. Allison did not see the commercial potential of the system and remained indifferent to the proposal of the subordinate. Frustrated, Siebel in 1990 took a vacation ... and never returned, having sold his share of Oracle shares at the peak of growth (which soon collapsed due to a financial scandal). But strangely, Zibel did not immediately open his office.
He did several things as a mercenary CEO and in 1993 established Siebel Systems in partnership with former Oracle marketer Patricia House. Zibel did not look at similar solutions and focused on customer satisfaction. Instead of cutting the release after the release to his own taste, he devoted a tremendous amount of time to communicating with clients, collecting business requirements, and studying the features and needs of various business areas. It was a rigorous research work, and its result was Siebel Sales Enterprise, a program for automating trade, sales, and later - marketing, and service. Zibel was the first to come to universality, which the CRM industry will think about much later.
From a technical point of view, it was a complex software that was based on a powerful database and distributed customer information among managers, sales representatives, salespeople, and call centers (telemarketers). The solution completely closed the problem of duplicating clients from different managers, helped collect information about preferences, and worked on marketing tasks. Zibel attracted investors and in 1996 became the owner of 280 million dollars, and 40 of his employees woke up millionaires. With a 15% stake in the company, by 1999 Zibel grew his personal capital to a value in excess of $ 1 billion.
Thomas Siebel in 1997. Photo by Jerry Telfer
From 1995 to 2000, Tom Siebel led not just the developer and vendor of "Mother of All CRM" (sometimes called Siebel CRM), but one of the most profitable companies in the United States. Profit growth was consistently more than 100% compared to the previous year, the company controlled 70% of the CRM market, and Compaq, IBM and Cisco Systems were among its clients. In 2001, the company sold software for more than two billion dollars. This could not annoy the former boss Tom - Larry Ellison, who was asleep and saw him destroy Siebel.
Actually, Allison did not have to go to war - the crisis of 2002 and the growth of weighty competitors SAP, PeopleSoft, Salesforce and Oracle forced Siebel to make massive reductions and feel not a giant resting on his laurels, but a company that got into a tough competitive environment. In May 2004, Thomas Siebel resigned as CEO, remaining the CEO. In 2005, Oracle bought Siebel CRM for $ 5.8 billion in a “friendly” deal.
It was Siebel who introduced in CRM those things that we now call KPI, loyalty program, client analytics. He did not just sell CRM, he worked in it and tested ideas on his own customer base, he himself every day argued how much you can grow if you work correctly in the CRM system. The management style of Zibel contributed a lot to success: it was harsh and authoritarian, demanding exceptional professionalism from the staff. Siebel differed from the democratic offices of Silicon Valley of the 90s, even the dress code and rules of catering were regulated. Without such an approach, that large-scale and multi-billion Siebel would simply not exist.
At the very beginning of the 2000s, two hostile groups were formed in the revived CRM market: analytical CRM and operational CRM. Analytical offers OLAP-cubes, hundreds of reports, product and product matrices, carried the marketing ideology on data from the 80s-90s. Operating theaters were workhorses focused on working with clients, documentation, transactions and processes.
Our Region Soft CRM came out in 2007 and, like many other domestic competitors, was extremely operational at that time and immediately ran into competition with analytical systems. By the way, neither operational nor analytical systems survived in their pure form — universal ones survived and those who could become universal (for example, in addition to the operational set of tools and functionality of the ERP system, more than 100 different analytical and operational reports were provided).
Why were doomed "narrow" CRM-systems?
In general, it was necessary to go to optimized solutions that would suit all commercial (and preferably, industrial and service) divisions at once. By the way, Paul Greenberg’s CRM with the Speed ​​of Light book (a Russian-language publication, a very interesting story) became a peculiar manifesto of the universality of CRM systems.
In the late 90s - early 2000s, the first online CRM systems entered the market. The pioneer here was Siebel, which in 1999 launched the mobile system for handheld computers (PDAs) Siebel Sales Handheld.
Following mobile versions released SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft. However, mobile systems did not succeed - one of the reasons was the lack of accessible and functional mobile devices, at this point the corporate software market was ahead of the iron market by almost a decade.
However, the idea of ​​reducing the price of owning a CRM system did not leave vendors, and in the same 1999, the companies released the first cloud solution. Then the clouds were a really cheap alternative to their own expensive servers. In the field of providing CRM as a service (SaaS) service, Salesforce has become a pioneer, which is still the world leader in the implementation of advanced technologies in its software and the trendsetter in the market. The first cloud-based CRM was extremely simple and suitable only for small businesses, but the vendor actively developed it and soon large enterprises tested the cloud. Not everyone liked it.
The idea of ​​the cloud then seemed very attractive - no resources for you on your site, administrators, servers, and other costs and problems. However, large companies in the Russian and Western markets (especially German) were skeptical of the clouds - and they are still concerned about the security and protection of commercial information, so vendors either support full desktop versions or install special server builds on the client’s hardware. The cloud vendors themselves also turned the wrong way, setting too high a subscription fee (and in Russia is often tied to our inhuman exchange rates) - as a result, the cost of owning a cloud is much higher than the cost of implementing perpetual desktop licenses.
The very beginning of the 2000s was marked by the massive bankruptcy of the so-called dot-com (Internet companies). However, IT giants were not at a loss and used the collapse of the dotcom bubble to enter the corporate systems market. In 2003, Microsoft rolled out a comprehensive solution that combined the MS Office suite, Outlook mail and a CRM system. Very quickly, Microsoft Dynamics CRM became a leading player in the market and, which is not typical for other import systems, relatively easily entered the Russian market. The strong position of the company in Russia, the network of partners and system integrators played a significant role in this. True, Dynamics did not bother too much with the peculiarities of the Russian market, but made it work for partners who write paid connectors for "features of the national business", in particular, 1C and primary documentation zoo. The price tag from this scenario, of course, does not decrease. By the way, at the same time, Oracle bought Siebel CRM and laid the CRM standard on data.
In 2004, another significant solution for the CRM systems market was released - the first open source system, Sugar CRM. The project turned out to be extremely successful, a huge number of forks appeared, among which one of the most famous is vTiger CRM. Open Source is thriving now, but again it’s quite expensive - the code that you got for free requires very paid support, service, and even a full-time programmer doesn’t save the situation - the wages of such specialists remain above the market average for almost a decade.
In 2007, thanks to the development of data centers and the internal processes of Salesforce, an interesting platform appeared - the business systems development environment. Every business got the opportunity for the finest customization. Prior to that, palm among the platforms held Siebel.
Among experts, it is customary to single out the latest stage in the development of CRM systems - the era of social CRM, when systems must collect complete information about customers, including through the social networking API. Above, we told why this is not a trend. And in general, to talk about trends in the CRM market as a whole = just forget about the millions of micro, small and medium-sized companies that use CRM systems as a working tool, rather than seeking to build their own traps for customers' personal data. A clearer trend is CRM work with big data and IoT, for example, in retail. This may well be a continuation of the story.
Today, the market has a lot of CRM-systems and those who are called by them. Some have already entered themselves in the context of the story, some will never do that. Perhaps you are wondering in perplexity - how about us, in Russia? The answer is much shorter than the article: CRM in Russia until 1991 - these are state-owned automated control systems, since 1991 import systems have started to appear in banks and brokers, and since 2002 purely domestic solutions have begun to appear, including in the CIS countries. Some went down in history, some became history. Modern news has not even come to her. The story continues.
An overview of the evolution for you were guys from the RegionSoft CRM team - a system with 11 years of history. But more about that another time.
- who was godfather of CRM systems
- how to design software on a napkin without UML diagrams
- how did the mechanical CRM
- how many billion dollars did Oracle pay for its lack of foresight.
And of course, the CRM industry does not stop there. And this is not necessarily a big date, the cars are leoning and everything else. However, about everything in order.
Caricatura.ru
Rolodex - almost a mechanical CRM system
The first CRM-systems were one-dimensional, that is, all customer information was presented in the form of cards. In fact, these were card files that contained basic information about the company's counterparties.
')
A classic example of such a card file was the legendary Rolodex (Rolodex) - a rotating catalog with cards that kept customer contact information. By the way, the name Rolodex comes from a combination of the English words rolling and index, which in itself reveals the purpose of the subject - such, in general, a manual search engine. The data in the Rodelex could be entered manually in a special form or it could be taken from the client on a business card on Rolodex letterheads.
By the way, about a year ago, a wave of demand for “rodexes” swept across Russian Facebook - users shared links and images of outlandish business card holders, albeit already Chinese ones. The present Rolodex was invented in 1956 by Arnold Nystadler and Ildor Nilson (Arnold Neustadter and Hildaur Neilson), and gained success in the market two years later, in 1958.
Modern view of the Rolodex
The device was an improved version of Wheeldex and a relative of the equally well-known Autodex, an electronic telephone directory management system that automatically opened for the selected letter. Generally, talking about the inventions of Zephyr American, one cannot help stopping for a moment and list some more breakthrough “gadgets” for that time: Swivodex is a non-spill ink pot, Punchodex is a paper puncher, Clipodex is an auxiliary device that was placed on the stenographer’s knee. There was another "ex" - Memex - the conceptual predecessor of hypertext. A part of inventions, as unnecessary, has sunk into oblivion, and rolodex has become a household name for personal organizers and for the process of accumulation and storage of business contacts.
Until the end of the 80s, sellers in Western Europe and the United States rotated rubbed rodexes, wrote comments to transactions on paper, stitching them into folders. It is scary to say, but in Russia, some companies still do this - and then the notebooks leave with the employees, and the folders gloatly sink into the shredder before dismissal.
Mainframes
In the 1970s, personal computers began to appear in companies all over the world, and with a light hand of IBM, the so-called era of mainframes, huge universal high-performance and fault-tolerant servers with impressive memory resources, began.
Nowadays, mainframes are used for complex resource-intensive computational operations, and modern CRM systems are less demanding of resources. At the same time, mainframe systems were used to digitize data that was manually created at one time — this greatly accelerated the search and saved physical storage space. Then the first sales automation systems began to appear. Interns for years could sit in the offices and drive in the data obtained manually in an automated system.
While the old Rolodex coexisted peacefully with mainframes, a revolution in business automation was being prepared in Dallas. In 1986, Pat Sullivan and Mike Mooney founded Conductor Software and created a product as close as possible to what is installed on our PC with you - the ACT! System. First, the abbreviation was decoded as Automated Control Technology, but in 1987 it became famous as Automated Contact Tracking (contact management system). Deciphering the name did not convey all that the system was able to do - in fact, it was the software for managing the sales process and customer interaction. By the way, in 1993, the company, renamed Contact Software International, was sold to Symantec Corporation, and in 1999 - SalesLogix. In 2001, all this was taken over by Sage, the system was renamed ACT! Sage, it became known to the Russian market with the last name - Sage ACT! (sometimes in not very professional reviews found Sage CRM). In 2013, the system became again simply called ACT! .. The company is developing, its headquarters is located in Arizona.
If we consider not the market as a whole, but each ERP / CRM system separately, then there are quite a few long-livers companies who have been developing and successfully implementing CRM for 10–20 years or more. The secret is relatively simple. CRM in terms of functionality is very agile - new business requirements stimulate continuous development. In fact, you need to listen to users and develop the system in exactly the direction that they need. The history of the Russian market shows that the attempts of CRM vendors to impose their developments and convince customers that "they need what they don’t need" have failed.
We have been developing RegionSoft CRM for more than 10 years, and by its transformation from version to version, you can monitor the realities of Russian small and medium businesses: from contact management to business processes and virtual PBXs. By the way, now there is another imposition of the term "social CRM". The vendors took the available social networking APIs and filed modules and individual programs that aggregate customer data. This is not necessary in the B2B sphere, and in B2C, not every company is ready to draw such software for money - it's easier to simply sell through groups and VKontakte or Facebook pages. And who is capable (insurers, travel companies, services, etc.), they have long ago integrated social networks with their CRM / ERP systems. Social CRM is perhaps one of the most obscure trends for small and medium businesses.
ACT! - the progenitor of CRM-systems
But back to the progenitor of the CRM-systems ACT! and let's take a closer look at what he was like and how the idea that turned the whole business world in general came. Our story is based on an English-language interview with the founder, Mike Mooney. And this is a really cool story.
In the 1980s, there was no talk of a CRM market; there were three categories in the application software: spreadsheets (Lotus), text editors (Wordstar and WordPerfect), and databases (dBase and Paradox). Pat Sullivan and Mike Muni were sales people and knew for sure that quality of customer relations was an important competitive advantage at the heart of successful sales. By the way, the partners themselves at the time used the Rolodex. Having received $ 100,000 of investment from a business angel, friends created a program that helped computer store salesmen to configure bills, set discounts, write goods out of stock and print it all. As is often the case, contrary to expectations, the novelty crashed and $ 85,000 went into the tube. There were two ways out: to close the business and return to the investor $ 15,000 or a second. The second solution was the decision to sell the company MarginMaker. It was then that the general director of the computer network CompuShop, one of twenty-five influential people in the US retail, appeared on the way of the partners. He advised friends to have a 4-hour brainstorm at breakfast.
On July 4, 1986, friends took paper, pencils, went to a nearby restaurant and asked each other what they wanted and what would help them personally. The idea was to use familiar paper tools on the computer. On the napkin was scribbled system with the code name YES (Yes, All Sale - Yes, all sell). ACT was conceived that morning! ..
The very first ACT prototype! on a piece of notebook. To a true genius, the tool is not important.
Three weeks later, there was a meeting with an investor in which he saw the schemes of the future system on paper and learned about the goals of YES. The investor gave $ 50,000, then arranged several meetings with interested partners, and friends raised $ 400,000 in investment over the week. After 9 months, on April 1, 1987, ACT was released! .. Mike Mooney considers one of his masterminds ... a laptop. Even then, he was delighted with the mobility of the device and he predicted the widespread penetration of mobile technologies. Although in many respects it was CRM that did not learn to be truly mobile - in part because there is no need for it.
One of the first users of CRM (then this name was not yet) were traders and FOREX-companies (in the best sense of the word). These guys had an insane sales and no technology in service - but it was with CRM that their personal progress started, turning these companies into high-tech, with blockchain and high-frequency trading.
The era of the birth of classic CRM
In the mid-1980s, the era of data-based marketing began (and this was called database marketing). For the first time in history, information began to integrate with the sales strategy. The future of the corporate software market for some time turned into the hands of marketers. Just because it was not those marketers who are now SMM spamming, but real data professionals. They consolidated and integrated analytical platforms, transactional databases, customer data, and based on all this they learned how to manage sales and relationships. At the back office were accounting, marketing and support systems. At the same time, the concept of cold calls appeared in the usual sense.
At this stage, banks and insurance companies became the main engines of progress. CRM (the market of which was no longer limited to ACT!) Followed by industrial companies, medicine, pharmacy, retail, utilities (well, that's where, like in Russia, there was then the USSR, the command economy and the secret talented automated control systems raped by the bureaucracy and the authorities' fears - but how would scientists and developers know the real state of the economy and national economy ?!). Even then, the business of Western Europe and the United States understood: whoever serves the customers better and builds relationships with them, he sells and, therefore, makes a profit.
The beginning of the 90s has already become the time of enterprise resource planning all over the world - in the conditions of tough competition and constant growth in production and technology, the problem of cost optimization has come to the fore. At the same time, database marketing has been transformed into sales automation. The first SFA-systems (Sales Force Automation) appeared, which combined the management of the company, the management of contacts, opportunities and transactions. The term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was introduced in 1995 (according to one of the versions, in the depths of IBM).
By 1997, trust in CRM systems temporarily declined, ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which provided automation of business operations, production planning and production processes, shipping, logistics, finance, etc. — came to the fore. CRM was only a module of these giants. However, this did not last long: the operational work was quick and clear, sales people understood their business and did not want to understand the production, they needed solutions for the front office.
The story of the "mother of all CRM" - the center of the history of CRM-systems
In 1984, Thomas Siebel was hired by Oracle and soon became a distributor of software for relational databases — his main task was to train Oracle sales representatives and consultants. He gave them a comprehensive idea of ​​how to present Oracle solutions to potential clients. Zibel was not just a salesman or coach, he became the best of the best in a surprisingly short time. By the way, the secret of his career and the advancing of his colleagues is simple to disgrace: unlike the others, he was technically savvy and because of this he easily translated all the nuances from a complex technical language to a simple human one. Such a success could not pass by Oracle co-founder and CEO Lawrence (Larry) Ellison, who very quickly raised the talented Siebel to a top manager.
Three years after starting work at Oracle, Zibel became direct marketing director and found himself face-to-face with the problem — his subordinates (consultants and sales representatives) were losing time, effort, and resources due to poorly structured customer information. Inefficiency had to be urgently eliminated, and Zibel developed a program that was designed to simplify the interaction of salespeople within Oracle. The results were impressive.
In 1989, Siebel offered Allison to sell the OASIS program (Oracle Advanced Sales Information System, Oracle Automated Sales Information System) to external customers. Allison did not see the commercial potential of the system and remained indifferent to the proposal of the subordinate. Frustrated, Siebel in 1990 took a vacation ... and never returned, having sold his share of Oracle shares at the peak of growth (which soon collapsed due to a financial scandal). But strangely, Zibel did not immediately open his office.
He did several things as a mercenary CEO and in 1993 established Siebel Systems in partnership with former Oracle marketer Patricia House. Zibel did not look at similar solutions and focused on customer satisfaction. Instead of cutting the release after the release to his own taste, he devoted a tremendous amount of time to communicating with clients, collecting business requirements, and studying the features and needs of various business areas. It was a rigorous research work, and its result was Siebel Sales Enterprise, a program for automating trade, sales, and later - marketing, and service. Zibel was the first to come to universality, which the CRM industry will think about much later.
From a technical point of view, it was a complex software that was based on a powerful database and distributed customer information among managers, sales representatives, salespeople, and call centers (telemarketers). The solution completely closed the problem of duplicating clients from different managers, helped collect information about preferences, and worked on marketing tasks. Zibel attracted investors and in 1996 became the owner of 280 million dollars, and 40 of his employees woke up millionaires. With a 15% stake in the company, by 1999 Zibel grew his personal capital to a value in excess of $ 1 billion.
Thomas Siebel in 1997. Photo by Jerry Telfer
From 1995 to 2000, Tom Siebel led not just the developer and vendor of "Mother of All CRM" (sometimes called Siebel CRM), but one of the most profitable companies in the United States. Profit growth was consistently more than 100% compared to the previous year, the company controlled 70% of the CRM market, and Compaq, IBM and Cisco Systems were among its clients. In 2001, the company sold software for more than two billion dollars. This could not annoy the former boss Tom - Larry Ellison, who was asleep and saw him destroy Siebel.
Actually, Allison did not have to go to war - the crisis of 2002 and the growth of weighty competitors SAP, PeopleSoft, Salesforce and Oracle forced Siebel to make massive reductions and feel not a giant resting on his laurels, but a company that got into a tough competitive environment. In May 2004, Thomas Siebel resigned as CEO, remaining the CEO. In 2005, Oracle bought Siebel CRM for $ 5.8 billion in a “friendly” deal.
It was Siebel who introduced in CRM those things that we now call KPI, loyalty program, client analytics. He did not just sell CRM, he worked in it and tested ideas on his own customer base, he himself every day argued how much you can grow if you work correctly in the CRM system. The management style of Zibel contributed a lot to success: it was harsh and authoritarian, demanding exceptional professionalism from the staff. Siebel differed from the democratic offices of Silicon Valley of the 90s, even the dress code and rules of catering were regulated. Without such an approach, that large-scale and multi-billion Siebel would simply not exist.
2000s in the world of CRM: the era of confrontation
Analytical vs operational
At the very beginning of the 2000s, two hostile groups were formed in the revived CRM market: analytical CRM and operational CRM. Analytical offers OLAP-cubes, hundreds of reports, product and product matrices, carried the marketing ideology on data from the 80s-90s. Operating theaters were workhorses focused on working with clients, documentation, transactions and processes.
Our Region Soft CRM came out in 2007 and, like many other domestic competitors, was extremely operational at that time and immediately ran into competition with analytical systems. By the way, neither operational nor analytical systems survived in their pure form — universal ones survived and those who could become universal (for example, in addition to the operational set of tools and functionality of the ERP system, more than 100 different analytical and operational reports were provided).
By the way, while we were writing a post, we also decided to slightly notify ourselves about how RegionSoft CRM appeared:In 2006, we launched RegionSoft CRM - our own system for managing contacts and sales. Over 11 years of development, it has been transformed into a powerful full-featured desktop CRM / ERP system with several editions for any type of business - from a small IP to a large holding. To date, more than 5,000 customers use our CRM.
The news of the exit was not yet RegionSoft, but already CRM: Contact Management
We distributed the system for free and the first customers tested it, and then could buy it back at a 50% discount. CRM entered the market and became popular due to the relevance due to constant updates, reliability and always economically reasonable price - we still keep the lowest possible price and do not wind the cost "from the ceiling and from the baldy."
Why were doomed "narrow" CRM-systems?
- Companies do not need an expensive software zoo; universal solutions provide better end-to-end automation.
- It is important for divisions to exchange data and coordinate processes in a single CRM system, and not to “drag” data from different systems.
- Analytical OLAP reports were overloaded and difficult for some employees. In fact, in small companies, the paid functionality was idle.
- Analytical CRM often required complex support and fairly powerful hardware - this financial burden hit companies.
- The pure operational CRM lacked accountability and analytics - in fact, they only cared about the process.
In general, it was necessary to go to optimized solutions that would suit all commercial (and preferably, industrial and service) divisions at once. By the way, Paul Greenberg’s CRM with the Speed ​​of Light book (a Russian-language publication, a very interesting story) became a peculiar manifesto of the universality of CRM systems.
Cloud vs desktop
In the late 90s - early 2000s, the first online CRM systems entered the market. The pioneer here was Siebel, which in 1999 launched the mobile system for handheld computers (PDAs) Siebel Sales Handheld.
Following mobile versions released SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft. However, mobile systems did not succeed - one of the reasons was the lack of accessible and functional mobile devices, at this point the corporate software market was ahead of the iron market by almost a decade.
However, the idea of ​​reducing the price of owning a CRM system did not leave vendors, and in the same 1999, the companies released the first cloud solution. Then the clouds were a really cheap alternative to their own expensive servers. In the field of providing CRM as a service (SaaS) service, Salesforce has become a pioneer, which is still the world leader in the implementation of advanced technologies in its software and the trendsetter in the market. The first cloud-based CRM was extremely simple and suitable only for small businesses, but the vendor actively developed it and soon large enterprises tested the cloud. Not everyone liked it.
The idea of ​​the cloud then seemed very attractive - no resources for you on your site, administrators, servers, and other costs and problems. However, large companies in the Russian and Western markets (especially German) were skeptical of the clouds - and they are still concerned about the security and protection of commercial information, so vendors either support full desktop versions or install special server builds on the client’s hardware. The cloud vendors themselves also turned the wrong way, setting too high a subscription fee (and in Russia is often tied to our inhuman exchange rates) - as a result, the cost of owning a cloud is much higher than the cost of implementing perpetual desktop licenses.
The very beginning of the 2000s was marked by the massive bankruptcy of the so-called dot-com (Internet companies). However, IT giants were not at a loss and used the collapse of the dotcom bubble to enter the corporate systems market. In 2003, Microsoft rolled out a comprehensive solution that combined the MS Office suite, Outlook mail and a CRM system. Very quickly, Microsoft Dynamics CRM became a leading player in the market and, which is not typical for other import systems, relatively easily entered the Russian market. The strong position of the company in Russia, the network of partners and system integrators played a significant role in this. True, Dynamics did not bother too much with the peculiarities of the Russian market, but made it work for partners who write paid connectors for "features of the national business", in particular, 1C and primary documentation zoo. The price tag from this scenario, of course, does not decrease. By the way, at the same time, Oracle bought Siebel CRM and laid the CRM standard on data.
In 2004, another significant solution for the CRM systems market was released - the first open source system, Sugar CRM. The project turned out to be extremely successful, a huge number of forks appeared, among which one of the most famous is vTiger CRM. Open Source is thriving now, but again it’s quite expensive - the code that you got for free requires very paid support, service, and even a full-time programmer doesn’t save the situation - the wages of such specialists remain above the market average for almost a decade.
In 2007, thanks to the development of data centers and the internal processes of Salesforce, an interesting platform appeared - the business systems development environment. Every business got the opportunity for the finest customization. Prior to that, palm among the platforms held Siebel.
Among experts, it is customary to single out the latest stage in the development of CRM systems - the era of social CRM, when systems must collect complete information about customers, including through the social networking API. Above, we told why this is not a trend. And in general, to talk about trends in the CRM market as a whole = just forget about the millions of micro, small and medium-sized companies that use CRM systems as a working tool, rather than seeking to build their own traps for customers' personal data. A clearer trend is CRM work with big data and IoT, for example, in retail. This may well be a continuation of the story.
Today, the market has a lot of CRM-systems and those who are called by them. Some have already entered themselves in the context of the story, some will never do that. Perhaps you are wondering in perplexity - how about us, in Russia? The answer is much shorter than the article: CRM in Russia until 1991 - these are state-owned automated control systems, since 1991 import systems have started to appear in banks and brokers, and since 2002 purely domestic solutions have begun to appear, including in the CIS countries. Some went down in history, some became history. Modern news has not even come to her. The story continues.
An overview of the evolution for you were guys from the RegionSoft CRM team - a system with 11 years of history. But more about that another time.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/325946/
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