For the 10th year in a row, CRM Magazine has released their annual list of the top customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors and products.
CRM Magazine has 3 ratings categories - enterprise, mid-market and small business - and the top firms vary by category with one exception. Salesforce.com dominates the leader board and is the highest scoring CRM company in all 3 categories. Not surprisingly, Salesforce also won in the sales automation category.
Another firm that did well in the small business ratings is SugarCRM. It's an open source product and they won in the overall open source category. Key quote on SugarCRM:
"Extending its winning streak to four years, SugarCRMswept 2011’s open-source category, scoring the highest marks in almost every metric. “Anytime you talk about open-source CRM, Sugar comes up; they’re by far the best known and by far the largest,” Fauscette says."
According to the CRM Magazine article, only 30% of small businesses have CRM systems in place. I think this is primarily due to cost and complexity. Historically CRM systems were expensive to own and hard to maintain and use.
But with the advent of cloud-based CRM systems costs are much lower and they are much easier to use and maintain. Because of this, we are confident the next few years will see a strong increase in CRM system usage by small businesses.
BTW, SugarCRM has a nice white paper on buying CRM systems. The 10 Step Guide to Buying the Right CRM Solution requires registration.
I was honored to be a judge again this year. It's a lot of fun evaluating the systems and seeing how the industry and products evolve over time.