CRM Madness – The Power of the Sugar Community
2 weeks ago I came across a tweet promoting the CRM Madness competition. A fun spoof on the annual NCAA March Madness basketball competition. Capterra, online destination for business software buyers, put the 64 most popular CRM applications in a March Madness like tournament and created the CRMMadness competition. All it took was one tweet and I was hooked…
This was not just a popularity contest, the marketing team at Capterra was using the CRM Madness competition to do real competitive research as they explained on their blog introducing the competition.
Over the next 2 weeks, SugarCRM was matched up against the cream of the crop of CRM competitors. In a classic use case of social media, we used facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and the Sugar forums to get the word out to our Community. And the results were very clear. In round 2 we beat Sage CRM, in round 3 (sweet 16) Oracle Siebel come up short, in round 4 (elite 8) SAP CRM could not stand the heat and then in round 5 (final four) we beat salesforce.com. And we beat them fair and square with 30x the number of votes.
That put us in the championship round against PegaSystems who themselves among others beat Sage SalesLogix and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to get to the final match up.
During the championship round, the Sugar Community showed up and voted in large numbers for SugarCRM. We owe you a profound THANK YOU.
