Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Andrew

I’ve worked in CRM, reporting, analysis and sales management for 15 years and the largest single problem suffered with most CRM packages is the cheese-paring mentality of many clients who will save money by whatever means possible, usually by doing self-installation and configuration. Then they take 6 months to do what I can do in a few days and go on to spend 18 months trying to unscramble the mess they have made. Most companies buy in their electric power from a power company, rather than building their own power station. Even if they have a commercial supplier, they don’t often decide to build the gear they want to run on electricity from a DIY manual! So why is CRM so different?

And don’t forget the user training aspects. All CRM software can be self learned if the company is prepared to waste many weeks trying to get a willing gofer to show staff how to do what they want to do with a system. At least with an established package the training schedules have already been worked out, the manuals are available and a qualified trainer can train most of the staff (5 to 10 at a time)on most of the functions in a day. If you use Sugar, as Mrs Beeton once said about cooking a goose, “First catch your trainer”, then train him, get him to write the course and then enjoy the spectacle of the blind leading the blind over a period of several months. Disenchantment usually results in the project being abandoned.

Functionally, Sugar is pretty powerful if you can firstly work out what you want it to do, secondly configure it to do so (Preferably in this century) and then implement it without bringing your organisation to it’s knees – after all, I’m sure that you have a real job to do rather than reinventing the wheel.

I’ve tried out all versions of Sugar and found the enterprise version quite comprehensive. I’m trained in installing and configuring over 8 packages, working with Access, SQL server and MySQL, so technically and functionally this should have been easy. It wasn’t and I set myself a test to see how long it would take me to do a basic implementation on 4 networked computers against one of our new analysts doing it in Maximizer. They had Maximizer up and running with the users trained in 3 days with some pretty sophisticated automation. I’d just about finished trying to make the server and clients talk to each other using Sugar.

Then I tried a forecasting and quotation setup and compared it against SymVolli - Maximizer is totally useless at these functions!- Sugar took me a week to produce a working CRM / Forecasting / reporting system which was riddled with bugs. Staff training would have taken all year as there is no existing documentation.

Configuring SymVolli took a day and as using it can be picked up by a goldfish, the training requirement is measured in minutes.

My view is very personal – I have no axe to grind; I am involved with SymVolli and used to be one of the worlds best known advocates of Maximizer. I now have little to do with the latter software as they decided that if I wanted to continue to be accredited, then they wanted lots of money to send me on irrelevant courses. The CRM market has also moved on over the last 10 years but max seems to have plateaued.
Given the exposure I gave here and elsewhere (All with an interest declared) I would say that they’ve lost about 1700 license sales since as I suggest other solutions, the owners of which are both willing and keen to ensure that I am up-to-date for free!

Sorry is this seems like a big negative about DIY CRM and DIY Sugar in particular, but most executives who want to implement a CRM system also have another more important job to do. Over the last 10 years I know of 40 managers who have been given the boot for playing at CRM administrators whilst taking their eyes off their profit-making real work.

If you do go for Sugar due to its features – that’s fine. Get someone to specify, configure and implement it and then to train your staff. If you are going to choose it on price per licence, just bear in mind that in a working system, the license costs account for about 8% of the total cost implantation!

Best wishes



Steve Alker

If you are using GM <= v. 5.5 (perhaps 6 as well but I'm not as familiar with its inner workings) you will have a bear of a time extracting all the data from the db. There are software tools available which can do the job. Find out from your integrator if they have the capabilities to do this.

One of the tools is GoldBox: https://www.redstonesoftbase.com/

If you are using Goldmine V5.7 in a highly stand alone system, then it is likely that it will run on the Borland engine. It’s a bit fiddly, but all the data is stored in discrete tables along with a relational reference which ties the documents to the contacts and the contacts to a company. The user defined fields are either indexed and are thus easy to relate and extract or they are most likely not indexed. One of the best ways of handling this is to get a dBase guy to ensure that all the different datasets have relational operators attached them – then you can import the data one table at a time by matching the unique identifiers.

Try:

https://www.sasdata.co.uk/DataManagement/DataMigration/tabid/204/Default.as...

If by sheer fluke you were the other company who adopted the Microsoft SQL version, then all the data is contained in SQL tables and every line in the table has a unique identifier.

The Borland data can be read by a number of other database engines – Pervasive SQL or MySQL for example, but what you have to watch out for is the different default lengths of data fields in the different systems. For instance, a text field in SQL is 256 characters maximum but a note field is not limited in SQL though it is limited in other systems. Documents present a similar problem, depending on whether the documents are embedded in a Goldmine File or linked to a Goldmine record. Matching letters to contacts is quite tricky as the unique identifier is hidden in the structure to bind you into the Goldmine System! Maximizer is just as bad on this issue.

One solution would be to upgrade your v5.7 data to the latest Microsoft SQL version of Goldmine. It handles its own data re-arrangement quite well, even if it is still a dog of a product.

Once you can see the SQL tables, you can read them into anything.

SF.Com has dozens of data import utilities but do remember that they are usually third party products and SFDC offer no implied warranty that they will work for your data. Some of them are pure rubbish. Sugar has the same problem, but their user forum regularly discusses data migration.

Data migration services are expensive because they are a one off and are incredibly boring. We charge upwards of £1,200 a day, not because it is rocket science, but because it is so fiddly and tends to cause our techies to leap, lemming like, off the nearest cliff out of total stultification of the brain.

On last thing – before doing anything to the data, re-index it a few times. Most Goldmine exports fail because the bloody data is so corrupt. One of our clients had 400 Goldmine Users and they virtually had the service engineer living in their broom cupboard!

Steve Alker
Xspirt

PS, I nearly forget , but there is a multiple platform data aggregator package which will take field, text, numeric, note, list and document data from almost any source and convert it for use by another system. It is called Smart Point. If you send me an email address, I’ll send you their PDF – it goes on about integrating disparate data sources into SAP, but it works with anything.

It can be used for migrating data from a legacy system to a new one or it can be used for creating an integrated data screen for 4 or 4 different packages which will not talk to each other.