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Move over SportsCenter!

You can now relive the excitement of Capterra’s 2012 CRM Madness tournament with this news clip.

Congratulations to SugarCRM!

After a month of intense face-offs amongst the 64 contenders in Capterra’s CRM Madness Tournament, it came down to just two remaining customer relationship management (CRM) solutions….

Sugar CRM vs. Pegasystems

Both “teams” had just three days, from April 2-4, to encourage users, friends, employees, and fans to vote for their CRM in order to take home the 2012 championship title.

Having both won their previous 5 matchups and defeating top seeded solutions such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics, both CRMs were well poised to win it all. Entering the final round, Pegasystems had a slight edge in voting, gaining a total of 1,106 votes in the first 5 rounds, while SugarCRM had acquired 1,068 so far.

It was a heated battle and well-played on both sides of the court, but ultimately, SugarCRM emerged victorious!

Here’s a closer look at how things shook out…

Championship Game Highlights

• As the championship game tipped off Monday morning, the votes came rolling in and climbed to more than 2000 by the end of the day Wednesday.
• Like Kentucky (the other March Madness winners), SugarCRM stole the show and ran away from the competition with 1352 votes. Pegasystems was the first runner up with 740 votes in the final round.
• Cumulatively, there were nearly 7,000 votes over the course of the competition
• CRM Madness was shared more than 1,500 times on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

While we’re happy to see so many CRM users visit the site and support their software providers, the real goal of CRM Madness was to educate companies on the wide variety of CRM choices available today. In that sense, all 350+ solutions in our CRM Directory are really winners in our eyes!

That said, we want offer a big thanks to SugarCRM for their active participation in the contest and a huge congrats on their victory!  As an open-souce, web-based CRM (with Social CRM capabilities as well!), they’re a great solution to consider no matter the size of your company. Their latest funding announcement shows that they are making big waves in the industry, so SugarCRM is definitely worth keeping an eye on if you’re in the market for new CRM software!

Last Thursday, the Final Four CRMs advanced in our CRM Madness Tournament. The winners were determined by a combined score, weighted 50/50 by the number of votes they received in the round and the number of monthly Google searches for their company/product.

Based off of those factors, we whittled down the Elite Eight to just four remaining CRMs, and, as a result, the matchups over the weekend were:

• Pega CRM vs. vtiger CRM
• SugarCRM vs. Salesforce

We decided to use Google searches as a factor in the tournament because it speaks to the overall popularity and brand recognition of the CRM products. One of the questions software buyers frequently ask us when shopping for a CRM solution is, “Which are the top solutions?” And our typical answer is that the best solution for you really depends on your company’s specific needs. However, we can provide a list of some of the most popular choices on the market based on a number of publicly-available stats (including Google searches and the others that we’ve been using throughout this contest). But perhaps the most meaningful statistic to determine a “top” CRM is whether a solution comes highly recommended by its users (which is why votes are such an important aspect of the contest). continue reading »

This weekend, as top seeds Syracuse, UNC, and Michigan State fell from glory, only one top seed—Kentucky — remained in the NCAA tournament.  Well, apparently that was all just foreshadowing what was to come in our CRM Madness Tournament.

This morning, the Elite Eight teams advanced, and only one top-seeded CRM made it through—Salesforce.com.

This round’s scores were based off of number of customers and votes, each making up 50% of the vendor’s overall score (just as in the previous rounds).  From Thursday morning through the weekend, there were more than 650 new votes among the Sweet Sixteen teams!

Here’s a look at what went down:

• They don’t call it the “Sweet” 16 for nothing: SugarCRM stole the round with 255 votes, breaking away from Oracle early on Thursday. And, despite the fact that Sugar was a lower overall seed, they actually report having more customers than Oracle’s Siebel, as well, with more than 50,000 businesses using SugarCRM.
• Underdogs play a full-court press: In my last post, I referenced how nobody could knock off the top CRMs (yet). Well, I guess their opponents took that to heart. ACT!, GoldMine, Pegasystems, and SalesBoom wasted no time ramping up votes and encouraging their customers, blog readers, and social media followers to help them advance. As a result, they all managed to upset their higher-ranked competitors.
• Refs make some tough calls: One CRM vendor pointed out in a comment on my previous post that customer and revenue data are not reliable metrics to consider because they are released by the vendors themselves (if at all), and many of the companies are not publicly-traded or vetted by third parties. That is a valid point and may very well be the case, but we are operating under the assumption that vendors are honest when they report these numbers on their websites and in press releases. We also asked all of the participants to provide this data prior to the start of the contest. But, when the data is either not available or unable to be released, then we looked at votes to compare. Thus, as we get into these later rounds, the votes become even more important. We were able to find the number of customers for all but two of our Sweet 16 CRMs, and the two in question received significantly less votes than their opponents (we’re talking single digits), so, actually, the refs had it pretty easy this time around.

The Final Four teams will be announced on Thursday morning, but voting ends Wednesday the 28^th. The next round will factor in monthly Google searches for 50% of the score, and votes for the other half. Make sure to vote once per day for your CRM at http://crmmadness.capterra.com, and encourage your colleagues and fellow-CRM fans on Twitter to do the same by using the hashtag #CRMmadness!

With the March Madness Sweet Sixteen teams returning to play this evening, we thought today was the perfect day to announce the 16 CRM software providers that will advance in our CRM Madness Tournament.

Since Monday, when we announced the round of 32, the remaining teams did a great job pulling in additional votes, bringing the contest total to over 1500 votes!

The sixteen remaining CRMs are (in no particular order)– Microsoft Dynamics, Pegasystems, SalesBoom, RightNow, NetSuite, ACT!, vtiger, Landslide, Infusionsoft, GoldMine, Commence, Salesforce.com, SAP, Highrise, SugarCRM, and Oracle Siebel. The playing field has really thinned out compared to the 350+ we stared with in our full CRM directory!

The scores for the Sweet Sixteen were based on votes collected since Monday and the company’s overall number of social media followers. We added the number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and LinkedIn followers for their respective company pages, and the total for the three networks accounted for 50% of the CRM’s score.

While number of social media followers is not really any indication of whether a particular CRM is a good fit for your company, it can be an interesting indicator of how engaged a company is with its own client base. It can also demonstrate how many customers are satisfied enough with their CRM to “like” or “follow” the vendor in social media. Of course, it’s not always an indicator of those things either, because many companies (and probably some of the ones included) advertise on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to attract more followers, thus essentially paying for these so-called “fans”. But that’s why it only makes up 50% of the score, and the other 50% was up to you- the voters!

Some Highlights from the Round of 32:

• Social Media Cinderella Stories: Our two lowest seeds remaining in the tournament are Commence (13) and SalesBoom (14). Not surprisingly, they’ve done a great job promoting the contest through social media and bringing in a high number of votes- despite the fact they were both at a disadvantage in terms of their overall number of social media followers compared to their competitors.
• Who Can Knock Off the Top Seeds? So far, nobody. All four of the top ranked CRMs have advanced to the Sweet 16, and the three remaining #2 seeds advanced, as well. Perhaps this next round we’ll see some bigger upsets?
• International Love: I wanted to give shout outs to the three remaining teams based outside the United States… SAP (based in Germany), vtiger (in India), and SalesBoom (in Canada). Despite the fact that March Madness is primarily a U.S. sporting event, they’ve stuck with the CRM Madness contest and gotten their fans involved, even if they’ve never heard the word “bracketology.”

Visit http://crmmadness.capterra.com to see the full bracket, and continue voting daily! Stay tuned for when we announce the Elite Eight CRMs on Monday, March 26^th.