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 26th.
Comments (2)
Great idea! I’m going to go vote now.
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