“We were strong in B2B, but not as strong in the B2C space and financial services,” he says. “We did not sufficiently mimic the paper experience – I think we nailed that on this release.”

He’s speaking of Echosign 5.0, which came out a few weeks ago. The new version allows users to sign – as in, draw their names on a screen in the same way they’d take a pen to paper – as well as digitally ink contracts. “These are truly written signatures, only you can have them work on a BlackBerry or an iPhone.” The Palm Pre is also part of the mobile mix.

Contracts can also be signed and managed through Zoho and Salesforce.com, and through Google Apps, Google Docs and Adobe Acrobat. The new version also includes a new pdf.-to-html engine. “There’s a lot of value to .pdf forms, but they aren’t really meant to accept signatures,” Lemkin says. “We essentially rebuilt Acrobat to enable .pdfs to be approved and signed in html.”

Echo sign allows subscriptions to start earlier, to close customers who might otherwise be anxious about completing contracts, and feeds data about unsigned contracts to sales reps, who can then proactively work on the final step in the sales process.

Echosign has had a good year, says Lemkin – sales increased by 30 percent from April to May, continuing a trend for the company, and many of the company’s new customers came about “virally” after they signed a document electronically. “Our goal is to acquire 70 percent of our customers virally,” Lemkin says.

Why is Echosign doing well? They’re one of an assortment of CRM “peripherals” that are doing well in the recession by providing very fast return on investment for relatively little expense. “It absolutely makes sense that there’s an acceleration of interest in tools that are instantly ROI-positive,” Lemkin says. The trick is making sure that the prospective users understand the value of the technology in question.

There’s been a push recently – especially in marketing automation – toward making systems easier to use. First came things like campaign management, so the ordinary marketer could use the system without the need for a trained “expert” to translate ideas into actions. Lately, we’ve been seeing approaches that help make process creation easier, so that things like lead routing can be defined easily and quickly and allow managers to react in real time to changing conditions.

Nothing in the “CRM-isphere” exists in isolation, so it’s not a big surprise to see ideas like these hop and skip across to the service side of thing. KANA Software’s KANA 10, a service platform aimed at large enterprises which debuted yesterday, is a good example of just this – it’s a solution that confers that ability to manage processes on the fly to the service side of the CRM equation.

“We’ve adopted the idea of ‘service experience management,’” says Vikas Nehru, KANA’s vice president of marketing. “We want to deliver a good service experience for the customer, and at the same time allow contact center managers to take control of the service experience.”

What does that entail? The new version is a Web services-based solution that leverages IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio and KANA’s own experience with knowledge management and adds what KANA calls “experience flow functionality.” That functionality is the key to the solution; it provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating service processes, allowing managers to understand what customers need most often and adapt processes quickly to meet those needs.

“The service process – or experience flows – can now be built by service experts, not by IT,” says Nehru. “The business user can make the changes, add tab or delete tabs, and so on. Those changes can be made in minutes, not months.”

The process also allows managers to model the effects of changes to the processes before taking them live so they can “understand the value derived from each process,” Nehru says. That also ought to help them spot unintended problems that might be created by changes before they’re unleashed upon the customers.

The applications’ web services architecture allows existing technology and resources to be linked into a single application, providing a unified view of all pertinent customer information. “We really think we are bridging the gap between business and IT this way,” says Nehru.

This application is another step in the trend of offloading the responsibility for implementing process changes from IT and giving it back to the people who determine, execute and evaluate those processes. No longer do you have to suffer through a bad set of service processes while waiting for IT to get to your project, and more importantly, no longer will customers have to suffer because of your company’s internal inefficiencies in process management. And why should they? Those inefficiencies aren’t their fault.

Other companies in this space were quick to react to the news. For example, another SaaS provider, youcalc, is offering LucidEra customers six months of free service as an enticement to migrate to their product.

Why didn’t LucidEra make it? Some are blaming its relatively high cost; others point that its focus on sales ignored other areas of business that could also provide helpful metrics. Certainly the economy did not help. In any event, the company’s technology will re-appear in time within another product; the company is reportedly putting its IP up for sale.

If there’s any other good news in this, it’s that LucidEra is still supporting its customers, and is said to be working with customers to help them migrate to other platforms. They could establish a model of how to shut down an SaaS service – certainly not the accomplishment they set out to achieve, but one that could be helpful to others in the future.

Everyone knows that social media is going to have a major impact on CRM (the concept and the technology), but as lot of people on the sales side struggle with exactly how that will manifest itself. There doesn’t seem to be any such struggle on the service side of the equation; there’s a group of companies who seem almost overly eager to bring social media into a service context. There’s a real cultural difference between these companies and their competitors, I think; one group defines itself as “customer service solution providers” and the other still sees itself as “contact center solution providers.” One orients its identification around customers, the other around the technology. That’s a pretty telling choice of words.

Anyway, the idea that social media can provide almost a service hotline is really catching on. The fact of the matter is that many people, burned by poor customer service experiences in the past, may click a URL and ask a peer community for help before they dial for help to a vendor. Moreover, because the rapid evolution of communities, experts are starting to make themselves known through the depth of their participation and the usefulness of their comments.

Helpstream is not only acknowledging that fact, it’s seeking to leverage those experts to both improve service and cut the cost of service. First, it’s introduced HelpExchange, a new community intended to help its customers tap into best practices for customer service excellence, many of which it culled from experts in various communities. “It’s really driven by customers,” says Tony Nomelka, the company’s CEO. The exchange currently offers 40 in-depth articles on topics ranging from “Attracting Members and Evangelizing Community” to “Selecting and Deploying Technologies.”

That’s useful – and it shows that Helpstream’s walking its own walk. On top of that, last week the company introduced ActivityStream, a very interesting product that takes some social networking metaphors and uses them to provide a platform for “subscribing” to experts within communities, allowing users to keep close tabs on the most useful participants in conversations, and allowing companies to stay engaged with them and understand the conversations they’re influencing. The platform allows users to see what other participants have worked on in the community and understand their areas of expertise, and make it easier to find answers to questions by flagging other users who have common experiences and interests.

The company also introduced a mashup that allows Helpstream’s customer service functionality into Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand, so that users interact with the Helpstream portal while service and sales reps interact with them through the CRM interface they’re accustomed to.

This emphasis on the interface is really interesting; as we all know by now, adoption is the No. 1 killer of CRM efforts (you knew that, right? Right?), and letting users employ the interface that makes them feel most comfortable is one way of encouraging adoption. Exactly what that interface looks like – a Facebook page, Salesforce.com’s interface, a customer service interface – is not important as long as the interface allows the user to do what he or she needs to do. It’s a sign that certain vendors are letting go of the vanity around their own interfaces and approaching the issue from a customer-centric point of view – in other words, using CRM to help sell CRM. That’s an encouraging sign.

I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating: All the CRM technology, process refinement, customer intelligence and sales efficiency in the world is worthless unless your company is truly customer-focused, and never more so than when a customer has a service issue. One bad service experience can turn all the relationship-building a company does into nothing more than hollow promises and unmet expectations. It’s like a friendship: It’s easy to pal around when things are going well, but your real friends are there in tough times. And the companies that understand this have the opportunity to turn tough times into long-term loyalty.

In service-intensive industries – cable television, telecommunications, utilities – you’d think that providers would have seized on these opportunities a long time ago. Their customer relationships start with a service call, and any future service calls are likely to be urgent, since these industries represent technologies we’ve grow to take for granted. But even in churn-intensive areas like telecommunications, service has taken a back seat.

Why? “So many businesses are focused on creating the next big thing, the next great product, and fail to see the value of putting the focus on service,” says Yuval Brisker, CEO of TOA. “As a result, a lot of intensely creative people are focused on innovation in products, but very few are given the opportunity to innovate around supporting the customer.”

Brisker’s company works at solving one obvious area with room for improvement – customer appointment management. The goal is to move away from the old model – “Our technician will be there between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.” – and move to a new one where customers are kept informed, the service window is narrowed – and providers end up saving money, too. For example, in cases where a customer must leave during that window, there should be a system in which the customer can call and let the provider know this data, and which allows the data to be routed to service personnel. Without it, a technician may visit an empty house, delaying the customer’s service and necessitating another visit. Each visit can cost between $400 and $1000 – so making sure that every visit goes to a ready customer is important.

“You want a chain of communication to the customer,” said Brisker, “so they know they can make that call and it’ll be heard and acted upon, and so they know when service will arrive.” TOA delivers that in a SaaS solution, with a self-learning capability that updates the system’s reactions based on past customer patterns.

Those are the basics of what TOA is providing, but Brisker sees the opportunity to be much larger. He sees these industries in need of harnessing some of the intelligence they collect about their users and expanding their loyalty-building efforts from service calls to other areas. “For example, we all see the offers made to new customers, but what about the customers who stay with providers?” he said. “How can we make them feel we care for them and the $70 or $80 a month they spend for services? That constituency needs to be taken care of, and there’s a need to acknowledge loyalty in the long term.”

But that again goes to the idea that innovators don’t get directed to customer service, Brisker said. “Service has been relegated to the backwater,” he said. “You just can’t provide a great product and then have creativity stop there.”

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sales/marketing misalignment that exists at most companies, and we keep hearing from readers that this seemingly never-ending issue saps efficiency from their companies in ways that endanger the success of both sides of the equation. Luckily, as sales efficiency grows in prominence, some companies are trying to address this – which is tough to do, since solutions either come from the sales side or the marketing side, and that creates a natural resistance from the other side.

Marketo’s trying to resolve that by speaking to sales through a language it understands. Yesterday, it formally announced Marketo Sales Insight, which CEO Phil Fernandez called a “social sales application.” The real power of this product starts with the fact that it’s a native Force.com application, meaning that Salesforce.com users (sales people) will have no trouble understanding it and adopting it – although it may not occur to them for a while that what it really does is allow marketing to present leads in a way that shows exactly how effective and important marketing is.

Oh, and it also ought to help sales focus their efforts on the right leads at the right time to help drive revenue and increase sales. That’s pretty important, too.

Here’s how Sales Insight does that: The system takes the data from the Marketo marketing automation solution, which tracks behaviors and interactions to determine how ready a contact may be to buy, and uses it to determine two factors: how hot the lead is (represented in the sales rep’s display as one to three “flames”) and how desirable the lead is as a customer (represented as one to three “stars.”) A sales rep can sit down in the morning and get a list of leads that is not just a list but a ranked grouping of companies he or she should focus on most intently that day – three flames and three stars? Call them first! - and that list will change as new data enters the system.

In fact, the application presents Facebook‐style “status updates” for the leads and contacts that a rep follows, highlighting the events that indicate buying interest. Again, those events are based on web analytics, email tracking and other things Market’s marketing automation system captures, records and correlates. The system’s also integrated with LinkedIn, DemandBase and Jigsaw in order to help identify anonymous traffic and add web visitors to your list of contacts.

The solution is pretty easy to use, too – I saw the demo, and if I could figure it out quickly, anyone could. There’s a reason for this – “it’s got to roll out with very little training,” said Fernandez. “Sales reps have very little appetite for learning a new application unless it’s really easy and it has an obvious immediate impact on how they work.”
Ideas like this are really useful in getting sales and marketing on the same page. The ideas here are not revolutionary (although the thinking about how to make good on them are very creative); the software replaces the overlooked part of the sales marketing cycle – the point where marketing turns their leads over to sales. Instead of chucking the list over the wall, Sales Insight allows that list to be updated, elaborated upon and evolve; if a sales rep can’t get to all the key leads on a list in a day, that doesn’t mean he’ll spend the next day hitting leads whose circumstances or attitudes have changed and are less worthy of his attention. Instead of a wall leads are thrown over, Marketo’s providing a constantly-evolving stream directly between sales and marketing, which is highly symbolic – and potentially highly lucrative to its customers.

When we talk about mobile CRM, the concept is generally understood to mean the projection of CRM into the field on the handheld device s of the people who use CRM data – initially, sales reps, but increasingly, other people, especially field service staff.
There’s one thing we’re missing, however: CRM in this day and age is no longer a one-way operation. There should be an aspect of mobile CRM that affects the customer, at least beyond informing the sales pitch or the service information he receives from someone else.

The most obvious place for this consumer connection to take place is in the marketing space – but mobile marketing has evolved in fits and starts. The idea seems obvious – reach customers right on the devices they have in their pockets! – but the opportunity to annoy was at least as great as the opportunity to positively influence customers.

One of the few marketing automation vendors that includes mobile marketing as part of its mix is Knotice, based in that CRM hotspot Akron, Ohio. Since mobile marketing has transitioned into a less intrusive text messaging-based era, “we use a text-centric approach,” says CEO Brian Deagan. “We treat it the same way sophisticated e-mail marketing is approached.”

In fact, the company’s Concentri marketing platform uses mobile (along with website and email marketing) as one of the three pillars of the product. Mobile marketing is viewed as an equal partner in the system, which Deagan says is very much to his company’s advantage. “Other attempts to use mobile have had problems because companies haven’t solved the data issue,” he says. “If it’s being delivered as part of a point solution, there’s a different path for decisions, and it’s hard to restore a really unified view of your marketing efforts.” The Concentri solution has an advantage because it can “interact with external systems in the context of a mobile device.”

Knotice is hoping not just to rationalize mobile and make it manageable, but it also aspires to break down the barriers between getting data from real-world sources and on-line sources – for example, using a sign in a store to indicate that customers can save 10 percent by texting a code to a number, thus starting the marketing cycle – but, says Deagan, “Education definitely has to come first.”

Once that’s been done, however, mobile marketing has the potential to infiltrate all kinds of areas of the customer relationship. For example, a loyalty program that a customer joined by giving an email address can then be used to associate that customer with what he or she had looked at in the past on the website. When that’s accomplished, the correlated information can be used to deliver personalized mobile coupons for products likely to draw customers into the store. Applications that integrate with Facebook to allow users to create “wish lists” can be delivered via email, helping bring in more customers – and more customer data. And the cycle continues.

Clearly, such strategies will work better with younger generations of consumers whose mobile phones are regular parts of their lives – but that percentage of the buying public increases every day. It may not be long before every marketing solution provider finds mobile marketing to be a critical part of their mix.

We had a concept internally we liked to call the “CRM-isphere.” The idea here is that your business is like a cell; what you emphasize determines what system forms the nucleus around which the rest of your enterprise is oriented. For example, if the emphasis was on manufacturing, then ERP might be the nucleus, and other functions would revolve around serving ERP. Some tech companies seem to be centered around marketing, so you might expect them to revolve around marketing technology.

If you’re focus is on the customer, you could certainly build your business system cell structure around CRM. When properly integrated, it exchanges data with sales, marketing, product development, finance, HR and manufacturing systems, helping them all work more efficiently while at the same time keeping front and center the idea of the customer as the driving reason for these systems – and indeed the entire business – to exist.

The tricky part for a lot of companies is that “properly integrated” part of that statement. CRM is often brought in as an attempt to solve a problem – y’know, just like you bring in finance and accounting software when your bookkeeping gets messed up, you bring in ERP when you’re manufacturing costs cause pricing problems, or you bring in marketing automation when your leads are substandard. When a business brings in technology in this fashion, it’s like asking a little Dutch boy to plug multiple holes in a leaky dike – he may temporarily hold the water back, but at some point the solution will become the problem.

In an interesting way, SugarCRM 5.5, which just went into beta today (you can get your own download to bang on here) , is presenting a solution to this problem. The new version adds improvements to Sugar’s web services framework and introduces an REST interface, which allows easier development of RESTful services. I won’t attempt to explain REST here – this site does a much better job of it than I could, anyhow – but it allows connections to be created with other systems, like finance and accounting systems, ecommerce systems, social networks and many others. It does this without the need to convert the data in those systems into a common data format. Then, it allows you to use that data for CRM analysis.

“You don’t have to replace legacy systems,” said Martin Schnieder, Sugar’s director of product marketing. “The data can be extracted and exposed in Sugar.”

Think about it this way: if you wanted to find three corresponding bits of data at the library, you’d probably figure out where the data was and present it to yourself as three books side-by-side – an interface you could understand. You wouldn’t first want to have to reformat the books in the library so they were all the same size.

This is a pretty neat feature, and ne that makes sense coming from Sugar, which has always seemed to treat users like they understood the data issues underlying CRM. While Schneider admitted that newer systems are being built in ways that lessen the issues of data transfer, it’s true that some organizations are penalized for being the first on the block to automate business functions and can get caught with data in formats that are difficult to integrate into CRM. Sugar’s aspiring to place its CRM functionality at the center of the Venn diagram where these systems overlap and provide a little coherence – always a good thing.

Also included in the new version are an assortment of other tools: Mobile Studio Editor, which allows users to customize their mobile deployments; advanced password management, a feature that should help Sugar gain more corporate customers; and the ability to create dynamic teams, which allow people in different teams and different roles to see the right information for them, or to see it in a context that makes sense for their roles.

This release isn’t going to be a big breakthrough in terms of functionality, but it does something that’s important – it gets Sugar aligned with some of the business needs of its prospective customers. This is something vendors ought to do on a regular basis; their customers’ professions are not necessarily tied to expanding CRM functionality but to running their businesses. Sugar is addressing some of their customer concerns with this release, and it’s nice to see a CRM vendor that understands and tries to build products based on their customers’ needs. It may not always be flashy, but I suspect it will be strongly appreciated by users.

The most encouraging aspect of the current economic conditions (if there are any encouraging aspects) is that it’s forcing companies to seriously consider new sales tools that look at aspects of the selling process in different ways, or at least in more efficiency-driven ways, and that most assuredly goes for areas that have been overlooked in the past. For example, last week, DemandBase released the second version of DemandBase Professional, and according to CEO Chris Golec, the company’s seen “traffic exploding” in visits to the company website for trials.

We talked about DemandBase Stream way back around the time of DreamForce 2008. At the time, the company was essentially giving away this product; it provided a “ticker” to reveal who was looking at a website at any given time, and correlate that to the company and location of the viewer. Professional takes that a bit farther, allowing this raw data to be processed, analyzed and integrated into a CRM solution, with the user paying on a per-lead basis.

“Analytics is already a huge market,” says Golec. “If you can apply some analytical power to track lead “‘click quality,’ you can cut through traffic on your website and boil it down to the visitors that really matter to your company.” Discovering, evaluating and acting on those leads is tremendously valuable, Golec says, and since 96 percent of the clicks on corporate website are not acted upon, it’s easy to see that this web traffic represents a significant opportunity.

DemandStream examines traffic to the website and identifies activities by user; DemandBase takes those activities and examines them to develop an initial idea of just how good those leads are. The product lets marketers build a qualified marketing list based on target audiences identified within actual site traffic. Those contacts can be added to a shopping cart and checked out whenever the organization needs them; from there, the solution can be used to break out opportunities by territories and automatically personalize one-to-one email communications to the right prospects.

Since the solution is priced based on the amount of site traffic and the number of leads generated, cost-conscious users can adjust the number of leads they purchase to fit their budgets, and Salesforce.com users get automatic de-duplication when they import the data (DemandBase is part of Salesforce’s AppExchange). The company’s offering a 30-day free trial to illustrate the power in its solution.

Demandbase won’t be the answer to every company’s demand generation issues – but that’s kind of the neat thing about where we are. There is no one set way of doing things like demand generation anymore, and the economy is such that users have an incentive to try something different. What that might be will vary from company to company, and what works for an inbound traffic, web-oriented company might be different than for a company whose leads come from other sources. But could this proliferation in approaches have been possible in flush times, when doing things the way they’d always been done still worked? I’m not sure that sales aids like DemandBase would have been received as enthusiastically as they have been, so perhaps the recession is good for something after all.