When someone says “I’m looking for a CRM” do you wonder what they mean?

You‘re not alone.

When Salesforce.com defined the software as a service category (mostly alone), they kept up with customer requests by adding features. But in 2006, when Mark Benioff slowed feature development in favor of nurturing the AppExchange, he signaled to developers and the world that the avalanche of new Software as a Service (SaaS) was welcome.

The AppExchange brought a rich array of new features which, when integrated, also made for sticky customers. The AppExchange also established that the application programming interface (API) was table stakes in the game of SaaS.

Fast forward ten years and we find that in the category of (just) marketing, there are 3500 solutions, and they’re doubling every 15 months. In the olden days (2002) we had Salesforce to reckon with. Now we have this infographic to help us decide what to buy (warning…).

CRM no longer refers to a single application; rather, it’s a collection of ever-changing apps, data, analytics, interfaces and automation that cheerfully bounces the customer ball through the revenue hoop over and over again.

The array of solutions that accomplish customer relationship management can be loosely grouped in the following categories:

General Purpose Platforms Wheel of Fun Solutions Endpoints Integration Tools Data Augmentation

You don’t need them all, but like potato chips — no one stops with just one.

General Purpose Platforms

The large enterprise is well served by a handful of full featured platforms originally conceived to have all possible functions embedded within (monolithic). They’ve since (because they’ve had to) established application and professional services ecosystems to fuel innovation through integration.

The market leaders including Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and Dynamics were born during (except Salesforce) the traditional physical software delivery model.

In those days, when ravens carried disks to office park window sills, software companies steadily added functionality in their given products to maximize physical release schedules. Fearing that they might be bested by competitors, their feature parades were choking on confetti lest they be doomed for an entire release cycle by a more feature-prolific foe.

Then, they brought this bloated software party to the cloud.

The benefit of older platforms is that a company with discipline and an army of developers and administrators can keep the wheels of data turning for very large companies in a disciplined way.

The downside is that tightly coupled platforms (integrated with themselves) produce hostile integration environments that make it tough to keep up with the SaaS that the cool kids are using.

Wheel of Fun Solutions

The arena of marketing automation is a great example of a Wheel of Fun solution.

The dominant marketing automation platforms are Hubspot and Marketo who, like Salesforce, invented the space. Both aimed to apply programmatic software workflows to automate the mysterious “digital/social marketing” job. Different than Unbounce, who specializes only in the creation of landing pages, A/B testing and metrics gathering, Hubspot and Marketo drive data through the entire array of digital marketing options, a verifiable marketing transformer.

With a heavy dose of training, a mere mortal now operates a single machine that delivers on the promise of digital marketing including content management, key words, newsletters, metrics-spawned automation and things I have only otherwise heard mentioned in phone closets.

They were great, and continue to be great, for some companies. However, not so great when things change. Given that 3500 marketing automation solutions are doubling every 15 months, what are the chances that the wheel of fun doesn’t need a new horsey now and then?

Endpoints

There is a term in software development called microservices. The idea is that applications that are broken down into smaller pieces are more flexible and resilient, and can be developed concurrently. The main condition that defines a microservice is that each microservice must provide an API endpoint.

Before we start feeling too good about ourselves for knowing what an API is, we must bow to Jeff Bezos and his API mandate for Amazon circa 2001.

Mere mortals (developers might roll their eyes at the comparison) might look at the 3500 marketing automation applications as microservices. Tools like Mailchimp for newsletters, Unbounce for landing pages, and the new Jolly Green Giant Slack for team messaging exist to do a great job at their narrow purpose. Even newer sales automation tools like Prosperworks (who call themselves CRM) can be endpoints, doing a great job effortlessly ushering data where it needs to go for purposes of automating and organizing email interactions — but passing it along to other systems that need it.

Buying should start at the endpoints. When the monolithic platform decision constrains the endpoint decisions, innovation takes a cold shower.

Integration Tools

Because of the aforementioned array of battle hardened data silos, a ramshackle army of solutions have emerged that endeavor to get the data where you need it to go. These solutions range from enterprise integration hubs like Mulesoft to lightweight, human-chosen data triggers activated by tools like IFTTT and Zapier, to more prescriptive data buses like Cloud Elements and Tray.io.

One might also put bots in this category, given their predilection to ferry specific data to and from data sources.

For companies who have workhorse systems that aren’t going anywhere soon, tools like Mulesoft can accelerate what will likely still be a nightmare integration scenario (at least the pain ends sooner). For those who are lucky enough to dance mainly in the cloud, IFTTT and Zapier provide some time-savers that are easy to activate without asking permission.

Most of these toolsets can handily map data from field to field. True automation takes more than an API. It takes an application.

Data Augmentation Solutions

Many companies under-recognize the data category. There is useful, affordable accessible data that can instantly improve customer segmentation profiles to activate your company around trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Companies like Mattermark gather information on rapidly growing companies by scraping company data from an amalgamation of sources using APIs and bots. Great leads for the right companies.

Contact manager FullContact does double duty. Not only does it perform the Herculean task of keeping duplicate contacts merged/complete/accurate, it also gathers relevant social data usually only found in expensive CRM.

Companies should consider the augmentation of their data to be as important as the tools they use to fly it from app to app. Putting data to work is the name of the game.

Conclusion

Admittedly, the letters “CRM” at a minimum have universal awareness of the patch of technology they aim to conquer, but the landscape has forever changed. One-app land for customer management is dead.

Fast forward fewer years than we might think, and we (like IBM Watson) may be throwing vast amounts of unstructured data in an AI data container so that we know what to do next. Who will need all that field mapping then?

For many companies, this is the perfect environment for the commitment phobic buyer. Companies can relax, encourage their employees to experiment, and be non-committal. From there, they can address integration as the business case warrants the investment.

As data takes a bigger role defining its own journey, spending a few hours every week in a few new apps is an easy way to immerse yourself in the range of possibilities. At least Jeff Bezos isn’t going to fire you if you don’t publish your departmental API.