From Brock, to Siebel, to Salesforce to Sugar, one thing all of these sales force applications have in common is a Lead Module. But over the years, the one module that I found most people complain about most is the Lead Module, or to put it another way – why do we have a Lead Module at all? Well for one in the early days of CRM vendors were scrambling to build as many CRM modules as possible, mostly in my opinion so they had more to demo in sales calls. I was a Sales Engineer back then, and I really enjoyed traveling the world doing six-hour, end to end CRM demos to major corporate buyer teams.

The second reason for the Lead module and a better reason for it, is that Marketers want to track multiple lead sources to one contact. Makes sense, you have several marketing campaigns running at the time or over time. The ability to track the effectiveness and cost of individual leads provides Marketing executives with the knowledge to more closely align marketing efforts with the best demand generating activities.

So what’s wrong with the Leads Module? Nothing, but at the same time I have found most small businesses do not need the complexity this module adds. Why should you have to create such a complicated process just to capture a lead? A lead comes in, it’s entered in the Leads Module, then a Contact is created assigned the lead, an Account is created assigned to the Contact and an Opportunity tied to the account or contact once the Lead is qualified. Wow…that’s a lot of steps for a sales representative to go through just to accept a simple lead from Marketing.

With X2CRM, our design goal from day one is to keep the system as compact as possible. Fast and compact, and if the module does not meet this criteria we left it out – like the Lead Module. Instead we combined the Lead Module into the Contacts Module. Yes, it is more difficult to track multiple leads per one contact, but I have found even the best Marketing executives are ok with this. What they really want is the most effective Lead Generation and Routing Tool they can find. In this case simplifying and speeding up Lead throughput is a better, faster and a more flexible approach. Sales reps like it better because it saves them time from what seems like duplicate data entry and the additional step of having to link multiple (lead, contact, account, opportunity) modules together.

I couldn’t help but laugh the other day when a partner told me the reason he used Salesforces.com’s $5.00 per month edition was precisely because it did NOT have a lead module. Paying more for complexity is ok sometimes, but I always value transaction throughput over data capture 100% of the time. X2CRM is all about speed and compactness, we’ll leave the complexity and high user costs to the traditional CRM vendors.

X2CRM Live Demo Server

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X2Engine Inc. today announced the general availability of X2CRM version 3.0, an open source, high-performance sales force, marketing and service application for small businesses.

New in X2CRM 3.0 is a Marketing Action Event Designer which allows marketers to build automated marketing campaigns based on customer behaviors. For example when a customer visits a website, marketers can create an automated trigger that sends an alert to the appropriate sales representative, updates the lead score and sends an automated email to the customer in one workflow.

In addition to Marketing, X2’s Quotes module had been enhanced to support line item based pricing adjustments and quote level adjustments. Quotes can then be inserted into custom email templates with an embedded tracker, so sales reps can see when their quote email was opened by their customer. Once Quotes are approved by the customer, they can be converted into X2’s new Invoices module for billing.

X2CRM’s Actions & Activity Feed modules have also been significantly updated with the ability to add pictures, videos, comments, and broadcast email alerts to users. The Actions module now allows representatives to quickly flip through Action lists and edit and complete items from within the list.

“After two and half years of development and with over 4,500 unique installations across 135 countries, we are incredibly excited to release X2CRM 3.0. With 3.0, now small businesses have the power of both an intelligent marketing automation application combined with a powerful sales force application in one CRM system. By keeping the system compact yet flexible, our goal is for X2CRM to be the fastest sales and marketing application on the planet,” said John Roberts, founder of X2Engine.

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Today after seven months of software development we are releasing X2CRM 3.0. It’s a huge release with several new and very powerful Marketing Automation and sales force productivity features. There will be an official announcement tomorrow, as well as new demo servers to explore.

This morning, as I was driving my kids to school they asked me when I was going to setup their own private Minecraft server so they could start creating worlds to share with school friends. I said, “sure but after we ship 3.0 today!” Then I went on for about five minutes why 3.0 releases are special.

X2CRM 3.0 is the culmination of over three years of design and development. What started out as a favor for a friend to create a fast, lightweight and compact sales system for a BMW Motorcycle dealership has turned into global open source CRM project and business. But 3.0 releases take time for them to be real. You can not rush or market your way to building innovative, high quality software. It simply takes time, and that time has allowed us to design, build, sand, test and ship – over 45 releases in a little over two years.

X2CRM 3.0.zip 5/1/2013
X2CRM 2.9.1.zip 3/27/2013
X2CRM-2.9.zip 3/22/2013
X2CRM2.8.1.zip 2/22/2013
X2CRM2.8.zip 2/14/2013
X2Engine-2.7.2.zip 2/1/2013
X2CRM2.7.1.zip 1/26/2013
X2Engine-2.7.zip 1/24/2013
X2Engine-2.5.2.zip 12/31/2012
X2CRM2.5.zip 12/19/2012
X2CRM 2.2.1.zip 11/16/2012
X2CRM2.2.zip 11/9/2012
X2EngineCRM2.1.1.zip 10/15/2012
X2EngineCRM2.1.zip 10/13/2012
x2engine_v2.0.zip 10/2/2012
X2Engine1.6.6.zip 9/4/2012
X2Engine1.6.5.1.zip 8/28/2012
X2Engine1.6.5.zip 8/25/2012
X2Engine1.6.1.zip 7/26/2012
X2Engine1.6.zip 7/18/2012
X2Engine1.5.zip 6/19/2012
X2Engine1.4.zip 5/23/2012
x2engine1.3.1.zip 5/8/2012
X2Engine1.3.zip 5/8/2012
x2crm.pxm 4/13/2012
X2Engine1.2.2.zip 3/23/2012
x2crm1.2.1.zip 3/17/2012
x2crm 1.2.0.zip 3/9/2012
x2engine1.1.0.zip 3/1/2012
x2engine1.0.1.zip 2/21/2012
x2engine1.0.zip 2/21/2012
x2engine0.9.10.1.zip 2/17/2012
x2engine0.9.10.zip 2/11/2012
x2engine0.9.9.1.zip 1/11/2012
x2engine0.9.9.zip 1/6/2012
x2engine0.9.8.zip 12/15/2011
x2engine0.9.7.1.zip 12/1/2011
x2engine0.9.7.zip 11/28/2011
x2engine_0.9.6.zip 11/14/2011
x2engine0.9.5.zip 11/3/2011
x2engine_0.9.4.zip 10/28/2011
x2engine_0.9.3.zip 10/21/2011
x2engine_v0.9.2.zip 10/13/2011
Beta_v0.9.1.1.rar 10/7/2011
Development Start 5/1/11
Design Start 10/14/10

The post X2CRM 3.0 Sales & Marketing Software Renaissance appeared first on X2CRM | Open Source CRM - Small Business Sales Force and Marketing Software.

Why? Because of a lot for market forces working against the lone salesman, namely the internet and increased competition for the customer. In addition to the obvious benefits of providing both the sales person and buyer (who are both wearing glasses) with perfect, real-time information about the product and pricing of the transaction. One feature I think will be used a lot is recording sales calls.

If I am a buyer, why would I not record every meeting with the sales representative? If it’s a big transaction and I want to make sure I am getting the straight answers to my questions, why not record the sales reps answers in a very soft, non-threatening way. But keep a perfect record of the sales call. I think this is a great feature, because for high integrity sales people, these glasses are your friends. If you wheel and deal your way to a close, and say anything to get the customer to sign – then perhaps you may not appreciate your buyer recording your sales pitch.

Google Glasses are going to be great tools for high integrity sales forces.

Google Glasses

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If you were an established CRM vendor with an overbuilt and expensive sales force application, why would you make it easy for customers to leave your service? I’ve heard some CRM providers even charge customers to even perform a data extract. The good news is the CRM vender lock-in trick is becoming less of an issue now, thanks to the ease of Import2′s new service.

Import2 is a pioneer of automated online data migration. It assures the integrity of all the user data as it supports import of all standard CRM objects, corresponding sales activity history and custom fields. “Import2′s goal is to make users’ transition between online services as fast and easy as possible,” said co-founder of Import2 Mark Kofman.

Import2 works with any X2CRM edition including Open Source and Professional.

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Today we are shipping a point release of X2CRM, our new open source, marketing automation and sales force PHP application. Though just a point release, adding a few new subtle features and some bug fixes. Most of our energy now is focused on X2CRM 3.0 to be released in a few weeks time. That said, I would like to call out a decision to adopt the relatively new AGPLv3, Affero General Public License as the open source license for X2CRM going forwards.

As a backgrounder, over the last ten years I have been fortunate to have founded or co-founded two world-class open source CRM projects, X2CRM and SugarCRM. During the course of running these projects several times I had to make or helped to make licensing decisions for the software. First there was the SPL (Sugar Public License), which was based on the MPL. Then a move to the GPLv3 with it came out in 2008. Then with X2CRM a change to the BSD license and now finally to the AGPLv3.

What I like about the AGPLv3 is I see the license gaining momentum with enterprise, open core based software companies such as MongoDB. But more importantly I believe it is the most open and fair license available today. With Amazon, Rackspace and others lowering their prices daily it seems, the days of building your own data center rack and running your own servers are nearing an end. The cloud is the user interface now, not server hardware, Linux DVD’s, etc… So the hosting provision in the AGPL I believe does reflect the ideals of open source software.

Yes, you can make a point that the AGPL is a much more restrictive license by forcing non-sharing folks to share what they would not have. But to be frank I care less about people who do not want to share, than those who do. Sorry to end on this heavy note, but this is just the way I see it. The AGPLv3 is a very good free software license and we are proud to adopt it for X2CRM.

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“Open source software and proprietary software mix well in the IT infrastructure but not at the corporate level. The cultures clash too much. Time and time again, we’ve seen promising open source projects and companies acquired by proprietary software giants end up either crushed or diminished. Of course, huge injections of cash help talented open source developers fund open source forks, and new companies, but on the whole, the fewer of these marriages, the better, in my humble estimation.”

On one hand I agree, that some great open source projects that leveraged up on venture funding, debt or corporate buyouts in efforts to greatly stimulate their projects have had mixed results. Not many still independent commercial open source companies have gone public yet and other than CEO’s “talking of going public,” no SEC fillings have been made. So Paula could be right on this one.

But as a smaller, non-VC funded open source CRM company. We have been amazed at how fast X2CRM has spread across the planet this past year. This week X2CRM reached 128 counties. This would not have been possible if were not for the great software stack that X2CRM is built on. Aside from PHP, MySQL remains our db of choice. Yes Oracle owns MySQL now, but I have not seen any significant change in the quality of the software and I think it is a big advantage to have our DB owned but one of the most respected database companies on the planet – Oracle.

Thanks for your great blog these past few years Paula.

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Last Friday though, all of our embedded videos on x2crm.com suddenly started showing the following error message. At first I thought it was our issue, something was wrong with the web server, or our account with ScreenR. After an hour of trying to reach screenr.com with no response from the website, I correctly determined this was a ScreenR issue not our issue. Ok, all cloud apps go down from time to time – it happens – not a big deal.

But, what really started to irritate me though was the message that ScreenR was displaying on our website. The way it is worded, it sounded like this issue was our issue, not Screenr’s. At this point the only thing I could do was allow this awful error message on the page and assume ScreenR would magically turn back on, which it did a few hours later. The next day I received our monthly invoice from Screenr, but no mention of the outage, an apology, or best case, a statement that they are rewording their error messages to not point the blame at their customers, but themselves.

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