Revenue Intelligence Archives

Is RevOps the New CRM?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 3, 2025 | Blog |

The Lost Strategy: What CRM Was Supposed to Be CRM at its very origin, was a strategy. With the advent of systems that support the execution of this strategy, the term more and more got shifted to describe a system. This shift can get seen in the words of CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg. His pre-2009 definition of CRM was “a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interaction in a business environment.” This changed to “Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively” in acceptance of this change (emphasis by me). These days, people often even mean a sales force automation system, when they say “CRM”. In another dimension, the systems themselves more and more turned into systems of record. Implementations often were management-oriented as opposed to team-oriented, which led to increasing dissatisfaction and the creation of new terms and categories like social CRM, system of engagement, customer data platform, customer engagement, customer experience management, and so on. There is much more, but in consequence, CRM lost both, the “C” and the “R”. CRM turned from a strategy into a glorified rolodex and a tool to manage teams, in particular sales teams, instead of helping organizations and teams to manage and improve the customer...

SugarCRM and sales-i reimagine sales intelligence in a sweet move

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 22, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |

The news Today, May 22 2024, SugarCRM and sales-i announced the acquisition of sales-i by SugarCRM. sales-i is leading provider of a revenue intelligence solution that helps businesses maximize their revenue and profitability. It targets at making sales professionals more efficient and effective by providing actionable insight into every customer, product and sale. The acquisition comes nearly a year after Sugar announced a partnership with sales-i to improve business-to-business (B2B) sales performance by delivering AI-powered revenue intelligence that leverages the data of a business’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and CRM. This combination provides businesses with actionable insights that improve sales, marketing, service and support, resulting in greater revenue and higher levels of retention. You can read the full announcement here. The combination of SugarCRM and sales-i combines the detailed transactional data residing in ERP systems with the rich sales data in SugarCRM. According to the release information, his shall create an intelligent data hub enabling customers to successfully execute impactful sales strategies to improv revenue, maximize profitability and increase customer satisfaction. In this combination, sales-i delivers the revenue intelligence, while SugarCRM delivers the CRM data; both of which are needed for a better sales enablement. Together, SugarCRM and sales-i intend to deliver the most innovative intelligent account management solution in the marketplace by utilizing leading edge sales enablement technologies provided by both companies and the rich revenue intelligence capabilities provided by sales-i. The bigger picture The market for CRM and CX solutions is crowded while only few vendors enjoy significant mindshare. And what is more, both terms, CRM and CX, get increasingly fuzzy as many vendors use them...