It’s Time to Put the ISH back in CRM…OK I Definitely Need to Explain This…
Back at the end of 2009 Paul Greenberg was going through his extremely thorough process of creating his CRM Watchlist for 2010. As the focus of his list tends to be on the enterprise players, I started thinking it would be pretty interesting to put together a list of vendors in the industry I thought were worth watching that catered to the SMB space. I tossed the idea at Mr. G, and he graciously invited me to post my list on his ZDNet blog in conjunction to unveiling his Watchlist.
Since Paul was using Watchlist, I needed to come up with something else. And really many of the companies that were doing interesting stuff at the time weren’t your traditional CRM vendors, but they were doing things that I thought were CRM-ish…especially in today’s social world. And even though some of them probably didn’t view themselves as CRM vendors, they were CRM-ish to me, which made them important to watch because they were poised to impact what CRM is (and will be).
With that, the CRM-Ish List was born, and because CRM-Ish List is kind of awkward to say, I just shorten it and say the Ish List…which of course leads me to do a lot of explaining – believe me I think highly of companies I put on this Ish List.
The initial Ish List was rolled out on Paul’s blog, and the folks at ZDNet created a pdf document combining Paul’s Watchlist with my Ish list in January of 2010, which you can check out here below. I received some pretty good feedback from the list, and with so many developments taking place throughout 2010 I was really looking forward to doing a 2011 Ish List, and was really happy Paul invited me to roll it out again in tandem with his Watchlist. And as I was beginning to go through the process of scheduling briefings and doing some initial analysis, my brother unexpectedly passed away on November 4th 2010.
The thought of doing briefings, analysis, writings and anything CRM related was gone for me for quite a while. So there was no CRM-Ish List for 2011. But I’m glad to say that there will be one for 2012, and once again it will be rolled out in tandem with Paul’s 2012 Watchlist. There will even be some interesting (hopefully) new wrinkles to it – that is if I’m able to pull a couple things together in time.
Now I have a number of companies in mind already, mainly ones that I have been watching over the past couple of years, but even since the last list just two years ago things have changed dramatically. There are so many companies out there I won’t even front like any one list can include every company that deserves watching. But I will try to put together a list that will help small businesses find some solutions that will help them find, catch and keep good customers.
I'm setting up briefings, and doing some digging and analysis stuff. And if you know of any vendors that I should talk to, STAY TUNED as I will be posting instructions on how you can nominate companies (you can nominate yourself too) very shortly. And stay on the lookout for the #crmish tag.
So with that, I’m glad to say The ISH is back, baby! And this year we’ve even got a logo!
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