Zurmo Open Source CRM / Zurmo Open Source CRM Blog: Recent posts

Jim is a tax lawyer in Chicago who helps people who are in really deep water. Finding clients is pretty easy for him. He just shows up to the courtroom when the federal judges are in town hearing IRS cases and swoops in to save scared citizens.

After that, nothing is easy. There are millions of little tasks required to move a case along. Jim has no automated way to keep track of his clients and all the pre-trial processes that go into managing each one. To kill two birds with one stone, he tries out Zurmo.... read more

Analytical  marketers love staring at charts and improving metrics. On top of that, we love to share our results with others. "Hey, dude, check out this campaign I created in Adwords. It has a 40% conversion rate!" Will I share the couple dozen total failures it took to get there? Probably not. Just like I won't boast about the bagel I ate this morning, but I will let you know how proud I am for filling up on roasted vegetables and whitefish last night.... read more

Don't think like an email sender, think like an email recipient.

A few days ago I went on a crusade to clear my personal email inbox. I've been inundated lately.

"One day sale – 30% off jeans". I don't need another pair of jeans. And I definitely do not want to hear about them every day. Unsubscribe.

"Last minute weekend: Air & Hotel from $429″ Yeah that would be nice but it's not going to happen. In fact, if I ever took a last minute vacation, it wouldn't be due to an email from a travel website. Unsubscribe.... read more

What happens when you stick workflow rules and marketing automation together in the Zurmo blender? Your CRM strategy gets a whole lot more dynamic. Your marketing tactics become really smart. And your targeted messaging is even more relevant according to where contacts are in the customer lifecycle.

Let's see how David, a Marketing Manager for a building management company in Chicago has been taking advantage of recent Zurmo 2.2 features including webforms and the addition of marketing list subscriptions in workflow rules.... read more

Zurmo 2.2 has been released to the public.

If you've haven't already heard the news about 2.2, here are some highlights:

• Zapier Integration*
• Google Web Tracking Integration*
• Rapleaf Integration*
• Gmail Integration*
• Starring records
• Enhanced Import
• Enhanced Reporting
• Enhanced Workflow
• New Portlets... read more

Question. Do you ever just need to cut out the baloney and head straight for the tenderloin? When the time to reach quotas is nigh, sales people have no patience for tom-foolery. "I don't use CRM. In my experience it is just a giant database of irrelevant clutter," said Paulo, a veteran VP of sales for a B2B company in a recent conversation (quote has been censored to suit all ages).

"Let me put a star next to my Leads and Contacts who really matter, so when the time comes to sell, I can easily locate the people who are actually going to buy," Paulo continued. He made the argument that CRM has yet to beat his very simple method of using index cards to keep track of prospects, where "Hot Leads" are always placed in a special pile on his desk.... read more

Here is a list of some random functionality that will be added to Zurmo in an upcoming releases. None of these really merit their own post, so they get to share one.

- Merge tag support for workflow actions. This allows users to include dynamic information in the items created or updated by a triggered workflow. For example, John sets up a workflow that creates a note in a related Contact’s record when an Opportunity status changes to “Closed Won”. His note includes the the related Opportunity name and any other relevant information.... read more

Roy has a business that finds and sells rare parts for old wooden boats. His website lists the various things he can locate for his customers. One of his customers is Charlie, who owns a refinishing shop at the Lee-Land Lake Marina. Charlie's winter project is a 1938 Chris Craft Clipper Cruiser called the Swan Bee. She needs some new parts like a new cabin windshield, a step pad, and a name plate.... read more

With the release of Zurmo 2.2, the next generation Open Source CRM is now integrated with Google Apps. Let's look at a hypothetical use case of how the marriage of Zurmo with Google will benefit Ralph, an organic hydroponics tomato farmer in Northern Michigan.

Background: Ralph has a hydroponic tomato farm. His perfectly ripe tomatoes are sold to restaurants and upper end food distributors in the Midwest. Ralph has always been a fan of Gmail and Google Calendar. These have been the main tools he's used to manage his business. Up until recently that has worked, but over the past few months he's desperately needed a better database to keep track of his customers.... read more

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to attend the the 13th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, OR. There were over 3,000 people in attendance, including "open source developers, hackers, experts, vendors, and users of all levels".

Jono Bacon, author of The Art of Community, was kind enough to chat with me about how the Zurmo community can continue to grow in a positive way. He had a great talk on dealing with conflict and burnout in Open Source communities.... read more

The first time I visited Switzerland, I was nineteen years old, backpacking through Europe. The morning after I arrived to Zurich, I rented a bike and set out to ride around the lake. About twenty minutes outside the city, I was overcome by a powerful and delicious waft of chocolate. Never before had I ever quite experienced anything quite like it.

Approaching a little village, I wondered what could be the source of this incredible aroma. A bakery? A pastry shop? Peddling further as the smell reached its climax, I discovered a chocolate factory.... read more

A major issue with CRM can be missing data and low data integrity. When a record lacks needed information, marketing, sales, and support processes suffer.

Yes, poor training and low user adoption are major culprits. Zurmo’s built in gaming mechanics have proven to motivate users to follow best practices. But When it comes to big data and an era where analytics matter more than ever, we can only pipe in so much as humans.... read more

On our developer's learning session today a community member requested that we hold a special tutorial session with our lead engineer Jason to go over Mercurial. Someone also suggested a special session on Zurmo Zoo.

We have scheduled both.

If you are a beginner or just need a refresher on Mercurial, join us on Thursday, July 18th at 10:00 AM Central (15:00 UTC).... read more

Zurmo was created to be the best gamified CRM on the planet. A new kind of CRM that motivates users by recognizing them for their achievements and facilitates friendly competition among co workers.

Over the past couple of years as the application has grown, we have noticed that another need for Zurmo has arisen from our Open Source community.

It started pretty early on when developers came to us with plans to use Zurmo as a platform from which to build - which at the time occasionally sounded pretty outrageous - other kinds of applications.... read more

We have confirmed our trip to Portland for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland this summer from July 22-26th. I will be attending, learning, meeting new people, and wearing a Zurmo T-shirt. Very much looking forward to it and if you'll be there, please let me know and we can schedule a coffee or lunch. Reach me at stafford at zurmo dot com. Looking forward to meeting more people in the Open Source community in a couple of weeks in Portland!

... read more

Using broken development frameworks, or why we don't use Zurmo

The above is the title of a recent blog post about Zurmo that was recently published. It raised some great questions about our application, our community, and the difference between constructive criticism from serious developers and lashing out. Let’s go through that post, step by step.

People often wonder why DBA's used to hate developers, and with DBA's also the System Engineers, __(note that I just expanded devops by adding dba's to the picture…)... read more

On a recent team call with Mark Kofman, I asked the following:

"So, just to be clear, your company spends the entire day doing nothing but CRM migrations?"

Yes. That is correct. Import2 spends all day migrating data. And they have figured out a way to do it very efficiently. "We are like the garbage collectors of the software world. We do what no one else wants to," Mark continued.

Okay. We don't necessarily envy their job, but we are certainly glad these guys exist.... read more

Zurmo, Inc. has invested significant resources into developing an Outlook Plugin. The integration tool is included in Zurmo Pro and is an optional add on for Zurmo Group. The integration tool introduces new functionality including:

1. Archiving emails from outlook to CRM.
1a. Sending and archiving when composing an email from Outlook

So, let's look at some examples as to how this works to save you time.... read more

The new release carries an extensive checklist of enterprise grade CRM features. Zurmo now surpasses the functionality traditionally found in Open Source CRM software and project leaders focus on new User Experience trends targeting Generation X and Y.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) June 18, 2013

Developers of the Zurmo Open Source Customer Relationship Management application today announced the availability of Zurmo 2.0.... read more

Autoresponder can be a confusing term. It is the name for a computer program that automatically responds to an email. The most common autoresponders are "out-of-office" and failed delivery notifications.

But for the purposes of email marketing, we use autoresponders for something quite different. The term is somewhat of a misnomer in this sense, because we are not really responding to an email, but rather an action or a change in the state of the recipient. For example, an autoresponder is triggered when someone subscribes to something, fills out a form, or is approaching an event.... read more

Today we're introducing the web form, or Web-to-Lead/Web-to-Contact functionality in Zurmo CRM. The use case example for this post is based on Joanna Rohrback, and her company Prancerise. Now Joanna does not have Zurmo and we're not really sure how she is managing the influx of leads pouring onto her site, but we're going to talk about how a web-to-lead form could help her out.... read more

Zurmo 2.0 includes Products, one of many added features that welcome newcomers to our family of use cases. Why would you need Products and Product catalogs? How do they work? Well let's play around with an example.

Arnold sells wholesale camping equipment in the Midwest.

He calls an old customer called Jim's Outdoor Adventures in Grand Rapids, MI to finalize an annual sale. When Arnold pulls up Jim's account in his CRM, he sees the products that have been sold to Jim in the past. A list of items appears in the Products widget that include items like "Tents", "Canteens", "Beer Cozies", and "Bear Deterrence Instruction Guides".... read more

With the release of Zurmo 2.0, Email Marketing has made its way into the freely downloadable Open Source application. Let's explore how sending out an email marketing campaign works in Zurmo, using a simple three step process and a fun use case example.

Jeff is a Marketing Manager for Adventures Verdes (AV), a small firm that sells ecotourism travel tours. Recently AV announced a trip to Argentine Patagonia in September of 2014 and Jeff would like to send out an email to people who might be interested.... read more

How can we make a blog post about custom portlets in the Detail view engaging? Have it my way. Lay on the extra cheese and a side of open tasks. Hold the notes and go easy on the upcoming meetings.

Okay what is this all about? If you are familiar with Zurmo, you'll know that you can customize your homepage. You can change your layout by simply dragging, dropping, deleting, and adding portlets. We've had feedback from users saying that organizing things according to personal preference saves time and keeps the most relevant objects front of mind.... read more

First of all - let's preface this post by preventing the heart failure of Kanban purists. We respect the Kanban development method. We respect it, which is why we will not pretend to be introducing some kind of Kanban sales process to Zurmo simply by adding Kanban-board-like visuals. We get it. Kanban is really cool and it is much more in depth than what we're doing here, okay?

So… having hopefully halted any rising blood pressure, let us introduce the Kanban View for Opportunities. It's pretty simple (remember we're not professing otherwise). We've taken the idea of a Kanban board and applied it to stages in a sales cycle. The result is a nice big-picture look at Opportunities.... read more