Beagle's Best and Brightest: The 2009 WizKids
It's important to recognize industry leaders, and not just the ones who dominate the market; sometimes the companies who are doing the best work are still making names for themselves. In that spirit, CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group each year compiles its WizKids Report, a list of front-office software firms that exemplify positive market trends. The 2009 winners have been announced, and this year's crop reflects a market shift from customer centricity to operational excellence.
"When we boil down operational excellence to practical business matters, the striking characteristic shared by this year's winners is this: making companies easier to do business with," writes Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research Group's founder and managing principal, and a CRM magazine columnist. "Early success in any market relies on customer contact -- enveloping the customer with service while engineering figures out ways to simplify use, reduce overall complexity, and lower costs." There comes a time for such companies when they've done all they can do in that regard, and when that time coincides with a recession, they risk choking on prior success.
"When the pendulum reverses course, demand is high for products and services that reduce labor and improve accessibility so that margins will more or less survive [when] overall prices remain flat or, more likely, decrease," Pombriant writes. "In other words, when products begin to commoditize, everything that touches the product will need trimming as well. This is not simply the characteristic of a recession -- though these times can add greater urgency to the trimming process. Accentuating operational excellence is a normal phase in a company's life cycle and the cycle will renew with the invention of new products and categories."
The 2009 WizKids are:
- EchoSign — electronic signatures
- Manticore Technology — demand generation
- Right90 — revenue forecasting
- TimeTrade Systems — appointment scheduling applications
- Unisfair — virtual events and environments
- Xactly — sales compensation management
- Zuora — subscriptions and billing
All of the WizKids companies operate on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, either exclusively or as an option.
The WizKids report pairs each vendor description with a case study showing how company ideals are put into practice to achieve results for a customer. "This report really is about solutions that make companies easier to do business with," Pombriant says in a follow-up interview. "These days, this operational approach is at least as valuable as the attention to customer experience, maybe more."
Pombriant's blogpost explaining this year's WizKids can be found here, and a PDF of the report itself can be downloaded by clicking here.
News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine. You may leave a public comment regarding this article by clicking on "Comments" at the top; to contact the editors, please email editor@destinationCRM.com.
Related Articles
Manticore Follows Leads to Fill the Funnel
03 Dec 2010
Manticore Technology offers exciting new product enhancements and hints at future CRM integrations.
E-Signatures Transform a Tortoise into a Hare
17 Nov 2009
Accelerate customer-centric processes with software-as-a-service-based electronic signatures.
Xactly Acquires Centive
23 Jan 2009
Analysts say consolidation in the sales performance management market was expected -- but this particular deal comes as a surprise.
Sign Here, Click Send
21 Nov 2008
New product release from electronic-signature provider EchoSign offers reporting and analytics to optimize the sales cycle.
AMI-Partners Susses Out the Hot SaaS Vendors
31 Oct 2008
A new report looks at several on-demand application providers who are worth keeping an eye on.
CRM: Your Personal Digital Assistant
01 Jul 2008
New offerings can make your sales reps more productive.
Hot Sales for Cool Vendors
03 Apr 2008
Gartner names the new and the noteworthy in the realm of sales applications for CRM.
Beagle Honors the Wizzes in the Biz
06 Mar 2007
Beagle Research releases its third annual WizKid awards, which honors both big companies and niche players that have been frontrunners of innovation in the industry.
Companies' ERP Wallets Will Get Fatter
02 Nov 2006
Budgets will grow by 12.3 percent next year, thanks to factors like healthy IT spending, enhanced functionality, and continued interest from SMBs and midmarket companies.
Where There's a WizKid, There's a Way
26 Mar 2008
The fourth annual Beagle Research study outlines the year's seven coolest and most innovative industry solutions.
The Reality of Virtual Events
10 Sep 2007
Virtual trade shows and other online events are gaining traction, and best practices are emerging to support them.
The 2008 CRM Market Awards: Rising Stars -- Zuora
01 Sep 2008
Sending the bill, from A to Z(uora).
Buyer's Guide Companies Mentioned