Ever felt in the dark about what's going on with your customers? Doing lots of internal-facing tasks, updating excel spreadsheets instead of actually spending the time talking to your customers and engaging prospects?

Over the past two weeks the CRM space has been shaken with the news about IBM’s decision to migrate 67,000 seats from Siebel to SugarCRM.

What is Marketing Automation?

Simply put, marketing automation is the use of technology and software to manage and automate the process of converting prospects into qualified leads and customers. Marketing automation is about qualifying leads and sending those qualified leads to salespeople.

SugarCon, SugarCRM’s annual user conference which was held from 23 to 26 April 2012 was again a huge success, gathering CRM industry thought leaders, providing training and networking to 1000 attendees. There were also some existing announcements including the latest Sugar 6.5 release, the new SugarCRM integration with IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and the replacement of IBM’s Oracle CRM with SugarCRM.

The latest release of SugarCRM brings greater performance to boost sales professionals’ productivity.

SugarCRM introduced the new Sugar 6.5 release at its annual customer, user and partner conference, SugarCon 2012. The latest update introduces new search and navigation capabilities to further boost user productivity and satisfaction.

Many businesses still use Excel and Access as their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to manage customer data. Whether it's due to their familiarity with these programs, the belief that CRM is expensive or lack the time to manage the transition process, organisations are still struggling with managing their customer relationships with these basic tools.

At a high level, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a business strategy that focuses on organisations' most important goals: acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. Putting a CRM strategy in place allows your organisation to build, strengthen and maintain relationships with customers and prospects - all in one system.

By empowering your social employees to collaborate with SugarCRM, you reduce training costs associated with attrition, and promote and capture communal knowledge which you use to ultimately better serve your customer.

In a recent survey of 223 CRM decision makers, Nucleus Research found that organisations can significantly increase returns on their CRM investments by adding mobile and social capabilities, particularly for salespeople.

It's all in the title. Here's how SugarCRM addresses the 8 key 2012 CRM trends identified by CIO.com: