Since 1990 the consulting firm ISM, located in Bethesda, Maryland State in the United States, has developed annually a detailed analysis of CRM software products available in the market. Ranking developed by ISM each year, in which CRM solutions are qualified has become a benchmark of great importance in the software market and an award in a ceremony is awarded to best qualified 15. We have had the opportunity to use the analyses developed by ISM and they are very complete, since they include nearly 217 evaluation criteria for each of the software solutions. The results of the best products are published in the spring of USA and this year have left the results this week. Let’s look at that he says ISM to CRM solutions. First of all is necessary to understand that ISM has classified CRM solutions in two categories.
The first is identified as business solutions. This classification corresponds to solutions that can be implemented in companies or large corporations and that may be in ability to support concurrent operation of hundreds and thousands of users in multiple geographic locations. The second classification is known as SMB (Small and Medium Business), which means small and medium-sized enterprises. By American standards, this means companies among 10 to 1000 employees and that billed between 0.5 and 500 million dollars. In the European Union there is a census of approximately 19 million companies in the SMB segment. Some analysts of technology industry and companies in the sector defined as SMB companies that billed between 1 million dollars and one billion dollars (1 trillion for North Americans).
I believe that a very high percentage of our companies in Latin America they fall within this classification. Another interesting know topic is how how ISM performs its evaluation of CRM system. ISM has a test lab, which follows a rigorous methodology in the evaluation of 217 criteria for each test.