It’s often forgotten why or how certain CRM applications became popular, specifically in light of competitive products who build amazing brand awareness (e.g.  Salesforce.com).  SalesLogix is just one of those applications.  I remember in the late 90′s when SalesLogix was the new challenger in the mid market. It dominated the market with functionality that allowed the small to mid sized companies afford a powerful solution without spending the monies required to run an application like Siebel ( of course what small company ever could afford to run Siebel?). 

In addition, SalesLogix offered easy to use functionality.  You’d get all of the great things we took for granted like drag and drop functionality and right mouse button clicking that made it easy to navigate and fast to use.  Easy to use has always been the creed when trying to advance end user adoption and SalesLogix seemed to take it’s lead from it’s little brother application, ACT! .

Today, when I review all of the CRM applications on the market, even I forget about the little things that make it easy to use sofware.  I suppose my biggest gripe today with the more popular web interface products is the lack of true windows client functionality and the speed to perform certain tasks as I did in a windows client. 

I was recently using the SalesLogix Web Cloud product I had an epiphany.  The folks at Sage incorporated many of those windows client elements that I liked so much.  I found right mouse button clicking  made the web experience much easier to navigate rather than having to click through multiple links like other web applications.  I was able to drag and drop emails and documents onto the SalesLogix screen from my desktop right into the account record. I missed those little nuances in other web CRM applications I’ve used or test driven. Bottom line, it’s the little things that count.