Google CRM? Will It Every Happen?

Google has been push­ing hard­er than ever to keep its Lord­ship on the web. Their lat­est bat­tle has been with Face­book who has been cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful army of its own. Google makes most of its rev­enue through paid search, but has had very good suc­cess with its busi­ness mar­ket­place: Google Apps. Google Apps pro­vides busi­ness­es with busi­ness email (Gmail), file stor­age and cre­at­ing of doc­u­ments (Google Docs), Con­tact Man­ag­er, Mobile Access and Google Cal­en­dar. Google then went one step fur­ther by cre­at­ing Google Mar­ket­place, which gives third-par­ty com­pa­nies the abil­i­ty to sell their prod­ucts and ser­vices and link­ing them to a com­pa­nies Google Apps account. The Google mar­ket­place is very sim­i­lar to the way Apple’s iPhone works with their App Store. So for exam­ple, if you use Mailchimp as your email mar­ket­ing soft­ware, you can add Mailchimp to your Google Apps account, which will allow you to sign in auto­mat­i­cal­ly through your Google account. Basi­cal­ly Google Apps is the hub­spot for your ​“cloud” busi­ness. I use Google Apps for my 100% cloud-based busi­ness and love it. How­ev­er, I have one prob­lem with it: Google is not a CRM. If Google had its very own CRM built in, I bet they’d get an over­whelm­ing response of new clients in a mat­ter of days. What is hold­ing most small busi­ness guy up from switch­ing to Google Apps is the lack of CRM capa­bil­i­ties. Right now they have to sign up for Google, get a smart­phone, and then sign up for a third par­ty CRM. How­ev­er, most third par­ty CRMs cur­rent­ly avail­able are not 100% com­pat­i­ble with Google’s plat­form. I’ve been using High­rise from 37 Sig­nals as my basic CRM and task man­ag­er and then Google for every­thing else. I’m hap­py with the two pro­grams. I’d still love to have every­thing under one roof. I don’t want mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies and all these small month­ly bills. I like most small busi­ness own­ers want one sim­ple, easy to use CRM pro­gram: email, cal­en­dar, task man­ag­er, con­tacts, deals and cas­es! I want it to work with no third par­ty plu­g­ins. My Pre­dic­tion and Wish­list for Google I believe Google will cre­ate a CRM pro­gram. Why they have not done it yet? I don’t know. Maybe they had time to kill and want­ed to see how their Mar­ket­place would do. I think the mar­ket­place is very cool, but it still is more than we need as busi­ness own­ers. Also, I think Google has to cre­ate a CRM or Microsoft will. Microsoft is a bit behind Google in cre­at­ing their cloud sys­tem, how­ev­er, they are doing it. Microsoft has a CRM pro­gram called Microsoft Dynam­ics. The cloud ver­sion has been released, but I have not tried it out. I’m a Google guy. Also, peo­ple are tired of third par­ty plu­g­ins left and right. Sales­force, the cur­rent leader in CRM-cloud com­put­ing, is buy­ing out all the third par­ty com­pa­nies! So they get it! Will Google do the same? I hope so. I think they should buy out 37signals who has the best project man­age­ment and CRM pro­grams I’ve seen. I’d then have them take over Pipeline Deals as they too have a few good CRM tools! The prob­lem with 37signals is that they just do NOT work with Google. They are com­plete­ly sep­a­rate and have no two-way inte­gra­tion. You have to install plu­g­ins from yet anoth­er com­pa­ny, that can be bug­gy, to sync 37signals and Google! Google needs to lis­ten to the small busi­ness world and cre­ate a CRM pro­gram with all the basics. Google does not need to wor­ry about their part­ner­ship with Sales­force, because small busi­ness own­ers don’t need such a sophis­ti­cat­ed CRM. They need a sim­ple, easy to use sys­tem. Google has that now: email, con­tacts and a cal­en­dar. Now just add the cus­tomer man­age­ment, and they will see suc­cess. As I’m writ­ing this, it got me think­ing, what about Apple CRM? That would be cool! Here is an arti­cle I read that digs a bit deep­er into Google CRM. I received this arti­cle from Soft­ware Advice, who asked me to post it here. So please take time to read: Will Google Enter The CRM Mar­ket? by Lau­ren Carl­son. It is a good read. Thanks, Lau­ren for send­ing this: and keep me post­ed on any­thing else you may dis­cov­er! What would you like from Google? Do you have a CRM that works well with the way you run your busi­ness? p.s. I also know it is expen­sive and can be prob­lem­at­ic for Google to cre­ate their own CRM…because so many oth­er com­pa­nies have sat­u­rat­ed this mar­ket. Google’s mar­ket­ing deci­sion is prob­a­bly to con­tin­ue inte­grat­ing 3^rd par­ties. My pre­dic­tions could be wrong. I sure hope I’m right, because I’ve just heard so many peo­ple frus­trat­ed with all these APIs and plu­g­ins. It is get­ting con­fus­ing. If Google holds back, there has to be a com­pa­ny that does a clean and per­fect inte­gra­tion with Google.