Martin Schneider was the driving force behind one of the best CRM blogs out there – CRM Outsiders. And although CO is a blog operated by the folks at SugarCRM, and includes helpful hints about using Sugar – the vast majority of the content was just good stuff about social crm, customer experience, the cloud and other important topics… and even a little pop culture (Thanks for that Martin!). And Martin and the team did it with personality and smartness, which made you want to check out what was going on. So when Martin announced he was moving on – or should I say moving up to be VP of Marketing for Basho Technologies, my initial thought was great for him, because he truly deserves it. That was immediately followed by a second thought – who the heck are they gonna get to fill Martin’s shoes…
Knowing that keeping the momentum that Martin had built up was not going to be an easy task, I was glad to hear that SugarCRM turned to Chris Bucholtz. I have known Chris for years, going back to his days as editor of InsideCRM.com, where he did a great job of covering the industry. He followed that up with the great work he did for Aplicor as editor for ForecastingClouds.com. Plus Chris has been writing for outlets like CRM Buyer for a long time. He knows his stuff, and he knows how to write – so Sugar couldn’t have found a better person to take the baton from Martin.
One last thing about Chris – in addition to being supremely qualified to do this, he’s also a nice guy. We’ve talked at length about his interest in the Tuskegee Airmen and the books he’s written on the subject. And I can’t wait for the movie that’s being based off of his book to come out! And when Chris found out I was a huge fan of the old Negro League – and that I had a collection of Negro League baseball caps – he went out and bought me one to add to the collection.
OK so these last couple of things had nothing to do with CRM Outsiders, but it does speak to Chris’ interest in understanding the people side of CRM, which I think is still the most important part of customer relationship management. And when you couple that with all the other things Chris has going for him, we can all feel good about the future of CRM Outsiders.
So Martin, thank you for all the great work and best wishes for your continued success at Basho! And Chris, thanks for grabbing the baton from Martin!
