Tour de Force: Proficient Solutions to Overhaul CRM

In today's business, a wealth of untapped potential has been created by the growing popularity of big data. Companies are failing to extract this data from their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or transaction-based systems and convert it into an understandable format that can drive activity for marketing organizations and sales people. For the last 15 years, Tour de Force has dedicated themselves to turning this over abundance of seemingly useless information into profit growth by making it the foundation of their product. Now they offer more than a flat feature set and a basic architecture: Tour de Force gives its customers a maintainable, manageable piece of customer relationship management (CRM) software with a low cost of ownership and easy user adoption.

But how's that possible? "Over the years, we realized that to be as active with CRM and get adoption, we have to drive information and value out to those users," says Tour de Force Founder and CEO Matt Hartman. The company reshaped the development of its product so that it was created under the assumption that it would always be implemented as an extension of an ERP system. As a result, Tour de Force's CRM extends from over 45 different ERP systems, meaning that it calculates what Hartman likes to call "over a thousand points of interest" based on raw, standardized transaction data from an ERP. With their Business System Integration (BSI) connector, they create meaningful data points for sales and marketing organizations to drive business with.

While one of their product's greatest strengths is being an extension of an ERP system, another is its collaboration with other popular platforms like Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail and Lotus Notes. Tour de Force has additionally created its own workflow manager to replace Microsoft Project, which allows them to manage project, production , and sales workflows while identifying key milestones and work list items. These tools allow clientele to manage major production cycles and get things out to their customers. “They’d have to pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in customization for those other solutions that they get out of the box with our product," says Hartman.