I recently connected with Rich Green, chief product officer (CPO) with SugarCRM, to get this customer relationship management (CRM) industry veteran’s insights into the challenges of integrating AI into CRM platforms, the value of generating deeper customer relationships, and the lessons learned during a career spent in Silicon Valley. (Responses have been edited for clarity.)

1. Can you give me the quick elevator pitch about SugarCRM, and where the company fits into the CRM ecosystem?

SugarCRM helps marketing, sales, and customer service teams achieve high-definition CX by providing the CRM platform that makes the hard things easier. Thousands of mid-market companies in over 120 countries around the globe rely on Sugar to reach new levels of performance and predictability by letting the platform do the work. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with almost 500 employees in 10 countries, Sugar is backed by Accel-KKR.

SugarCRM has a singular focus on mid-market companies, and offers a cloud-first, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform with a library of pre-built integration templates and connectors to most common business applications that sales, marketing, and service teams in mid-market businesses need. It also has a global community of more than 400 partners to extend reach and relevance.

2. What is your role at SugarCRM, and what were the personal or professional experiences you have had that shaped the way you approach product engineering, development, and management?

I’ve been at SugarCRM for 6 years. I started out as a consultant to the prior (interim) leader of Sugar Products organization, but was asked to stay on and take on the CPO role. Subsequently, I was asked to become Sugar’s chief technology officer (CTO) as well. Prior to that, I had leadership roles in a variety of industries and in companies large and small, at Sun Microsystems, Nuance Communications, and Nokia.

Having spent most of my time in Silicon Valley, a few things stand out. Much like in sports, the team with the best athletes generally wins. At Sugar, every product-related hire must conceptually “raise our average” so that we can be the fastest, smartest, and most creative product team versus our competitors. Having been at companies with lots of fine folks, and at companies with smaller but incredibly bright folks, I’ll take smaller numbers of great athletes every time. And that’s what we’ve created here at Sugar.

Teams loaded with brilliant folks who each make dozens of decisions every day, unseen by their peers or their managers, require a leader to share as much information as possible and be as accessible as possible, so that their decisions will be aligned, and pointed to a common goal.

Having been part of many technological revolutions, they generally happen more slowly than it would seem they should. And that’s why, though you must spot them early, you need to be careful about entering the market too soon before the trend, and the needs can be well understood in the marketplace. Of course, it’s worse to be late, but both can cause failures.

People still struggle with some of the key foundational tenets of the fourth and fifth industrial revolution: massive data; near-infinite connectivity and bandwidth; cloud as the world’s network operating system; mobility and the Internet of Things (IoT), and the greatest change-agent of all, AI. It will come to be that these “waves” of tech affect everything, are not “optional,” and those who do not quickly become facile with the topics and take significant steps to engage with them will be left behind so quickly that there’ll be no time to play catch up.

3. The integration of AI within CRM/customer data platform (CDP) solutions has become commonplace. Tell me how SugarCRM is incorporating AI, and how does that benefit your customers?

Though this has become commonplace, the rollout and use of AI in CRM manifests itself in many ways. Today, AI is predominantly an “add-on.” That is, technology that can be added to solve a specific problem or use case for an existing customer. That places the burden of expertise on the customer and their potential partner.

Using AI in CRM, CX really, is an intrinsic property of the system, providing automated engagement, advice, and predictive capabilities as just “how CX works.” This is a more challenging and valuable offering and that’s what we’re doing at SugarCRM. I will say that it’s quite challenging building and evolving AI that can accommodate the variances of how customers analyze their pipelines, how marketing nurturing is used, and how support workflows are defined. These all pose challenges, but there is enough commonality to build incredibly powerful models. And, of course, using automated machine learning (AutoML) techniques to understand those variants and adapt them to model building is leading-edge stuff.

4. Relationship-based selling is important for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) businesses. What steps should organizations take to shift from a purely transactional approach to a sales strategy based around deeper customer relationships?

Well, it’s why we at Sugar have moved from the notion of CRM to CX. It’s all about the aggregate experience that your customers realize. Doing more to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and sensing their experience, and then modeling your whole company to build a better one is why we create the products and technologies that we do, and it affects how all of Sugar operates.

For example, our branding of “let the platform do the work” manifests technologically by creating event-streamed data services so that all users, whatever their function, can have access to or be advised of information that they need to be informed, responsive, and provide a great experience for their customer, or said differently, our customer’s customers.

5. As we head into 2022, what CX strategies do companies need to deploy in order to win and retain customers, especially in light of rising prices, supply chain issues, and labor availability concerns?

If I had to reduce your question to the most basic response, it’s all about speed, knowledge, and communication. Consumers and businesspeople have been trained in their personal lives to expect near-instantaneous responses online and though some types of CX challenges can be more complex than a typical experience, the “near-instantaneous” expectation prevails. So, building processes and relying on systems in which the data flows and notifications appear in near-real-time is essential.

There is no substitute for knowledge when competing in this new world. Access to information instantly; enabling customers to find their own information without having to speak or engage with a human; getting visibility into both the facts and the sentiment and perspectives of your customers; and being able to quickly act on that information immediately are all paramount.

And as I’ve presented to many audiences, it’s literally beyond the capability of human intelligence to gather, relate, and analyze all the information needed to competitively provide a great experience. That’s why automating data gathering and sharing, and relying on AI-powered assistance to plow through that information to identify patterns and anomalies (to cut through “the fog of war”) are essential to compete aggressively in most every market.