My idea is:
Add sales automation functionality on top of current architecture so that Mautic can attract companies who need sales automation/CRM functionality (and be a reasonable substitute for Hubspot, ActiveCampaign etc).
Mautic has “stages”. A possible solution could be to:
A “card” can be pulled between columns and the stage would be updated.
A stage “change” should be able to trigger an automation.
I think these groups of people would benefit from this idea:
Anyone looking for a viable CRM/Sales automation option for ActiveCampaign and Hubspot. Quite often Companies don’t want to mess with multiple tools (one CRM and one for Marketing automation) so it would be benefitial to have them both in the same tool.
Why I think they would benefit from this idea:
Marketing and Sales need to work together in most companies. The marketing funnel often end up in a sales contact and during the sales process, the representative need to continue to automate contact followup etc (sales automation). As I see it, Mautic has the architecture to be able to support sales automation with a few additional features.
(Note: at this point, stages are connected to people, which is probably just fine for now. At a later stage, a new entity for “deals” may be needed).
Any code or resources to support this idea:
Unfortunately not (except for the link to the DnD project above).
Are you willing to work on this idea?:
I would be happy to provide testing and functionality requests, but my programming skills are… well, let’s not go there .
What skills and resources do you need to explore this further?
Developers.
In general, companies either already have a CRM or don’t plan on using one.
Not sure it is a good idea to add to Mautic extra functionality that’s already existing and open source (plenty of CRMs out there). A CRM is usually a very complex piece of software, generally 10-20 years old (meaning fully developed, stable, large) that contains lots of specific business cases.
Here’s my view:
So, if we can’t add a fully fledged CRM to mautic (or half fledged for that matter) I would not use the terminology, I would not call it or compare it to a CRM because that battle will always be lost.
Because most companies will already have a CRM in place (or you can get an excelent CRM for free), what we could do instead is providing/improving the primitives and tools (like the one you described) that allow better interaction and richer data exchange with a CRM/ any CRM.
What do you think @horsen ?
So I would say the first step would be to define what exactly these other tools you mention, have or do, that Mautic doesn’t and determine which ones make sense for our audience.
One concept that might be important in all this process:
Mautic is NOT currently designed as a UI centered APP where users log in to “manage their marketing”
It is more of a back-end tool, with maybe one exception, the campaign builder.
Do you think this has to change or do we need to continue moving in that direction?
The reason I first started looking into this was because Mautic was so close to covering most of what I needed in a CRM (contacts, company grouping, tagging, filtering etc). The only thing I was missing back then was for Stage changes to trigger automations. I think the minimum thing for would be to have that. The Kanban board is not necessary, but would provide some nice UX.
I think that with some added functionality for Mautic, it would cover the needs of many sales people, and without the hassle of having two separate systems to sync.
Blockquote Do you think this has to change or do we need to continue moving in that direction?
I suppose it depends on where the community want to take the product. Considering the new page builder being implemented (and considering where “competing” products are moving), I would love to see a more UX-UI centered application.
Well, a note on that, the direction of the product is hardly defined by the community, it is handled by Acquia.
We have many “Teams” in the community, none is about product development.
We do have a Product team, but it is not what a marketer would call “product” this team is 100% centered on programming, releases, code maintenance, etc.
Maybe this could be the first step needed on our quest? I mean having a product team that can DEFINE the path for the product…
Thanks for the idea! Im also missing this and was thinking about implementing something.
I fully agree with @Yosu_Cadilla thoughts on CRMs. In addition, I think there is one thing missing for smaller companies, companies with an outdated CRM, or projects/teams that want to organize their work in a more flexible and easy way (while still having the master CRM).
My idea: instead of building something in Mautic, I was thinking about a Trello integration. Similar to @hrosen: Mautic puts the contact in Trello Lists based on e.g. the stage. Users can then use the cards normally in Trello. A Trello Power Up syncs the stage changes back to Mautic. This can be a plugin for those people who like it.
I build a very very basic prototype for the Mautic functionality to see if it can work (and to learn more about Mautic). I will continue as soon as I find some time again. Happy to share and collaborate on this.
Please also note that all the advancement in the UI-UX area is being done by developers or companies with developers, so instead of waiting for “the community” to produce these new implementations, they are just doing it themselves from top to bottom.
@adiux makes a good point: There are many different profiles of companies using Mautic.
On one side we have larger companies, which do have and use a CRM that they need to keep using (cost of switching would be too huge).
On the other hand, Mautic attracts plenty of small businesses and solo-marketers which would probably find Mautic much more useful and a more enticing software if it included some basic “mktg management” features and used simply UI’s for that.
And of course all sorts of companies in the middle, most of them would be happy to have something like this available.
I would contest this, we do have a focus on the product development (in addition to the keep the lights on stuff) however the team do not have many active members, so a lot of work is being carried by a very small number of people.
We have a draft product roadmap and a roadmap Trello board which is our first step toward a strategic approach to product development. We absolutely need more support from people with skills in product development/management/ownership to help us make progress with this.
If there are people who would like to support in this way, and help us to shape our draft roadmap into a finalised roadmap which we can publish, please step up!
We have the Community Sprint next week which is the perfect opportunity to get involved in this way. More details will be coming shortly about how the event is going to be organised but in the meantime please sign up via the link if you’d like to be involved.
A community sprint is hardly something marketers would be interested in attending.
As long as “Product” is defined by developers instead of marketers, we won’t get it going in the right direction.
I’ve been there, offered myself for the job on two occasions, one of which was long before any teams existed, what you describe is a fantasy @rcheesley.
I tried to introduce debate in that very product team, about how to steer the development process to what the community wants, know what I got? Crickets!
Who created the product roadmap? Who validated it? Where was that roadmap discussed in the community?
It was handed down by the community leadership, who works at Aquia and Accepted by the product team, which is almost exclusively populated by Acquia employees.
And now this fake construct is defended by you Ruth, who also works at Acquia.
Hardly a community driven effort!!!
That is called a “Development team”, not a product team.
A product team job is to develop the product, not the code.
The development team is supposed to do what the product team decides.\And that’s why there isn’t a product team, pretty neat! Won’t foul me…
Interesting perspective, the community sprint is cross-team.
The Marketing Team will be running a sprint where they very much need marketers to help us with things like the Mautic 3 release, defining our personas, setting up our Mautic instance and planning out campaigns. The Education team need people to help us with updating the videos and creating new ones for YouTube, writing content for our Knowledgebase, and helping us improve the docs and forum.
To answer your questions, the product roadmap was initially started by @dbhurley (who does not work at Acquia) and shared with the Product Team some months back. We’ve been working on it and refining it in our regular fortnightly meetings. We’ve also had cross-team involvement with the Marketing, Community and Education teams giving input.
These teams are not ‘almost exclusively populated by Acquia employees’ at all @Yosu_Cadilla, that is factually incorrect.
I would recommend that folk look back through the Product Team meetings in #t-product on Slack, which are all publicly accessible, to review the work that the team has been doing for yourselves. It’s all public, there’s nothing to hide.
perfect timing on your side, with the online sprint coming up
Ruth, I watch/read EVERY meeting that happens in the community. What you describe is what SHOULD be happening, definitely not what is really going on.
Frankly, I suspect you missed some things in the past, even then it was not black and white.
Nonetheless: I agree there is definitely a lot of room for improvement and I can confirm that this is explicitly on the agenda for the upcoming sprint - including things like deeper short- and long-term roadmap, including cross-team workshops.
And if we find out that we want even more (think “market research by marketing team”), the only limit is the capacity of volunteers, so we will always have to go step by step. The good news is that we have many new community members from around the world joining us for the sprint, across all teams.
I seriously hope you will be able to make it, too!
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