Tour de Force CRM was officially founded Oct. 1, 2001. In the past 10 years, with the input of hundreds of distributors, Tour de Force CRM has grown to be a robust, feature rich solution with a broad user base, 80% of which is made up of industrial distributors. Tour de Force CRM is rapidly becoming the CRM of choice for organizations in the B2B industry seeking to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales teams.
Matt Hartman, President/CEO and founder of Tour de Force CRM, was raised in the distribution industry. As the former owner of a Rockwell Automation Electrical Distributor that had been run by the Hartman family for 50 years, Matt spent most of his time working in sales and managing a sales team. One of his greatest struggles was the ability to efficiently and effectively manage a sales team while also providing with them the tools to manage themselves.
During his tenure at his electrical distributorship, Matt tried to implement various contact management software products such as ACT, ECCO, and GoldMine, but none of them were built to work in a business-to-business selling environment. All of the solutions he tried were contact centric, and did not integrate to the distributor’s primary ERP system to provide value to the sales team while also giving them access to everything they needed to know about their accounts, anytime and anywhere.
After selling his distribution company in 1997, Matt spent the next several years involved in various consulting engagements with Rockwell Automation and Schneider Automation that were focused on the training of salespeople in the industrial distribution industry. As part of these consulting engagements, Matt tried once again to use GoldMine to manage the relationships with the distributors and integrators that he was doing business with. Once again, Matt experienced the frustrations related to these solutions that were not built for sales in the B2B industry.
It was around this time that Matt met with Tour de Force’s lead developer and scoped out what he wanted in a solution that would provide sales force automation along with CRM capabilities. One of the fundamental requirements that Matt recognized was the need for the system to be based around the framework of Microsoft Outlook. He knew that the one application that everyone in an organization uses continually is Microsoft Outlook, and he didn’t want them to be required to have an additional application open on their desktop.
Since 2001, Tour de Force CRM has evolved and grown based on the input of hundreds of distributors. Today, it is a robust software solution that drives an organization to be more efficient and more effective by providing a wide range of tools in customer relationship management, business intelligence, and sales force automation. As the product has evolved, so has the Tour de Force CRM user base, which now consists of distributors, manufacturers, construction companies, furniture dealers, and other various B2B industries.