The Most Revolutionary Software of 2019

TrustRadius Team
July 1, 2019
Reviews & Research

The Most Revolutionary Software of 2019

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that not all software products are created equal. That’s why, in honor of Independence Day in the US, we’re celebrating the software that users would follow to the ends of the earth with TrustRadius’ Most Revolutionary Award! 

To determine the most revolutionary software, we examined TrustRadius’s collection of over 2.67 million words contained in reviews across hundreds of product categories, looking for the products with the most reviewers mentions of the word “revolution” or any derivative thereof.

The stars at the top of our list have really earned their stripes! The people have spoken. These progressive technology products capture the innovative spirit of revolution. 

Introducing our Most Revolutionary Software for 2019 in alphabetical order:

  1. Act-on
  2. Airtable
  3. Appian
  4. Cvent Event Management
  5. Gainsight
  6. HubSpot
  7. MindTouch
  8. Oracle HCM Cloud
  9. OutSystems
  10. SharpSpring

Inspired by our list of Most Revolutionary software, we’ve compiled a ten-step guide to how each of our winners helps their customers start their own successful revolutions! 

Step #1: Focus on what’s valuable to achieve at the moment with Appian 

Setting a focus for your budding revolution helps people rally around what’s really important. Just as the Patriots of the American Revolution were seeking freedom from “taxation without representation,” Appian is helping businesses free themselves from bulky manual processes. Appian’s low-code development platform combines intelligent automation and business process management to deliver powerful business applications to its clients.

As one Appian customer, a business analyst for an aviation company, says in his review, “We like to follow the KISS principle and automate the mundane so that our staff can concentrate on their day job and not have to worry about what happens next.” 

It sounds like when you’re able to focus on the important stuff and forget about the rest, you’re free to enjoy life, liberty, and happiness at work!

Step #2: Oracle HCM Cloud helps recruit the right people to help you get the job done

The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence came from a variety of occupations, including farmers, physicians, lawyers, and merchants, yet they all worked together to envision and create a system of government to replace British Parliament. Finding the right people for the job can be hard, but Oracle HCM Cloud is there to help. 

Its complete core HR and integrated talent management suite supports the entire employee lifecycle, from hire to retire. The vendor says that benefits to organizations include: streamlining operations, aligning talent management to organizational needs and providing insights to executive teams. 

A manager at an enterprise-level health and wellness company using the suite writes in their review, “Oracle HCM Cloud/Taleo has completely revolutionized how I’ve experienced new job requisitions being posted[,] how applicants are managed and reviewed through the hiring process, and how our employee careers portal interacts with the whole thing.” 

It turns out recruiting a team that’ll make it into the history books and managing them throughout their employment is way easier with the right tools. 

Step #3: … and Mindtouch helps to make sure those people have got your back

If you thought the Declaration of Independence was written entirely by Thomas Jefferson – you thought wrong! While Jefferson did write the first draft, he had a dream team of four other delegates helping him make edits and rewrites along the way. 

MindTouch, the next revolutionary product on our list, also aims to make things better for clients by improving the customer self-service experience. According to the vendor, MindTouch brings the customer record (CRM) and customers’ self-service behavior together to better understand their experience with a given brand. 

“What really sets MindTouch apart from other providers I’ve worked with is that the people who know so much about the product also understand how their customers actually use the product. That had a profound impact on our setup, configuration, implementation, and rollout,” says a 10/10 star reviewer, who uses MindTouch to keep up with his customers’ information needs as they buy his company’s luxury motorhomes. 

Creating a revolution (and implementing a new product) can be hard work. But with the right people helping you along the way, every day can be a (Boston Tea) Party!

Step #4: Put SharpSpring’s resources in place to help you grow 

The Revolutionary War cost the fledgling country about $400 million – that’s over $2.4 billion today! Clearly, serious resources were required to take themission from a grassroots rebellion to a full-blown revolution. 

SharpSpring’s comprehensive marketing automation platform is one such resource that has helped businesses grow rapidly, according to TrustRadius reviewers. The platform offers features like behavior-based email marketing, dynamic forms, landing page and blog builders, social media management, universal CMS compatibility, and hundreds of application integrations to its customers, the majority of whom are small businesses. 

One reviewer, a senior digital strategist at a boutique digital marketing and branding firm, says that SharpSpring “[r]evolutionized our new business development. In the past 6 months, we’ve closed more than $1 Million in new business (for a boutique agency that’s huge), and every one of those clients we got because of SharpSpring, and specifically its Visitor ID tool.” Other reviewers praise everything from its comprehensive training and support to its robust analytics and automation tools.

According to the TrustRadius community, SharpSpring is a solid resource for companies who want to grow as big and strong as the mighty white pine, one of the primary symbols of the American Revolution. 

Step #5: Let OutSystems help get the ball rolling 

After over two decades of growing civil unrest, the Revolutionary War lasted another seven years! But our next winner, OutSystems, helps users build enterprise-grade apps way faster than that. This solution lets users visually develop their entire application, easily integrate with existing systems, and add their own custom code when they need it. 

For example, it helped one user launch two startups in three years. He says that he chose OutSystems because “we needed a revolutionary way to create new innovative solutions & products at a speed never seen before. These new products needed to go from idea to market in weeks not months. Enhancements need to rollout in days not weeks.” Other reviewers like how OutSystems keeps product deployment clean and integrates with legacy systems that pre-date it.

Once your revolution’s roots are planted, it’s time to start moving quickly to execute your grand plans. TrustRadius reviewers affirm that OutSystems can help you get there.

Step #6: Get the word out with Act-On 

Political pamphlets were the email blasts of the 18th century, wildly popular and widely distributed through circulating societies. Act-On’s multi-channel marketing platform can help spark the same level of fervor, offering inbound and outbound marketing tools that the vendor claims enable a tighter alignment with sales and turn your data into substance helping provoke action. 

Says an Act-On purist using the tool at their small software company, “Act-On has completely revolutionized the way we send emails to our contacts and host our content. It has helped us learn things about our customers and prospects’ online presence across our website, something that until we started with Act-On we had absolutely no insight into.” 

Aspiring revolutionaries, take heed: spread your message from a powerful platform and you will be on your way to success!

Step #7: Cvent Event Management will help you expand rapidly 

By the time the Declaration of Independence was adopted, there had already been several battles between colonists and British troops. In response, militias began springing up from nowhere; for example, in the spring of 1775, Connecticut recruited a quarter of its military-age men to march on British-occupied Boston, along with 10,000 other New England colonists. 

Cvent Event Management also knows how to help you draw a crowd. Their software solutions automate and simplify several aspects of event planning so customers can maximize their event’s impact. The Cvent platform supports online event registration, venue selection, event management, event marketing, onsite solutions, email marketing, and attendee engagement. 

Cvent has revolutionized our event management processes,” writes a reviewer who works as a Program & Events Specialist for a midsize nonprofit. She explains, “We started small by only purchasing with one department for a one-year trial. After great success, we have expanded to all departments.” Reviewers like her also enjoy the company’s proactive attitude toward adding new technologies and their budget building and intuitive website design tools.

Drawing a crowd is a great sign that your movement is getting traction, and Cvent helps event planners and marketers do just that, no bottle-rockets or firework display necessary! 

Step #8: Grow your force of loyal followers with the help of HubSpot

Today’s historians widely believe that only a third of the colonist populace was in support of seceding from England. That means each of those followers was crucial to the American Revolution’s success. HubSpot, which operates as an all-in-one inbound marketing engine, helps businesses create ever-important followers with tools for email marketing, landing page creation, social media marketing, content management, reporting & analytics, search engine optimization (SEO) and more. 

A client who started with HubSpot as a “novice” to all things marketing now says, “Through the use of the landing page, CTA and email tools, we have revolutionized the way we reach out to potential client[s], leads, and customers… We reach them more, we share more things with them, we engage them like never before. Strangers have become followers, and followers have become family.” 

When loyalty means the difference between success and failure, HubSpot can help you recruit a band of true Patriots for your business.

Step #9: Airtable will unify your operations and your supporters 

Leaders of the American Revolution recognized a need for unity and collaboration amongst the colonies. Benjamin Franklin’s Join or Die woodcut, featuring a snake divided into eight pieces, became a memorable symbol of colonial unity and freedom. Today, 30,000+ companies use Airtable’s collaboration platform to support content pipelines, product management, event planning, user research, and more. 

One reviewer, who uses Airtable to manage a nonprofit, writes, “There’s nothing I can think of that Airtable isn’t a great platform for. And that’s the beauty of it – I can use it as the foundation for everything, rather than piecing together 12-15 different apps and platforms.” Users also appreciate how simple Airtable’s bases are to create and customize, the accessibility of the presentations that Airtable helps them prepare for stakeholders, and the platform’s mobile capabilities.

Airtable empowers users to build workflows for virtually any task, showing aspiring revolutionaries that unifying your efforts under a single user-friendly interface can make your business a force to be reckoned with.

Step #10: Keep moving toward your goals and the future you want to create with Gainsight 

When the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4th, 1776, there was still a lot of work to be done – the darn thing hadn’t even been signed yet! (That happened in August.) There was a war to be won, a government to be formalized, and a country to build. Revolutionaries needed to take a long look at their core values in order to do the hard work of forging ahead.

Savvy politicians and businessmen alike know that they must understand what’s going on in the present and examine the past in order to create a prosperous future. Gainsight has been called out by its reviewers for helping them also work smarter and make better plans for managing their customers’ success. Gainsight’s platform offers a workflow engine, data connectors, tools to manage your data architecture, as well as a business modeler and a best practice library. The vendor promises to help its clients interpret data about their own customers and see how their actions impact their accounts.

The vice president of an enterprise education management company using Gainsight says in her review, “The Gainsight team has been excellent at providing thought leadership in customer success and helping us revolutionize both our mindset and process. They continue to make us look further, think deeper, with the goal of being more successful at partnering with our clients.”

Other reviews also mention Gainsight’s timeline, which lets users track important events in a customer’s lifecycle in one place, its powerful rules engine, and its customizable call to action function. 

Congratulations to all the Revolutionary Award winners! 

Just like the United States has come a long way since the original Independence Day, these Revolutionary Award winners have helped customers change the face of their own businesses. These products work tirelessly to adapt to the needs of their clients. Change is the spark to revolutionizing technology and countries. 

About the Author

TrustRadius Team

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