During our startup phase, we began to ask customers, prospective customers, and CRM professionals this question: "What is the greatest challenge that you face in choosing/implementing/using CRM tools?" The overwhelming response really surprised us. We thought we had it pegged. We had lists of features ready that we wanted to add to vtiger CRM and plans for more integration with other tools and services.
The answer to our question was not even related to the CRM tool. The answer was: user adoption/acceptance.
Keep in mind, our focus group was comprised of individuals that used many different tools. We had some that used Microsoft CRM, Siebel, SageCRM, Salesforce.com, and more. Each of them said that their greatest challenge is getting their organization to buy into the idea of it and then getting their users to actually use the tool.
This changed the entire playing field and, therefore, our entire strategy. While our prepared feature lists still held some importance, we realized that it would be most important, from a business perspective and from our customers' perspective, to focus more on the "how" of CRM.