In the fall of 2005, SearchCRM.com invited companies in the CRM and related markets to nominate their products for the 2005 Products of the Year awards. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Oct. 1, 2004, and Sept. 30, 2005. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace. Not all companies invited to participate submitted nominations.

We looked at products in twelve categories -- Business Intelligence, Customer Data Integration, Data Quality, Online self-service, Contact Center (E-mail response), Contact Center (Hosted contact center), Contact Center (Workforce optimization), Contact Center (Speech technology), Marketing automation for enterprises, Marketing automation for SMBs, Sales force automation for enterprises and sales force automation for SMBs.

Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products based on a variety of criteria including innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. We then tallied the judges' ratings separately, and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.