CRM, the abbreviation of Customer Relationship Management, has been a buzzword for a decade and has become an old term now. While it is treated as commonplace as ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning), HRM (Human Resources Marketing), E-Marketing, etc., why should we bother discussing it again?
The fact: many benefits of CRM are yet to be discovered.
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The ancestors of CRM solutions started from software boxes like ACT!, and later Goldmine and Maximizer, the so-called "Contact Managers" to "upgraded" versions of CRM (of course, I skipped a lot like "PIM" or "Groupware") that help users manage the interactions, documents, potentials, or later projects, voice, or many more and in company basis. A decade ago, research companies like Gartner speculated the big potential of CRM solutions and therefore many solutions, like Saleslogix, ACCPAC (or Sage) CRM, and later Salesforce and MS CRM were found on the global market. The revolution of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and now Cloud Computing further boosts the global CRM implementations and therefore the revenue to, still, double-digit annual growth rate even during the years of financial tsunami. Millions of people, especially in the United States are still paying Salesforce US per user per month and thus contributed the annual revenue of the company beyond $US 1 billion last year. Thanks to evangelists like Mr. Paul Greenburg, author of the best-selling CRM book called "CRM at the Speed of Light", CRM wheel has been moving fast and are still evolving (e.g. Customer Experience Management, Social CRM,... well, I am sure more will be coming).
When we look at the Asian market, however, the situation seems not as encouraging as that in the western world. Just take an example of the International ICT Expo in Hong Kong held in April 2010 that just finished. We received comments like:
- Why the sales pipeline / forecast is obtained by such rough opportunity percentage?
- Writing to the system does in fact kill my time in pitching more customers
- (Sales people) Why should I put the contacts to company database as in case I leave the company, I can "bring" them to the new one to keep on the pitching.
Not many people are concern with using some scientific approach to keep healthy pipeline (or that's the similar reason why stuff like Balanced Scorecard or Management KPIs is yet to be popular in most of the SMEs). Further, professionals here could be meaner on time in writing even simple sentences but be concerned less on the time in looking for information (i.e. files, contacts and emails from different locations) that is in fact killing their valuable time. What's more, physical but dead contact information could mean more than a great tool in managing great relationship with your customers who can directly contribute their prospects in the companies that they are serving.
But above all, being reluctant to change is the most important reason. My experience can prove the statement that at least 80% of conversation with prospects is to invite them back to the right track to explore the opportunities together but replies are usually they are busy. Well, I have been offering apps and services to help them turn their valuable time into opportunities and thus revenue.
CRM is indeed beneficial to a lot of businesses but they just need "a reason" to kick off the project immediately. What I can say is that it is not up to me to "offer" my customers a reason to buy my solutions, but whether there is any "strategy" in business owners' mindsets to make their companies more competitive.
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