As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don’t have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses — mostly small — are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the CRM decision-maker or implementer; like the other activities in these businesses, customer relationship management is just one of a number of tasks being juggled by an all-too-small group of employees.
The issue is the term "CRM" - most people don't get it in small businesses. It's like CMS or ERP or any other acronym coined by vendors - they are not in the customer's language. Compare "I need to implement a new CMS" vs "I need to build a new website".
For many small businesses - particularly consultants and agencies - the thing that is most important is the pipeline i.e. "where is my next sale coming from" NOT "what notes have been added to the CRM".
I'd like to see the term customer relationship management system dropped!
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Reaching the Untapped CRM Market: Talk About Problems, Not Apps
Posted by: Christopher J. Bucholtz March 24, 2011 05:00 AMAs hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don’t have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses — mostly small — are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the CRM decision-maker or implementer; like the other activities in these businesses, customer relationship management is just one of a number of tasks being juggled by an all-too-small group of employees.
For many small businesses - particularly consultants and agencies - the thing that is most important is the pipeline i.e. "where is my next sale coming from" NOT "what notes have been added to the CRM".
I'd like to see the term customer relationship management system dropped!