Rethinking the case for CRM
Published: 09 May 2002 10:55 BST
How so?
Once you surpass 100 or so salespeople, it's very hard to synchronise data when the salesperson has to use it on the road. The disconnected use has been very, very spotty. And contact management -- you get that with Microsoft Exchange. That's not that valuable. Sales-lead tracking, most can do that on an Excel spreadsheet. Pipeline tracking is useful to guys like me, in management, but it's of little use to the sales force. Nothing in that process makes you sell more effectively. Salespeople haven't really gotten anything out of it, so they're not willing to use it to the point that it really becomes so much shelf-ware. I've seen estimates that sales-force automation makes up 30 percent to 40 percent of CRM spending, historically.
But Epiphany sells a sales-force automation application, right? Do your customers have these problems?
We just released a new CRM suite with a new sales-force product. We call it "intelligent sales." What we're really doing is driving intelligence to salespeople from the marketing and service departments and then providing a path to find out what's working and what's not in the selling process.
How does it work?
One thing it can do is read the calendar of the salesperson, see what customer meetings the salesperson has, and show the customer service alerts, buying history and other information related to that particular relationship. It allows the salesperson to go into marketing organisation and to query what other salespeople have been effective at selling a particular product. It's much more focused on delivering intelligence about specific customers that salesperson has and breaking down silos between marketing, service and sales.
News.com ran a column recently that questions the extent to which software can really "manage a relationship." The columnist said that while software is a useful tool, you can't rely on it to improve relationships, because relationships are about people, not data. Do you agree that "customer relationship management" is a misnomer in that sense? Perhaps even misleading?
It has been a misnomer, but it's changing. If you look at the historic players in CRM -- Siebel, Vantive, Aurum, Clarify -- they've all, interestingly enough, been called CRM software. But there is very little they do that's about the customer relationship. These technologies are productivity technologies for people that interface with customers.
Sales-force automation, for example, is really just a sales productivity tool. It doesn't do much to make you understand the customer or to foster a better relationship with the customer. Call-centre software has traditionally been about how quickly you can get customers off the phone. It's more about saving money and does almost the converse of fostering relationships. Supporting the processes of people dealing with customers has done little to foster the relationship.
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