A key component of a Modern Infrastructure that can be delivered standalone. Customer Relationship Management is now a core business capability and not just a “tool.” It isn’t simply a store for all your customer information, it is also a means to streamline all processes, capture prospect and customer insights, track and evaluate marketing results, evaluate sales productivity and client onboarding, among many others including all service delivery metrics. It is the modern hub technology that is used for most key business information collection and evaluation. The top tier CRM tools are extremely flexible with their “User Interface” design tools allowing for departmental to role-based interfaces that maximize productivity. They facilitate the capture and calculation of key metrics; from total servicing costs per client that determines product to customer level profitability to other key prospect and client-based metrics. 

Most top tier CRM tools offer metric visualization through infographic-based dashboards that illustrate everything from historic trend analysis to near-real time or real-time information. If your firm doesn’t have CRM accessibility for every role and executive, you’re well behind the curve.

As THE industry leader in CRM knowledge, we provide your firm the best chance for success. Our Managing Partner alone has over 50 large company installs and has built and sold an industry-based CRM solution that was cloud based and phone enabled in 1993, way ahead of its time. Over the last 20 years of CRM, many vendors have come and gone. Some reaching the status of best of the magic quadrant only to be acquired or fall from their lofty status. With this as a known, it’s important to be strategic when selecting a vendor, knowing it may be less than a ten-year relationship and another strategic investment may be necessary. All technologies have a short lifespan. CRM is better than most but as previously stated, more than 5 vendors had the #1 status over the last 20 years.

Currently, Salesforce® holds a large lead in the magic quadrant. A company that started in 2000, went public in 2004 and was the first cloud-based solution to reach $10 billion in annual revenues by 2017.There are as many CRM failures as there are success stories. What separates them? Its not one thing but rather several key factors. Our belief is one metric stands above all others; ADOPTION. Without great adoption, failure is certain. What aids adoption above all others is the strategy toward simplicity at initial launch followed by quick responsiveness to other data, report or dashboard enhancement requests. It’s an add as you go strategy. This coupled with regular monitoring of usage, reinforcement training with best-practice case studies from users, among many other tactics will ensure adoption. Another important aspect is; SUPPORT. Small companies typically can’t afford to hire support service personnel internally and few vendors offer responsive support with administration. Solving this prior to selection is important.