Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

Customer relationship management, once a daunting new trend, is now at the heart of every sales organization’s sales enablement program. The earliest iterations of the technology were giant, premise-based, inflexible, expensive and unwieldy. For this reason, they had poor usage by sales teams, who didn’t want to learn a new technology, didn’t feel it was right for their sales methods, or simply found that the software didn’t work when they needed it. It could only be used in-house, so it was of little use to sales personnel who were traveling. Today, everything is different.

The cloud has changed the very nature of CRM, so today, it’s sleek, distributed, mobile and flexible. Usability issues have been solved, and CRM solutions are made for the way sales teams operate in the real world. According to Dan Stratton, writing for Business2Community, data automation tools have also greatly improved CRM.

“Instead of relying on salespeople to log their activities (and create contact records for those they engage with) companies rely on technology to populate this data for them,” Stratton wrote.

Some solutions, he writes, have the ability to recognize all the missing information from a CRM and provide individuals with a simple process for syncing in all this missing data. This eliminates the need for redundant (and error-prone) data entry, which saves time and improves efficiency. Finally, predictive analytics have made an enormous different in CRM, allowing sales companies not only to see the past and the present, but possibly the future.

“This exists in the simplest of forms such as whom sales teams should be following up with at particular accounts to larger scale predictive analysis such as which sales deals are most likely to close, as well as identifying buying patterns and the ideal make-up of your perfect customer,” wrote Stratton. “Now the data is working for you instead of you working for the data.”

The problem for sales organizations today becomes – rather than too few choices a decade or so ago – too many choices. No one wants to risk making a purchase that’s not right for the company, and the sheer volume of solutions and features can become a little mind-bending. Luckily, the analyst groups can offer some intelligence for companies looking to find a good fit. (Here’s a good summation of analyst reports that can help.) Similarly, many contact center and sales solution companies have partnered with CRM players to build multifaceted, cross-platform hybrid solutions that allow organizations to unspool CRM to every corner of the organization that can benefit from it. A partner relationship between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Aspect, for instance, offers sales organizations fast implementation, easy integration, mobile enablement and process automation in order to begin taking advantage of third-generation CRM as fast and as easily as possible.

CRM is no longer a perk. Instead, it’s a function that lies at the very heart of a sales organization, like the engine driving a vehicle. New technology hasn’t distracted from it, it has benefitted it enormously. Companies today are more likely than ever to be able to find the perfect fit between their organization and a CRM solution.