Back in the 1990s, many companies installed the first versions of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, lured by promises of miraculous boosts to sales efforts. While many companies did reap benefit from their earliest iterations of CRM, many more were left struggling with expensive, cumbersome solutions that were often out of date by the time their epic implementations (measured by months or even years) were complete. To add insult to injury, many companies found, after spending time and money on the solutions, that employees weren’t using them because they were difficult, poorly suited to the organization or improperly integrated with other systems.

The cloud has done miraculous things for CRM. It has allowed companies to pick and choose the features they want and disregard those they don’t need, it has cut implementation time from months down to days, it enabled companies to pay for only what they need, and it has helped ensure that CRM solutions are properly integrated with other (often cloud-based) systems such as ERP solutions or the call center. With all these advantages, companies are better placed to make sure that a CRM solution purchase does what it’s supposed to: help boost sales efforts.

Beyond even acting as a tool for selling, today’s CRM systems go further and help companies achieve the all-important Holy Grail of customer engagement, or cultivating two-way relationships with customers that cover the entire customer lifecycle, with inbound feeding outbound efforts and vice versa.

“The most cutting-edge companies are [now] focusing their sales efforts around the customer experience," Morgan Norman, a senior director of product marketing for Microsoft (News - Alert) Relevant Products/Services's CRM division, told Newsfactor Business Report recently. "With the volume and velocity of data Relevant Products/Services created by social, marketing, sales, and care departments, teams need a [comprehensive] real-time view of the customer."

By crossing CRM over every department and employee that touches the customer, organizations can build a 360-degree view of the customer that boost sales efforts in a way no other tool can. The trick is to avoid the earliest mistakes of CRM implementations and ensure that the solution is designed in a way that focuses on customers and not on salespeople.

Lisa Earl McLeod, a sales leadership consultant and author of "Selling with Noble Purpose," wrote in a recent Forbes article that many CRM solutions foster sales mediocrity because they focus salespeople on information important to their own companies rather than information that is important to their customers. Customer engagement, of course, requires that organizations build CRM from the customer up, not from the sales personnel up.

"Here's the big mistake that most companies make: They tell salespeople to focus on the customer,” wrote McLeod. “Yet [their CRM system focuses] more on internal metrics and pipeline management. The result is mediocre sales behavior.”

By using cloud-based CRM in a way that begins and ends with the customer, companies can achieve true customer engagement, putting sales where they belong: as part of the means to and end of building a life-long relationship with a customer.