CRM, the abbreviation of Customer Relationship Management, has been a buzzword for a decade and has become an old term now. While it is treated as commonplace as ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning), HRM (Human Resources Marketing), E-Marketing, etc., why should we bother discussing it again?
The fact: many benefits of CRM are yet to be discovered.
The ancestors of CRM solutions started from software boxes like ACT!, and later Goldmine and Maximizer, the so-called “Contact Managers” to “upgraded” versions of CRM (of course, I skipped a lot like “PIM” or “Groupware”) that help users manage the interactions, documents, potentials, or later projects, voice, or many more and in company basis. A decade ago, research companies like Gartner speculated the big potential of CRM solutions and therefore many solutions, like Saleslogix, ACCPAC (or Sage) CRM, and later Salesforce and MS CRM were found on the global market. The revolution of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and now Cloud Computing further boosts the global CRM implementations and therefore the revenue to, still, double-digit annual growth rate even during the years of financial tsunami. Millions of people, especially in United States are still paying Salesforce US$65 per user per month and thus contributed the annual revenue of the company beyond $US 1 billion last year. Thanks to evangelists like Mr. Paul Greenburg, the author of best-selling CRM book called “CRM at the Speed of Light”, CRM wheel has been moving fast and are still evolving (e.g. Customer Experience Management, Social CRM, … well, I am sure more will be coming).
When we look at the Asian market, however, the situation seems not as encouraging as that in the western world. Just take an example of the last International ICT Expo in Hong Kong that just finished. We received comments like:
Not many people are interested in using some scientific approaches to keep healthy pipeline (or that’s the similar reason why stuff like Balanced Scorecard or Management KPIs is yet to be popular in most of the SMEs). Further, professionals here could be meaner on time in writing even simple sentences but be concerned less on the time in looking for information (i.e. files, contacts and emails from different locations) that is in fact killing their valuable time.
But above all, being reluctant to change should be the biggest reason. My experience can prove the statement that at least 80% of conversation with prospects is to invite them back to the right track to explore the opportunities together but replies are usually, “Keith, I am busy. Please call me next month.” (I am not kidding… for example, I received a reply from a business owner asking me to call him after the World Expo 2010 in May when I called him in December last year). Well, if they are busy, they are busy. I should respect the valuable time of my customers, and that’s also what I have been offering to save their time and help them turn their valuable time in opportunities and thus revenue.
CRM is indeed beneficial to a lot of businesses but they just need “a reason” to kick off the project immediately. What I can say is that it is not up to me to “offer” my customers a reason to buy my solution, but whether there is any “strategy” in the mindsets of the business owners to make their companies more competitive and we, GearApp, are able to offer them help instantly and cost-effectively.
In the next articles, I will comment more on how SMEs nowadays used to manage their customer and sales information and their pros and cons.
