CRM Trends

In a recent conversation, the topic turned to the future direction of CRM. Normally, I would wax philosophic on this but it is really pretty simple.

Marketing is taking over more and more of the traditional sales cycle. Sales will spend less time educating and more time selling qualified prospects. Marketing will own the wide part of the sales pipeline more than it ever has before. Prospects can gather a wealth of information by themselves and they will do it. Prospects will self-qualify more than ever before. Sales Enablement solutions are finally getting traction. Sales will adopt CRM because sales enablement will finally offer them value rather than “sales accounting”. Social CRM plays to the marketing side of CRM and early indications are that it will lead to bottom line results.

The enterprise can and will learn from early adopters. In the end it all comes down to the community of customers that your enterprise builds and nurtures. How do you grow prospects? How do you nurture them into customers? How do you show the love to those customers post-sale? These will be the macro-trends that CRM will see in the next few years.

All of these new services will be hosted software as a service solutions in the cloud and the challenges around integration will still be there. I look forward to checking this post 2-3 years from now and seeing how I did.