The post below is a guest blog post from SoftwareAdvice.com. It provides a history of CRM systems, the current state of these systems, and features we can likely expect in 2014. It’s written in a Q&A style.
2013 top CRM buyer trends
When CRM systems began, they were implemented to make sales and customer service organizations more efficient. Today’s CRM solutions still work to accomplish this, but with the growth of readily available social and other data, CRM software now also aims to improve the effectiveness of customer interactions. With this goal in mind, what are organizations in 2013 looking to purchase in a solution? What do they think is most valuable?
That is what Software Advice’s Ashley Verrill, who writes detailed reviews for CRM buyers, aimed to find out in her 2013 CRM BuyerView. For this report, she analyzed interactions held this year with 5,279 CRM software buyers to reveal the top functionalities, deployment model and solution type requested by buyers. In the below Q&A, we talk with Ashley a bit more about her key findings, which include:
-
While 50 percent of the organizations sampled didn’t have a preference when it came to the deployment model, for those who did, 96 percent wanted a cloud-based system;
-
A vast majority of prospective buyers wanted to evaluate best-of-breed solutions (e.g. marketing automation, sales force automation) over an integrated suite; and,
-
Sales force automation was the top-requested CRM application among both best-of-breed buyers and those wanting an integrated suite.
What are the most requested CRM features in 2013, and do you see these changing in 2014?
The most-requested features from CRM buyers this year were contact management, note-taking capabilities, reporting / analytics, integrations and service/database. It was interesting, actually, because I expected at least a few less traditional features to show up — social media listening or monitoring, for example. This tells me buyers are still really focused on those core CRM features. Reporting and analytics could actually be one area where expectations vary slightly between reporting in the traditional sense (monitoring productivity and sales / marketing activities) and more new-age capabilities, such as predictive data analytics. As far as 2014, I expect even more buyers to be talking more about this and other features that personalize customer interactions.
How do you see Salesforce automation capabilities evolving?
I expect vendors to come out with more features for personalizing outreach, based on data we now have from social media, mobile and other sources (e.g. IP addresses). This data will be packaged up and served in instantly — I’ve heard some refer to this as data curation. For these tools to be really useful, they need to analyze this data and serve it up in real time, because data that is useful now might not be even 10 minutes from now. Let’s say someone lands on your website that is in your marketing sweet spot. There are tools out there that can dynamically change the look and feel of your website in real time to personalize the experience for that customer, including proactively opening a chat window, asking if that person needs help. A salesperson will be pinged and ready to talk to that opportunity. Imagine if you never knew that person was on your website, and they spent five minutes there, then closed out. That’s a huge missed opportunity. I expect more and more technologies of this kind that integrate with CRM and sales force automation tools.
Why are some companies continuing to use traditional methods of customer relationship management, like excel spreadsheets?
I think there is still a perception out there among smaller businesses that “sales should spend their time doing sales, not entering data into software.” It’s a fear of the unknown and a fear of change. I hear these questions all of the time: “Will my sales team actually use this tool? Will it take forever to figure out how to use? Why is it so expensive (sticker shock)?” What they don’t realize is that automation allows agents to be more efficient, and therefore spend more time selling, closing more deals, faster. Particularly in the area of measurement — it’s impossible to improve what you’re doing if you don’t have an accurate measurement of what works.
What does your company offer?
At Software Advice, I’m the managing editor of the CRM market, so I produce research and content meant to help answer the company’s most pressing customer relationship management questions. I run a blog called the Customer Service Investigator where I write mostly about customer support strategies and technologies. As for Software Advice, we are a trusted resource for software buyers. We provide detailed reviews, comparisons and research to help organizations choose the right software. Meanwhile, our team of software analysts provide free telephone consultations to help each software buyer identify systems that best fit their needs. Since its founding in 2005, our company has assisted more than 150,000 software buyers.
If you’re interested in writing a guest blog post don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
