The Evolution of CRM

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

Historically, customer relationship management (CRM) software has been one of those obscure products used by sales and maybe marketing to manage customer information and, if you were really sophisticated, to conduct promotional campaigns. Back then, CRM was just another software product, primarily used by lowly sales and marketing folks who hunched over their keyboards as they sat in their cubicles spending endless hours scanning in business cards and formatting comma delimited files for import. CRM was about as far from relevant as you could get. It wasn’t cool. It was administrative. This is somewhat ironic when you think about it – as what could be more important or relevant than managing and mining the relationships with your customers?

As a sales or marketing professional in the ‘90s, you would be lucky to have access to products like ACT!, Goldmine, Saleslogix, or worse – a custom database and interface created by the last IT guy. Whatever the case, CRM solutions were not much more than GUI-driven databases that allowed you to import, manage, and export contact data. By the mid-90s, new features such as remote user synchronization and email integration came on the scene which allowed traveling salespeople to batch upload account, contact, and opportunity information from the field and for more active communication internally as well as with external contacts or groups of contacts. For sales and marketing, this meant, at least in theory, that there was more accurate and timely information in the database and that you could leverage this data. But the reality was that this created significant IT complexities; many, many synchronization and data quality issues; and very poor user adoption rates. Been there. Done that. Burned the T-shirt. But by 1999 things began to change.



With the advent of cloud computing, new and innovative CRM solutions began to emerge. These new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products were simple, easy-to-use, browser-based, and synchronization and user-adoption issues were eliminated. Around the turn of the century, Salesforce.com led the “no software” charge as the industry’s first major cloud-based CRM solution. Salesforce was not only easy-to-use and free of the complicated, error-prone synchronization processes; it was configurable. As a result cloud-based CRM software solutions quickly started to erode the market share of legacy on-premise solutions. Legacy CRM providers, who had all but owned the market, were forced to start making the monumental shift to cloud just to compete and were confronted with the fact that they had to put more control in the hands of the end-user and eased the burden on IT. The CRM market hasn’t been the same ever since.

This new configurability gave the end user, not the IT department, the flexibility to add fields, create custom reports and dashboards, and leverage information in ways that were not previously possible. Some cloud-based CRM providers began to integrate with internal and external data sources, such as LinkedIn, Google, and web analytics. This provided added visibility and value by enriching the data with individual interactions and relevant contact information. Combined with the flexibility of user-driven configurations, organizations could now see, control, and even automate the communications to and from customers and prospects, as well as leverage this information to target particular individuals based on their interest and behavior. Game on.