THE STATE OF CRM:
BENCHMARKS AND PRODUCT GUIDE (2008)
Choices abound when we speak of how to make the most effective use of a CRM for your company. One could easily evaluate over 40 different CRM software packages with dozens of selection criteria. We decided that the best way to help you make critical decisions about CRMs was to get information and opinions from your colleagues and peers.
We set out to discover what CRM software our subscribers were using and how they were using it. We asked questions about user adoption and inter-departmental use. We asked what modules they were using and how their CRM was working with other software and even to what extent they were opening it up to use by customers, suppliers and partners. Then we asked about key benchmarks and best practices.
We heard a lot of things we knew (like how hard it is to get sales staff to USE the system), some things we could intuit (like data accuracy is an issue…garbage in, garbage out), but we also discovered a few things that surprised us (like just how few of you are truly recognizing the value of CRM).
Some of the key findings include:
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Adoption of the CRM is still pitiful, given the investment. At best 60% have almost everyone or everyone using the system for sales; 47% for marketing; and 40% for customer service.
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Less than 50% of CRM owners feel as though they were able to get real time information from their CRM.
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Only 30% are using their CRM for forecasting and only 60% are using it for pipeline management.
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There are so many choices of CRMs now available that no one system truly dominates, though salesforce.com does come out on top as 24% top choice.
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Only 52% follow CRM best practices (data clean-up, disaster recovery, integration with sales model, and real-time metrics).
Download The State of CRM: Benchmarks and Product Guide now! Our hope is that you find the information in this guide useful and find our comments insightful. We sincerely appreciate any thoughts you might like to share with us.
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Over 60 sales and marketing templates (DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDFs)
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