December 01, 2017
December 01, 2017
Contributor: Tim Stafford
Top 4 things sales leaders should prioritize before speaking to CRM vendors.
Leaders in charge of B2B sales teams have almost certainly reached their senior positions by being good at explaining to others why they should buy a certain product or service. But once you reach a senior management position, you require a host of other skills as well.
For sales leaders, one of these — somewhat counterintuitively — is to become good at buying other companies’ products, especially those that are CRM-related. CRM systems are at the heart of the modern sales process that depends so much on capturing, analyzing and using data to make decisions. The number of CRM products and services on offer is now vast, especially for those sales executives who are on CRM technology steering committees and so must understand the full landscape.
“Gartner categorizes CRM applications — at the finest level of detail — into 190 subcategories,” says Ed Thompson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
This means that sales leaders involved in CRM and customer engagement projects should prioritize where they direct their time and attention. They should focus first on understanding how a CRM system can help them achieve their business strategy. Next, it’s important to avoid dogmatically selecting a vendor and struggling to improvise to satisfy business needs or compromising the entire CRM initiative to accommodate the vendor.
They should also expect to engage more than one CRM vendor to meet their goals and shouldn’t focus solely on a CRM system's functionality. Instead, sales leaders should use these top-line criteria to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of CRM application vendors:
As sales teams think about how to get the most from their CRM systems, and how to deploy the functionality those systems offer, it helps to think about the five top-level CRM application functionality categories:
It is also worth bearing in mind that many applications cut across departments, including analytics, voice of the customer and master data management. More than 70% of spend and more than two-thirds of Gartner inquiries are related to just four of the 40 subcategories under these major areas:
The remaining 30% of spend is spread across the other 36 subcategories. The majority of buying organizations overlook the smaller categories of CRM applications that sit outside the "big four." Ironically, these smaller categories often deliver higher levels of ROI. For example, it is common to see a significant return from a pricing management implementation or a better knowledge management tool in a customer service environment.
Overall, Gartner research on the CRM landscape shows that sales leaders should be aware of four important conclusions.
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Recommended resources for Gartner clients*:
CRM Application Functionality Starfish by Ed Thompson.
*Note that some documents may not be available to all Gartner clients.