What’s the Matter with CRM?

Or more appropriately, “What the HECK is CRM?” Technically it stands for customer relationship management. Hmmm, and we can all agree on what that means, right? Wrong. Even analysts who cover this ‘sector’ give complex definitions. B2B online magazine reprinted Forrester research that tries to describe the ‘CRM ecosystem’. Ecosystem?? Wow. The ecosystem description becomes even more confusing sounding by adding many more acronyms like SFA, PRM, RPM, CPQ, CSS, etc. – kid you not. That’s fine, if your job is to discuss processes and technology aids that help do those processes more efficiently, cost effectively and, you get it, it’s a full consulting business of its own.

The reason I care about CRM, is because it’s the only way for me as a marketer to actively collect lead/contact data, run a campaign, look for trends, measure response rates and a whole host of other business building activities without spending hundreds of hours creating non-connected spreadsheets and cross-checking information.

Can I do what I want to WITHOUT a CRM system? Yes, sort of. But it would be painful and I couldn’t do any of the cool things that technology enables: auto responders, set up targeted messages to segmented groups, send email reminders to salespeople to follow up hot leads…that’s just the beginning.

For small businesses, finding a useful CRM solution that is affordable is challenging. I have a new client – documentary filmmaker Under the Hood Productions – that needs one of these to manage all the contacts interested in their latest film “The Anatomy of Hate” . In years past I would have put them on Salesforce.com, which is what I use for several other growing companies. But Salesforce also grew, changed their pricing structure, and are now too expensive for a start-up on a limited budget. Researching alternatives has been time-consuming. While there are plenty of sites that give advice, opinions vary widely based on needs. SmallBiz CRM provides some good basic metrics, reviews and links to the top rated online systems.

For now, we’re going to give FreeCRM a shot – but not the ‘free’ version, the ‘pro’ version which has a low per user/per month cost. It will allow my client to see if this is something that will work for them but not involve an annual contract in case we need to re-think things in a few months. I’ll post something later after we see how useful this tool it – or is not.

Comments from others are welcome.

–Donna