The need to collect relevant marketing information and the inherent fragmented state of current customer data is driving the urgency for a retooled Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for mid-market companies, Such a solution must possess the following key advantages:
1. It must provide a correct balance of performance and investment.
2. Must allow for a phased implementation yielding recognizable ROI quickly.
3. Reduce political road blocks due to corporate politics because the majority of data is customer related.
4. Can be leveraged by both mid-market and small companies for rapid CRM deployment
Most mid-market companies are already structured into divisions and lines of business (LOBs) within which are silos of customer information. At the same time, with the increasing rate of change in today’s marketplace, customer pain-points are rapidly changing causing companies to constantly shift their sales and service strategy. In fact we can say that in the early 21st century, the emphasis has shifted from a classic product-centric focus to a more modern focus of customer centricity.
An effective customer-based focus can only occur when there is one version of the customer truth regardless of the point of access to the information or the reason for its use. This calls for implementing a customer relationship management solution with data that spans the entire organization.
Interestingly enough, current CRM solutions are exactly the opposite, They tend to be quick and dirty solutions that are implemented by sales management, with minimal if any buy-in from multiple lines of business, mininmal centralization of data along with transformation rules satisfying all parties across the enterprise, with the data typically relevant only to the sales force.
The mid-market company, with its restricted budgetary and resource constraints, is especially challenged to integrate and manage customer data more simply while staying focused on the marketing issues instead of on technology. The key is to implement a CRM solution in controllable chunks that can have a positive impact on the business pain points and realize a positive ROI before the market experiences a new cycle of change.
Mid-market and small companies need a CRM solution that can be implemented quickly, calls for minimal coding, is politically expedient and easy to justify. All this can be accomplished by implementing new CRM solutions that truly focus on collecting relevant customer data that can be used to find the target markets which need to be pursued.
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