Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.
5 Facets of the Highly Effective Marketing Organization
By: Lou Guercia (@louguercia)
Scribe CEO Lou Guercia reviews five critical components of effective marketing organizations. These include breaking down data siloes, taking action instead of assigning blame, mastering smart customer data insights, embracing best-of-breed technology solutions and aligning marketing and sales departments to drive revenue. And while this advice may seem obvious, it’s steeped in data – Marketo found organizations with aligned marketing and sales departments had a business close ratio 60% higher than those lacking alignment, and a CMO council survey unveiled that most CMOs don’t believe they received adequate resources from IT.
Five Conferences 2013: SugarCRM Next Up
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
Paul provides his thoughts on the recent SugarCRM conference, as well as SugarCRM’s overall strategy to become an enterprise-ready company. He highlights their partnership with IBM as proof of their ability to shift towards the enterprise, with one critical ingredient missing – a CMO. The company currently lacks a comprehensive marketing strategy beyond messaging, and they need to hire a CMO to drive influencer relations, thought leadership and general visibility. Regardless of their marketing challenges, Paul praises SugarCRM 7.0 as the company’s most important release in the last decade for its ability to provide scaleability and personalization for each user, while maintaining security and data quality.
CRM Pain Points: On-premise or in the Cloud, Still Room to Improve
By: Mary Shacklett
This piece by Mary highlights a critical component of CRM to keep in mind when planning an implementation – access. Without access, which in Mary’s example involved a financial services company trying to integrate their CRM system with their call center, even the best CRM system is rendered ineffective. Mary touts system integrators as a much-needed solution that helps lower overall cost and time, while also improving the manageability of CRM integration with other enterprise systems. And, of course, the specific integration solution software used by systems integrators will also play a major role in the overall cost and effectiveness of the integration, and should be weighed as a factor when selecting an integrator.
Data Integration – Delivering Wealth Management Value
By: Bill Rourke (@brourke)
Like most customer-facing industries, CRM has transformed from an IT issue to an essential business requirements in the wealth management sector. Bill covers the importance of CRM for improving client response time, eliminating double entries and streamlining processes for greater efficiency. However, the rapidly growing mid-size consultancy space must move beyond custom coding, instead taking advantage of data integration solutions like Scribe to provide enterprise-grade integration on a lower budget.
Putting the “Relationship” Back in CRM | #sapphirenow
By: Valentina Craft
At SAP’s Sapphire Now event, Sameer Patel and John Furrier discussed how to better integrate the “social” component of CRM and treat it as a value-add for enterprises. The major takeaways include using CRM for “relationship” rather than “record” management and keeping content front and center. In our fully digital world, the connected consumer demands one-on-one attention from brands, and when used properly, CRM systems facilitate this type of connection.
We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.
