CRM Economic Recovery Program

Why investing in CRM will speed our economic recovery.

CRM Summit With Obama

Businesses in the United States and Great Britain excel at marketing, sales, and service. That’s why CRM should be emphasized as a way to help boost the countries’ economic recovery.

Do you remember President Obama’s beer summit? What I’m proposing is a CRM summit. Over lunch on the Rose Garden patio here’s how I’d urge Barack to help:

1. Provide CRM incentives. Entice companies to invest more in CRM, to help them hire more salespeople, run more marketing campaigns, and improve their lead scoring to generate more business, because all of that will help improve companies’ revenues, thus providing a boost to the economy.

2. Train more people on CRM. Invest in more CRM worker training. A lot of manufacturing is now being done abroad. But the United States and the United Kingdom excel at service, product development, sales, and marketing. Shouldn’t we continue to emphasize and benefit from this?

Sales Isn’t A Zero-Sum Game

Of course it sounds self-serving to plug CRM as the antidote to a difficult economy and today’s flat sales levels (despite corporate profit margins being at an 18-year high). Investing in CRM will help, however, because there’s always new business to capture; sales isn’t a zero-sum game.

If that’s the macro picture — invest in CRM to improve the U.S. economy — for any given business, individual sales can look like a zero-sum game. For example, we’re working with a large medical device manufacturer, with a simple goal: beat the competition. That means doing more deals, being more responsive to customers’ needs, and really tailoring how they market, sell, and service their high-end diagnostic devices to the needs of the global hospital groups to which they sell. In other words, the business wants to go wide, and deep.

How does the medical device manufacturer improve its marketing, sales, and service outreach? In this case, by using Salesforce.com to gather and store data on all of the hospital groups it targets, identifying the most-important opportunities, and then creating a custom sales-outreach plan for each prospect or repeat customer. The result has been a dramatic increase in sales efficiency, as well as sales growth.

Smart Movers Innovate During Slowdowns

At another Innoveer client, a large financial services organization, senior managers opted to not stand around and hope for the paltry 1% returns they’d expect — thanks to the current economy — by sticking to “business as normal.” Their usual business is selling their financial service products via brokers to businesses, who pass them on to employees. So, in an innovative twist, the financial services firm is adding an array of new, supplemental products that it will sell directly to the employees. To make that happen, the business is investing in new sales and marketing processes.

In other words, the financial services firm is demonstrating strong sales and marketing leadership, even in a difficult time. It’s a smart move. Is it a risk? Perhaps. But the company didn’t survive for a century by sitting on the sidelines.

Show Some Sales And Marketing Leadership

Evidence suggests that more businesses are becoming hip to the upsides of CRM during the downturn. Why is that? Because of the current CRM consultant hiring frenzy. At Innoveer, we’re hiring like crazy. Our competitors are hiring like crazy. It’s practically a full-blown hiring war out there.

My best explanation: A lot of companies realized that during the last downturn, failing to invest in CRM hurt them when the economy improved. Companies that opted to just “wait it out” suddenly faced competitors who’d spent the downturn focusing on innovation, efficiency, and creating a better class of lean, mean, lead-eating sales machine.

Why wait to recover later, when you can get ahead now?

Learn More

What’s the next, best step for your organization’s CRM program? To answer that question, take our CRM program quizzes, which are built using our benchmarks of the CRM practices of hundreds of companies. We’ve used those best practices to build Innoveer’s CRM Excellence Framework, which identifies where your current program excels — or needs work.