What’s in a name? CRM and other jargon…
As our research into all sales and marketing software deepens we hit many challenges in categorising our findings in a meaningful way. Software that I would never have called CRM are marketed as such, and those that appear to be CRM are called something else. It’s all very unhelpful and makes it much harder for sensible sales and marketing people to find the right tools for the job. And far harder for IT directors and the like.
To that end, I thought we’d share some definitions we have made for our own use, in case they are useful to you.
Firstly – throughout this blog, data refers to customer and prospect data and associated information. E.g. name, email address, mailing address and things they bought, pages they clicked on etc.
1. CRM
Many different applications in this space call themselves CRM. Why anyone would want to jump on this one-wheel-off, the Indians are all around, the ammo is running out, bandwagon, I have no idea. But they do. We stick to the criteria that a CRM solution must have sales management, marketing management and customer service modules, otherwise they belong in another category.
2. Sales Automation
Many, many so-called “CRMs” are sales automation tools. I.e. they help you manage sales contacts, follow ups, deals and typically use a prospect – lead – deal workflow.
3. Contact Management
For storing contacts, and associated notes and reminders. But without the built-in workflow of prospect – lead – deal found in sales automation. Many applications can do both this and sales automation, depending on how you configure them, but some cannot and so they belong in here.
4. Marketing Databasess
These are software solutions, often intended to bring together disparate data from many different databases or other data sources, into one place. But crucially, they come with built-in marketing campaign management functionality. These tools empower marketers to analyse all the information they have about a customer or prospect; to make product and marketing decisions based on that analysis; and to extract the data that forms the lists that they use for campaigns. They support one-to-many marketing activities, but not one-to-many sales (telemarketing), or one-to-one (direct sales) activity.
5. Data Warehouses
This can be quite a nebulous term but these are usually enterprise-wide, repositories of legacy and current data (and in this case, not just prospect and customer data), brought together for the purposes of reporting and analysis. They can indeed, have marketing tools and similar attached to them but a data warehousing project does not imply a marketing solution and shouldn’t be assumed to be so.
6. Marketing Automation
An emerging technology, currently dominated by a handful of big players but, with small applications catching up quickly, costs are being driven downwards and simpler tools are appearing all the time. These are the Next Big Thing. They are a marketers dream… when they are well implemented and you spend oodles of cash on getting it implemented and running it. At their most integrated, they enable automated campaigns to reach your customers and prospects based on their interactions with your touch points. E.g. clicks on email links that don’t convert to purchases can be sent discount vouchers within 24 hours, customer complaints made into a call centre can trigger free gift offers to be sent by mail. The marketer can sit back, test things, analyse and do what marketers always should have been doing.
It’s beyond our scope but there are customer service helpdesk management tools out there too so you see, CRM software is splitting up. From jack of all trades we’re now getting masters of each. Yes, multiple databases will remain but CRM never did solve that easily, that was an illusion. (See Data Proliferation: Friend or Foe).
We hope you too, will soon be able to access this research and benefit from our continued slicing, dicing and cutting through the marketing jargon and nonsense that surrounds all these systems…
[...] What a CRM is not… As we go about our business, advising on CRM and other sales and marketing technology we hit a common challenge. People have objectives for their CRM implementation which fundamentally, a CRM system will not deliver. We (at Mayfield Solutions http://mayfieldsolutions.co.uk) do use the term CRM in its narrowest sense – a piece of software with a database attached (see our definitions http://dataandmash.com/2010/02/05/whats-in-a-name-crm-and-other-jargon/). [...]
Great clarification of some key terms Kate. I do wonder what the future is for “marketing databases” in the face of marketing automation solutions. Perhaps the analysis and segmentation aspects become a sub-class to the ultimate need for sophisticated campaign execution, lead nurturing and Sales hand-off functionality?