For the longest time, companies have been trapped by enterprise software vendors. First by shrink-wrapped software packages. Then by SaaS offerings. Both situations led to what one even in a SaaS world can call shelfware – although thes e days the shelf is a virtual one instead of a physical one. Buyers still get enticed to purchase more capabilities than they need, which leads to them paying more than necessary while often using software packages that offer overlapping capabilities. One of the promises that SaaS started with, was to end this. Sadly, it looks like this promise was not kept. And this is no wonder; after all vendors want to be sticky. And they need to have increasing revenues. This means that they need to offer an ever-increasing number of capabilities, aka features, to warrant their pricing and eventually regular price increases. Combined with the frequently used strategy of offering related capabilities, i.e., seats for an adjacent software that is not yet needed ...
The Lost Strategy: What CRM Was Supposed to Be CRM at its very origin, was a strategy. With the advent of systems that support the execution of this strategy, the term more and more got shifted to describe a system. This shift can get seen in the words of CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg . His pre-2009 definition of CRM was “ a philosophy and a business strategy , supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interaction in a business environment. ” This changed to " Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively " in acceptance of this change (emphasis by me). These...