This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He’d done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated. After that, however, he started finding new problems — which he then found solutions for within his CRM system. As he climbed the CRM learning curve, he also began discovering new capabilities within CRM — time-stamping leads, lead sources, and so on — that he’d never even considered before.

The past year seemed like one of marking time in CRM. The trends are all well spelled out: Social CRM will become a critical tool, service has grown in importance as customer acquisition has become more difficult, and the value of mobile CRM is becoming painfully apparent. So why aren’t we acting on the trends? I’ve heard the excuses — most famously, “we need to understand the ROI on this before we launch any projects.” That’s not a great excuse, because ROI calculators are out there and ready for use. Great or not, too often the excuses win out.

‘Tis the Season. And it’s better to give than to receive. And you’d better watch out.
Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It’s always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It’s better to give them tools that reward them for using them instead of making CRM a way to receive statistics about their performance. And you had better watch out — because the minute you stop thinking about improving your CRM approach is the minute your competitors begin to gain on you.