David Cummings on Startups

Does CRM go away as a standalone offering?

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David Cummings

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Several months ago I wrote a piece titled HubSpot as the Next Mainstream CRM where I explored the lack of a clear #2 CRM provider in the market and offered that HubSpot might fill that role. Last month HubSpot, at their annual user conference, pushed the message “inbound sales” as the next phase of evolution with their solution.

With yesterday’s post titled User Engagement Tools vs Marketing Automation, Scott Voigt of Homebase.io offered up that these user engagement tools are quickly becoming a viable alternative to a combination CRM and marketing automation system for companies that don’t have an outbound sales team (e.g. no hunters and sales order taking is done in a self-service fashion). Mike Lewis offered up that his company uses Totango as their user engagement tool and that it’s great for managing user retention at scale.

So, looking back at the HubSpot-as-mainstream-CRM idea, the premise was wrong. The market doesn’t need a mainstream CRM as separate from the marketing automation system. Sales and marketing are inextricably tied together, and marketing campaign execution and tracking technologies are so good now, they’re leading the way. The marketing system is more important than the CRM system because it delivers more value in the organization. Marketing is driving sales, and marketing automation systems are a better driver at telling sales people where to spend their time, compared to the static information logged into a CRM.

If an entrepreneur came up to me asking which CRM to use, I’d start talking about marketing systems. A CRM is useful for logging calls and managing opportunity pipeline, but that’s less important than implementing a marketing system. With a marketing system, prospects are tracked, messages triggered, and rules automated.

So, yes, CRM systems do go away as a standalone offering and become part of a joint sales and marketing solution.

What else? What are your thoughts on CRM as a standalone offering?

Comments

4 responses to “Does CRM go away as a standalone offering?”

  1. Eric Santos Avatar
    Eric Santos

    Great insight David. I definitely agree with you. At our company, even though we use a separate CRM (and a User Engagement tool), the best intel that our sales people can get comes from our marketing software.

    About the idea of adding CRM capabilities (to-do’s, pipeline, etc.) to a marketing automation system, I like the concept, but don’t you think that it would get too complex for users/buyers (in terms of interface, messaging, pricing model…)?

    Reply
  2. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    Marketing Automation and CRM are coalescing at the top of the funnel. When should we next contact our prospect? Should we call, email, show an ad? Instead of scheduling an inflexible followup call in my CRM, the MA system will tell me what to do – or follow up automatically.

    Reply
  3. craigskipsey Avatar
    craigskipsey

    I agree, pure CRM systems are obsolete, they’re nothing more than a glorified contact list. Automation of the mundane transactional tasks in marketing and sales is critical – its just too damn expensive to get humans to do that stuff nowadays! This is the main problem when people compare Salesforce.com to MS Dynamics. Dynamics still is, at its core, a glorified contact list. Salesforce is an automation platform and now building marketing automation capability with their latest acquisition ExactTarget.

    Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  4. Mike Lewis (@pescatello) Avatar
    Mike Lewis (@pescatello)

    I like the concept of this. However, none of the MAP platforms that i know of have a CMR that’s good enough to make this work. The current CRM of today is fairly basic, but it’s also pretty flexible. The reports and use cases it solves are needed and while the marketing contact list might be more interesting to look out, it won’t replace the CRM as the contact of record until it cleans up it act – which i don’t see happening.

    Which makes me wonder this question – which do you think is a better route: building a new CRM that has marketing automation capabilities or building a new marketing automation tool that has great CRM capabilities?

    I think i might go the former (a CRM) because the contact list is what it’s all about, but i’ve never built a MAP platform before.

    (Also, thanks for the shout out)

    Reply

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