I recently had a few, somewhat passionate, discussions on CRM.
According to Gartner, 90% of enterprises have deployed CRM and everyone you speak with will tell you that CRM is their system of record for customers.
Yet, while CRM is a de facto reference for most, we continue to see new platforms emerging for managing a specific aspect of customer relationships:
Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)
Customer Success Management (CSM)
Account Based Platforms (ABX)
Product-Led Growth CRM (PLG-CRM)
They each act as a mini system of record for the motions they drive.
They are also built on different data models, tightly linked to the workflows they enable:
CRM is based on the lead, contact, opportunity, and account model
MAPs are built around people, and created to simplify marketing campaigns by unifying leads and contacts
CSM software is built around each company’s adoption of your software to underpin renewals
ABX platforms are built around accounts, including all the potential members of the buying group — suspects, leads, and contacts — that your account-based motion requires connecting with.
Lately, we’ve seen the emergence of PLG-CRM built to track how individual users are using your software
All these apps integrate back with your CRM, leveraging the cloud to sync both ways. However, the scope of the integration is often limited, typically for reporting. As these apps proliferate, they get harder to manage and subscription costs stack up.
Some businesses are turning to CDPs to bring together data from various software into a cohesive data model to drive customer engagement.
So what should you do?
As often, it depends
The ‘integrate’ approach requires a stringent approach to stack design, in particular data modeling. It also requires instrumenting the stack, leveraging Revenue Intelligence and Data Intelligence/Visualization software.
The CDP approach has become a solid alternative. A CDP also gives you a data platform for AI. Packaged solutions exist as well as do-it-yourself options using streaming, data-ware/lake-houses, and reverse ETL. It requires developers to put together the solution.
Whatever path you choose, the days of piling up SaaS applications on top of each other are gone. Stacks need to be architected.