The News: Enterprises are increasingly deploying customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to support more strategic activities across sales and marketing, according to a survey conducted earlier in the year by SugarCRM. The results indicate that beyond simply being a repository for a database to record notes on customers, CRM platforms have become vital tools to support upsell/cross-sell activities, lead generation and nurturing, and sales pipeline visibility and quantity. As a result, organizations are seeking out tools with AI, automation, and other more advanced features to support these advanced duties. You can read the press release highlighting the survey results at SugarCRM’s website.
SugarCRM Survey Shows CRM Taking on More Strategic and Tactical Roles
Analyst Take: A new survey conducted earlier in 2023 on behalf of SugarCRM found that organizations are increasingly leaning on their CRM platforms to handle a greater number of strategic and tactical tasks. SugarCRM surveyed more than 800 global business-to-business (B2B) sales, marketing, service, and IT leaders from May 15 to July 1 to understand shifting CRM use cases over the past 5 years, and what new CRM activities companies are prioritizing moving forward. As organizations seek to use CRM platforms to handle more sales and support tasks, they likely will seek out platforms infused with AI and automation to provide more functionality while keeping training and onboarding requirements low.
Leveraging CRM Software for Sales Functions
Some of the key findings from the survey revolve around how organizations are deploying CRM software in a sales capacity. According to the survey, 60% of respondents are using CRM as a centralized communications hub for nurturing leads and customers, while 43% are leveraging it for sales forecasting and pipeline insights, and 41% are using it to capture intent data and for lead scoring.
Comparing the use of CRM platforms today versus 5 years ago, 57% of respondents say they perceive their CRM solution as more important now with helping them achieve their sales and marketing goals. Today, 37% of respondents lean on CRM for sales pipeline visibility, 35% depend on it for sales lead quality, and 31% rely on it for sales lead quantity.
These results generally align with the trends we have seen in the market, where organizations are focused on seeking out adjacent and incremental opportunities that are revealed via customer journey analytics and the use of customer personas to identify actions, conditions, and scenarios that indicate a customer has a propensity to purchase.
Integration Between Sales and Marketing Technologies
When asked about marketing and sales technologies that organizations have integrated with their CRM solutions, nearly half (46%) have integrated marketing automation or email marketing solutions. Over one-third (35%) of those surveyed have integrated analytics or measurement dashboards, while only 12% have integrated account-based marketing tools.
Respondents also cite forecasting and pipeline insights (43%) as the most important CRM-based activity that organizations are prioritizing today, followed by intent data/lead scoring (41%). These insights are indicative of the need for a platform that can assess various buying signals, and correlate them with customer journey information and buyer profile information to provide accurate sales predictions.
Over the next 5 years, respondents say the top priorities for maximizing value from CRM systems include gaining a complete view of all customer interactions (45%), leveraging AI (20%), and being able to generate targeted or personalized content across channels (14%). These priorities reflect the shift to leveraging both interaction history and personalization information to create unique interactions that help develop unique and valuable CX.
Existing Challenges With CRM Platforms
Overall, the data from the SugarCRM survey is not surprising; many organizations have undertaken a digital transformation and are more closely linking communications and interactions with sales and marketing activities. However, an interesting finding is that more than two-thirds of respondents are not currently using their CRM systems to handle certain core activities, such as leveraging CRM to support customer service and upsell/cross-sell activities (33%), mid-funnel lead generation and nurturing (32%), early-stage awareness (21%), and low-funnel sales efforts (14%).
According to the survey, 41% of respondents cite technology integration issues as a major challenge, and 37% admit a lack of internal knowledge and skills impede their CRM use. Further, 40% of respondents indicate that their current CRM platform is hamstrung by feature limitations.
The release accompanying the survey results highlights “the growing application and acceptance of predictive and generative AI will embolden customer-facing professionals to expect – and demand – even more from their CRM tools.”
Although AI is likely to help make CRM platforms more powerful and potentially easier to use, organizations will still need to address another major issue that was not covered in the survey, which is the responsible deployment of AI to prevent hallucination, bias, and toxicity. Platforms that do not address these issues will face challenges, given the importance of these issues to both enterprises and the end customers they serve.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
