Where did CRM automation lead to?

Customer relationship management aka CRM – automation began as a one-stop product-based automation for marketing, sales and customer services, bringing in a lot of excitement for businesses to implement one such product, possibility with expectations of rapid business growth. 

Half a decade back or over a period slightly more than that, customer service automation gained much advancements to become a specialized product of its own, breaking away from the parenthood of CRM suites.

Most recently, marketing automation also gained furtherance in its features which became necessary to meet the expectations of marketers, once again, divorcing itself from the dated CRM spouse.

Now, CRM automation finds itself limited to sales automation, i.e. to manage sales forecasts, to track sales opportunities, to manager product / service catalogues and to offer few more frail features.

CRM product companies are in the fray to introduce allied feature to the primary function of sales opportunity management. What is this opportunity management all about?

Sales guys are expected to register their sales deals in the so-called CRM (which is just a calibrated sales register) and to move the sales deals along the sales stages, per the sales process followed by the business organization.  The benefits of doing so is for the sales managers to be in control of the sales targets’ achievements.

Somewhere, along the way the ‘relationship management’ with the customer went amiss, or maybe the ‘relationship’ only meant to keep track of business transactions with the customers. Not sure. This can be dwelled deeper in a subsequent article, as in here the next level of sales automation is articulated.  

Even though the dilution of the comprehensive CRM product, from the older days, to just being a sales management tool, can still be unimpeachable if the benefits are wider spectrum. Comparatively, marketing automation and customer service automation products have arisen much more in terms of their present-day features and functionalities. So, what is it that can catapult the love of all business organizations i.e. the traditional sales automation product?

Sales enablement is one such aspect which is talked about, but in actual terms not implemented as in certain form of corresponding features in the sales automation products. Here are some questions which come to mind, thinking from the point-of-view of a salesperson:

How to enable the salesperson to sell better / quicker? What help can the system provide to salesperson in his primary job of selling? What information does a salesperson need, at different sales stages, to be more convincing for the prospect? How can the system help the salesperson to make decisions i.e. whether a sales deal is worth pursuing or dropping or putting on hold? How to enable salesperson to easily quash the competition?

Making the sales automation system helpful for the salesperson can encourage enthusiastic use of the system vs just limiting the system to reporting their sales activities. In some cases, the lower user adoption of the sales automation system can see a positive/high increment of system usage with the induction of well thought through sales enablement features.  

There can be many more ideas for advancement of the legacy sales automation products and their present-day implementations, which can surely infuse the feel-good-factor, in the user community of the sales automation implementations.

There doesn’t seem a logical reason for the sales automation limitation to sales opportunity registration and management, when marketing automation has advanced to omni-channels, journey builders etc. and chatbots have found their way into customer service automation.