By Chris Bucholtz
Our webinar today with Ken Thoresen discussed exporting the power of CRM from the sales department to the entire rest of the organization (you can hear the archived version here). We ran a couple of polls, and their results were interesting.
First, we asked who uses CRM in the audience’s companies. Luckily, sales was not the only user at most companies (although 17.1 percent said that it was in their organizations). Sales and marketing were the main users in 33.9 percent, by far the biggest cross-section in our poll. Almost a quarter (22.6 percent) identified sales and several other departments, while a lucky 25.8 percent said the entire organization used CRM. That last one is the “right†answer, at least philosophically; the entire organization has to be on board to reap the full rewards of CRM.
Second, we asked who championed our attendees’ CRM solutions. A whopping 44.6 percent identified an executive focused on sales as the big booster. An IT executive (philosophically, the “wrong†answer) was the guy in 14.9 percent of installations and a marketing exec was the driver in 21.6 percent. The “right†answer was the CEO, but only 18.9 percent of the respondents identified him as the driver. Upper-level buy-in is very important, but, as our webinar’s title suggested, in many cases sales leads the way.
Regardless of what I suggest are “right†or “wrong†answers, the good news is that CRM is at work in these companies and is achieving things now regardless of whether it was implemented in a letter-perfect way.
