Of all the projects Supl gets involved with, most involve the establishment and configuration of a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. What you might conclude from this is that the bulk of our commissioning clients are from the marketing department. And you would be wrong.
OK, so a number of our commissions have been Start Up Pop Ups, where a CRM has been on the agenda alongside messaging, collaboration, document management, web and social channel development etc, so that has involved the marketing function to some degree (you can see some of our case studies here). However, a number of the most extensive "CRM" projects we have undertaken have involved marketing to a surprising small degree. If not chiefly about client relationship management, why put in a client relationship management system?
I have always felt that CRM systems have been surprisingly poorly marketed themselves. This might come as a bit of shock when considering the meteoric rise of the darling of the sector, Salesforce (investment ticker: CRM): surely Marc Benioff and his team cannot be faulted? I made the point to Salesforce senior management in the early days (2002) that "CRM" didn't begin to describe the system's potential, and that "Salesforce" was a name that put off many would-be buyers (especially in the UK, where snobbery demands the sales role is called something like "business development").
It might pay to go back a little bit. Salesforce came after a great white hope in the 1990s called Siebel: massively expensive and terribly difficult to deploy, Siebel nonetheless represented a huge improvement over the marketing tools around at the time, which were little more than enhanced address books with a flat file structure: things on the list (and crucially their relationship with each other) bore little relationship to the real world. Siebel's relational database changed all that, and for those disciples of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the 80's who talked of customer-centricity, this was great news. I remember having a role in its installation at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (now Blackrock) but its eye-popping installation and licencing costs quickly became a casualty of the fall-out from the dot com bust.
Enter the insurgent Salesforce. Yes, hard to fathom now, but Salesforce was a dirty word to IT departments, as its adoption could bypass traditional deployment models (and so actually add value). It combined the relational goodness of Siebel (Benioff came from Oracle, who supplied the database knowhow) with an accessible technology and business model: you just needed a web browser and a credit card. True to form, it has spawned a whole lot of competitors, some of whom are really good.
My point is that they were not completely aware of the potential of their own invention. Just as the phonograph's original purpose was to record telegram messages and SMS to distribute software updates, CRM's purpose as a client relationship manager is way too modest. In their search for the best CRM, Salesforce (and others) have built really capable relational databases with web-based, simple interfaces on top that allow normal people to configure them, people involved not just with clients, but with suppliers, partners, regulators, financial accounts, colleagues and anything, really. Thus the purpose of the system moves from CRM to WGO: What's Going On. It's on that basis we have built the latest two "CRM" installations, one using Salesforce, the other Zoho, the wildly successful and excellent cloud software company that you have probably never heard of.