The CRM Industry seems to be in constant flux; at least for the last decade. CRM software has come a long way from being a static excel replacement and data entry system to becoming an ever intelligent tool widely adopted by businesses today. And there is so much on the agenda of CRM vendors in the market which is a sure indication that CRM industry is going to be evolving rapidly in the near future as it launches its own bandwagon for the latest digital trends of the 21st century.
Trends Expediting the Evolution of CRM
The purpose of this infographic post is to revisit the evolutionary journey of CRM systems and envisage what the next decade holds for this industry. We are witnessing several acquisitions within the industry including Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite to give its cloud capability a boost. Similarly, there are trends like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data explosion, and Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service, Social CRM, which are promising to revolutionize the interactions between client-facing CRM users and customers. This has also diversified the applications of CRM in various industries. For example, Healthcare CRM and AI has completely revamped how healthcare industry works by leveraging large data sets to deduce results, create virtual nurses to assist patients and tremendously improve medical imaging.
Sales Intelligence has acquired a new meaning. Today’s CRMs are facing ever-increasing competition to provide their respective salespeople with the best possible insights into the customer’s behavior. So there’s one conclusion that we have drawn. According to our vision, CRM is vying to become more and more customer-centric to provide the Salespeople with all the information they need on the customer from different sources and platforms, to close deals faster. A recent LinkedIn survey revealed that “77% of top Salespeople rely on Sales intelligence tools”.
All this becomes a bit more interesting when we take a look at some CRM adoption stats: Today in 2016, according to Larry Augustin, CEO SugarCRM, there are “350 to 400 million people whose jobs are to talk to customers in business” and there are less than 30 million commercial seats of CRM sold. This reveals the potential that the industry holds as CRM adoption increases from a mere 10 percent as of today. This is going to facilitate the evolution of CRM software and CRM trends beyond recognition.
So without further ado, here’s a look at the infographic:
Evolution of CRM Systems
That’s all from our side. Where do you foresee the CRM industry heading? Let us know here! You might also like this infographic on CRM comparison.
