The CRM Of The Future Will Recommend New Customers To You Automatically

"No Software."

Before Salesforce, CRMs were clunky, poorly designed, and expensive. Companies looking to build efficient sales teams had to buy Siebel, SAP , or one of the other vendors with huge hardware and setup costs. To get a sales team automated would have easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the early 2000s, Marc Benioff changed that completely. He introduced a CRM that virtually anyone could buy and could be accessed from anywhere. It was (and still is) revolutionary for the software industry. While Salesforce itself is a multi-billion dollar business, it is easy to see now that Salesforce has added significantly more value to the broader market. Companies can sell efficiently and quickly with Salesforce.

What is the next evolution? The challenge for sales teams going forward is access to great data. Leads are expensive, low quality, and a disaster to maintain. Of all the Fortune 500 companies I've encountered, all of them have: a team dedicated to managing leads, 20% or more duplicated leads, and expenditures in the millions of dollars annually on raw data from various providers.

I like to think of CRMs as an empty box; companies buy a CRM without any data and then fill it with data and customizations.  Hopefully through this process, data stays consistent and clean enough such that sales reps, the marketing team, and the reporting team are synchronized.

The future of CRM is "no CRM" (I would like to credit Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures for the genesis of this idea; he wrote about this initially here). The future will be a complete solution that marries Structured Contact Management and Lead Data together. It's important to remember that this marriage will have to allow specific data to be shared across customers. In a nutshell, this is what I think the future of CRM for sales and marketing ought to be.

1) Out-of-the-box Lead Recommendations: Today's CRMs are empty; they require data to be added to make them useful. CRMs of the future should be purchased and upon first use recommend and identify customers for your business. The solution should completely eliminate the need to buy leads separately or hire a lead management team to find good leads. For example, if I'm selling janitorial services to office buildings, my CRM should every morning recommend new office building management companies to me based off of my existing customer base, quality controls, and marketing response.

2) True Canonical Leads: For every lead, every sales and market team should have that same lead. Across competitive and non-competitive industries, leads are duplicated. A specific lead should be canonicalized as a singular lead across all marketing and sales teams. Software should learn which leads are active, inactive, or who need specific products or services. CRM users should all be contributing data to the same canonical lead record so long as that data contribution is non-competitive. This will significantly cut down on bad data, wasted time, and more importantly spam to potential customers. If someone doesn't need your product or service, the data should tell you, and we can only realize this if we all contribute to the same lead records.

3) Pipeline Data Views: Sales has evolved: inside sales is overtaking field sales. Therefore, division of labor has become more important. Within an organization, there are reps who qualify leads and set appointments, and those who close leads. These jobs are very different and the future products to enable these jobs will provide different views for each type of rep. Lead Development Representatives should see recommendations of leads they need to qualify and Account Executives should see more detailed information about a qualified customer -- are they on Facebook ? Do they Tweet? How good are their reviews on Yelp ? We can't have a single view for all types of reps, software should present the right data to the right rep at the right time. Coupling great data and the right data within each view drastically improves rep productivity.

It's still early, but the future is becoming more apparent. The industry is spending too much time perfecting marketing automation or obsessing over better autodialers; great data is where we should be innovating. Since data is so difficult to clean and de-duplicate, often times companies just look for ways to get more leads. That works - to a point - and it's quite expensive to buy more leads rather than focusing on how to target more of the right customers. The best way to ensure lead data is more usable is to break down the wall between CRM and lead lists. The only question is, who will be the first to do it?