The Future of CRM

CRM. The mere mention of the word usually brings horror and groans of, do we have to.

Associated with being a management tool to run pointless reports about activity, or lack of by the seller. Contact data that is wrong and out of date, or none whatsoever.

I ran a poll on LinkedIn which led to a response from one person that CRM does not help towards revenue generation, they are after the fact and, as far as they were concerned, an utter waste of time.

It is still running and the majority of the votes said adoption was the biggest issue in their view.

I have always defended CRM systems. When people tell me they are a waste of time. They are if you are not thinking about what sort of MI and data you want out of them to help you move a client relationship forward, understand the current state of play and more.

I believe they do contribute towards revenue generation and are having a renaissance in how they are now being deployed and adopted.

I would like to welcome Matt Woodford from Microsoft. Matt is the Portfolio Lead, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Western Europe. He has been on the Dynamics 365 side of things since 2014. So he knows a bit about CRM and the marketplace.

In this episode we cover off :

Why does CRM get such bad press?

How has CRM evolved?

With all this other technology we have to choose from such in the sales tech landscape, is CRM still relevant?

Matt gives us insight into the vision Microsoft has and the role Dynamics 365 plays in their entire ecosystem.

We chat about the Cloud, Automation & AI

Where is it all going?

Thank you to Matt for being so candid, whilst this is through a Microsoft lense, all that he says translates to CRMs in general, albeit some may not have as much capability as Dynamics 365, or the power of Azure, the fundamentals in my opinion remain true.

Follow Matt here https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewwoodford/

Learn more about Dynamics 365 and Digital Selling here https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-gb/sales/overview/

As ever, thank you for taking the time to tune in and listen, please feel free to share with your networks.

If you would like to be a guest, find me on LinkedIn and send me a message. If there is someone you would like to recommend, do the same thing.

Until next time.