What’s next after CRM?

The natural inclination when faced with the question “what’s next after CRM?” is to ask “Hey, how about actually doing CRM properly first?”

But Tibor beat me to it and has already posted on that.

So I’ll attempt to gaze into my crystal ball. But only a little. I believe that trying to look to far out and betting too much on predictions of how the future is going to turn out (especially when it involves technology) is foolish in the extreme.

However, I can see two trends in the CRM field which I think are sure to continue.

The first is integration with the social web. Most CRM systems are beginning to build interfaces so that when you look at a client/customer, you not only see the traditional “360 degree view” of all the internal details you have on that customer – but also now you can see a lot of external information. You can see the latest posts on their blog, their linkedin and facebook profiles, their twitter feed – or even a quick google news search on the topics you know they’re interested in.

Next will come integrated alerting based on these external profiles and searches – so that at minimum you get alerted when a top prospect updates their blog or changes their profile details on a social networking site.

The other trend is the increased sharing of information outside the company. A number of services are appearing which allow salespeople and others to “trade leads” and other information about potential clients.

This is a development which throws up all sorts of interesting opportunities and challenges.

For salespeople it could help get a real inside track to hard-to-reach prospects.

But from the client’s perspective it could open them up to all sorts of unwanted calls and what they would consider spam – plus the rather unnerving prospect of sales people they talk to giving away what they thought was one-on-one information as a trade to get a lead for another client.

To some degree, salespeople have always traded information – but this raises the prospect of it happening on a much wider scale.

There are also legal/privacy implications too. Certainly, in the UK, trading contact information from your CRM system with outside parties would almost certainly be a breach of the Data Protection Act.

So it’s going to be interesting to see how this area develops.

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