Brian Gardner, founder of Sales Process360, argues that companies need a dedicated CRM steward, essentially a CEO for CRM, to unlock value from their systems. Most organizations treat CRM as surveillance rather than a tool for growth, which wastes the potential of modern platforms.
Chapters
The first one, which I really enjoyed was Brian Gardner's article. Brian and I just met recently and Brian is the founder of Sales Process360. He wrote a book called ROI from CRM and it's that finished its title there. Give him the plug he deserves here. ROI from CRM. It's about sales process, not just technology. And he wrote a really good article about who is your CEO for CRM. This is available at the Distribution Strategy Group's website. He did this in conjunction with that team. I thought this was a really solid article.
Oh, it's a great article. And you know, there's a lot I don't want to recap it. I think you're, you know, you're better served to take a look at the article and really talk about what it means to be a CEO of your CRM. But what it means is that somebody in the organization has to be the steward of getting what can be gotten out of the CRM. What I find interesting, and we see this every day, right? Let's face it, a lot of companies, we see it think CRM is a four letter word because of a lot of kind of the old school definition of CRM, right? Which is Big Brother and all we're going to do is add extra work and blah, blah, blah. But I look at the value that I see our customers getting in the sort of this next generation of CRM and the sales growth that they're getting and the value and the enablement that's occurring with their sales team and the insights that's there. Right. Is so massive that this idea of the steward of the CRM, almost like you could have a chief CRM officer in the organization. And I know that's not the best word, but it's really, there's so much value to be gained out of it. You know, we do a lot from the vendor perspective, but within the organization having somebody that can continue to facilitate that value is really, really, I think, something we're going to see more and more of as CRM as people start to understand this next generation of CRM is not the generation of CRM of Big Brother and extra work and whatever, whatever they call it, CRM Saturdays or whatever it was. Yeah, people were entering those and unfortunately, I wish there was a better term for it. Right. I wish there was a new term, but there's not. But anyway, the point is, is in this article is, is how do you actually get the mileage out of it? And I thought it was some really, really good advice.
