To make a long story short, Customer Relationship Management is in essence the practice of placing all of your customer data into a single system, so as to allow a "360° view of the customer", principally so that whenever you or your organisation interacts with a customer they have all the information available at their finger tips to maximise the likelihood the customer will give you more money.
The most popular CRM product on the market are is Salesforce.com and the good news is we can assist Irish charitable organisations to get free licenses for up to 10 users, thereafter licenses cost around €30 to €60 per user per month. Salesforce provides specific functionality for non profit organisations reputed to improve donor retention by 24%, constituent engagement by 36% and some 89% of customers believe that salesforce improves their ability to deliver their mission.
If you'd like help to implement and optimise CRM for your Irish not for profit organiation, please get in touch and I'd be delighted to put my years of CRM Implementation experience at your disposal, or if your curious for the longer version of what CRM is and where it comes from, please read on.
CRM Stared with "Sales Force Automation", which is in essence systematically tracking and managing
SFA was pioneered by Thomas Siebel, who founded a company in 1993 called Siebel Systems. The story went that Larry Ellison, Billionaire CEO of Oracle, noticed that one of his account managers was hugely outperforming the others and he went to find out why. He discovered that the reason the account manager was so successful was that he had an outstanding sales consultant, Tom Siebel. Tom was made a sales manager. Tom was something of a control freak, e.g. when he flew from Silicon Valley to Europe, he piloted the plane himself. Tom applied his rigorous approach to sales, applying "Total Quality Management" techniques to the selling process his team would follow. Tom pitched the idea of creating a "Sales Force Automation" product based on these techniques to Larry Ellison, but Larry declined. A decision no doubt he regretted, as later he had to pay $5.8 Billion to buy Siebel Systems and get the idea back!
Sales Force Automation becomes customer relationship management when you surround the Accounts and Contacts from SFA with everything that you know about the customer, every previous time an account or contact has given you money, every time they have contacted your organisation to ask a question, request information.
In early 1998 Scopus Technology where one of the largest Service management software companies in the world. Service management is about tracking everything that your customer ever asks of you, everytime they call your call centre etc. The Scopus share price however was dipping, whilst Siebel's was soaring. Tom swooped in and bought Scopus for a mere $461M, becoming the market leader in this new software segment. However, rather than maintaining two separate systems, Tom killed off the Scopus technology, adding "Service Request" functionality to his SFA product. The term, SFA no longer really applied though, so a new name was required. CRM was born!
In addition to integrating the service management functionality, Siebel also brought to market "Siebel Marketing Enterprise", in essence this added the concept of a marketing campaign. Sophisticated search functionality allowed a long list of "Suspects", people who might possibly give you money. From that list a standardised qualification process could be applied to whittle this down to a list of "Prospects", people who where somewhat likely to give you money, from which opportunities could be generated for the sales team to go after. Combining this with the SFA and Service Management Functionality, really does provide the full CRM cycle.
In 1999, Marc Benioff, launched salesforce.com, an online version of Siebel's Sales Force Automation Product. Larry Ellison was an early investor. Despite the name Salesforce, by the time they went public in 2004, there symbol was CRM, as they had implemented web accessible versions of all the required service and marketing functions.
By this time, the Siebel stock price had tumbled to around 5% of it's peak value, and in 2006 Larry Ellison's Oracle stepped in to buy out Siebel in 2006, since 2006 salesforce have been the undisputed leader in the CRM space and they continue to be so today.