For a couple of decades now, business technology pundits have told us we needed a CRM application. Yet at the same time, sales forces have continued to complain that CRM is an overbearing administrative burden. This all leads to a particularly pertinent question: What is a CRM application actually for?

1. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A
CRM APPLICATION?

2. For a couple of decades now, business technology
pundits have told us we needed a CRM application.
Yet at the same time, sales forces have continued to
complain that CRM is an overbearing administrative
burden. This all leads to a particularly pertinent question:
What is a CRM application actually for?
CRM APPLICATION

3. All the tools, technologies and procedures to manage,
improve, or facilitate sales, support and related
interactions with customers, prospects, and business
partners throughout the enterprise.
(Sweeney Group)
CRM DEFINITION
“

4. FULLY MANAGE CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIPS
But why do sales reps continue to balk at CRMs if the
purpose of this application is to fully manage
customer relationships?
The sales force is at the very forefront of customer
relationships; they make that initial contact and are
responsible for maintaining a relationship with a
prospect or customer. If a salesperson isn’t able to
easily utilize CRM for customer relationships, something
is awfully wrong.

5. CRM application’s purpose should be
refocused as “a technological toolset
that fully empowers the sales force to
sell”.
It would follow that if the sales rep were
so empowered, the remainder of a CRM
application’s stakeholders (sales
management, tech support, marketing,
customer service, financial executives)
would be empowered as well.
EMPOWERS THE SALES

6. PHILOSOPHY BEHIND CRM
APPLICATION
Shifting the purpose of CRM to “fully
empowering the sales force” is in fact a shift
in CRM philosophy. This has roots in the
Austrian School of Economics, in which
proactive individual and human action are the
focus. The Austrian School places the
entrepreneur front and center in its economic
models—demonstrating the power an
individual can have on causatively changing
an economy.

7. When entrepreneurs are fully and freely empowered to
innovate on a national level, the result is usually an
economic boom. A fine example is the United States in
its first 150 years of existence. Through stellar
entrepreneurship, it went from a struggling collection
of 13 farm colonies to the strongest industrial power in
the world, in an incredibly short period of time.
What can happen to a company when its internal
entrepreneurs—the salespeople—are empowered in a
similar fashion? What can happen when a CRM solution,
instead of being used simply to monitor sales reps and
mire them down in data-entry duties, fully enables
them to freely perform their functions?
It is clear that the purpose of today’s leading-edge
CRM application is to fully empower sales reps to sell.