Transforming the CRM From a System of Record to a System of Insight
This article originates from ZoomInfo. Review the CRM implementation white paper at your leisure. You can find its mention of Trujay under “CRM migration.”
By Henry Schuck
Over the last two decades, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become the center of the universe for enterprises and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB) alike.
A steep upfront investment, the CRM promised to digitize go-to-market motions and give sales managers visibility into pipeline and forecasting management, including quote-to-cash, territory management, and customer 360 efforts.
Yet, throughout the last 20 years, the majority of CRM data intended to drive these motions has been largely left untouched (or forgotten), and as a result, many companies never achieved what everyone believed CRM was capable of: empowering sales and marketing teams with a system of data-driven insights to better understand their total addressable market (TAM)—and to, ultimately, prescribe the next-best actions for sales.
CRM: A System Of Insight
Without systems and processes to cleanse and enrich data for real-time accuracy, CRM information stays stagnant and unreliable and can lead sales and marketing teams down the wrong path. Instead of selling, sales reps waste precious time on manual data entry and pursue the wrong prospects at the wrong time—and to make matters worse, they may even rebel against the CRM, seeing it as a burden versus a system of actionable insight.
The result? A costly problem—with analysts citing CRM implementation costs reaching up to $100 million. And that doesn’t include long-term costs of bad CRM data linked to limited agility, lower sales output, low morale, and dissatisfied customers.
The digitized go-to-market motion undeniably starts with the frontline seller and marketer working together with high-quality CRM data, actionable intelligence, and data-driven insights to find the next best customer. Arming your sales and marketing teams with confidence in your CRM is key to unlocking the value the CRM was intended to create.
So whether you are enriching your CRM, starting from scratch, or undergoing a CRM migration, ensure you have accurate and complete data. Your sales and marketing teams will then be able to leverage trusted CRM insights to identify and target the best-fit accounts, segment audiences for personalized communication, capture high-quality leads, automate sales motions, increase pipeline performance and forecast accuracy, maximize renewal, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities—and ultimately, displace the competition.
“The digitized go-to-market motion undeniably starts with the frontline seller and marketer working together with high-quality CRM data, actionable intelligence, and data-driven insights to find the next best customer. Arming your sales and marketing teams with confidence in your CRM is the key to unlocking the value the CRM was intended to create.”
- Henry Schuck, ZoomInfo Founder & CEO
Transforming your CRM data into a strategic asset and building a system of insight starts with a continuous commitment to maintaining data quality, completeness, and actionability. Regardless of where you are in your journey with your CRM, it’s never too late to focus on your data. And, even if you think you have good, clean data, there’s always more you can do to enable your sales team to get to the right customers, faster — like CRM automation.
Download ZoomInfo’s whitepaper for our best-in-class approach to:
- Source, cleanse, and fill in data gaps
- Automatically enhance data based on key attributes and events
- Activate data to power artificial intelligence-based go-to-market orchestration
Time is money—so why wait to harness the power of your CRM?
If you want a step-by-step guide to transforming your CRM from a system of record to a system of insight, we’ve got you covered.
Author Bio:
Henry Schuck is the CEO & Founder of ZoomInfo, the leading B2B database and go-to-market solution.
