CRM – Comprehensive Revenue Management
That’s not what CRM really stands for, but I like it better. When the acronym for customer relationship management was first used in 1995, it was a clean way to describe sales force automation to businesses who were already using contact management software. But that was more than a quarter-century ago, and CRM has evolved to become a comprehensive revenue management tool.
The world has changed since 1995. It’s digital and connected in a way that was only imagined. There is so much more information available that the way business is conducted is fundamentally different. Businesses buy differently than they used to, and how distributors generate and manage their revenue needs to keep pace with the ever-changing environment.
Evolving Distribution Industry
Fortunately, the distribution industry knows it and is taking the time to examine long-held practices and traditional sales model silos. Modern Distribution Management (MDM), one of the leading voices in the distribution industry, recently published its 2022 Distribution Trends Outlook. In that report, 41% of Distributors will invest in CRM technologies in 2022, while another 29% plan to invest in pricing technologies.
CRM Technologies
Pricing Technologies
When those market-leading distributors choose their solutions, they will be looking at more than an old-school CRM or sales automation tool. Most will be looking for an all-inclusive platform that allows seamless integration between all aspects of revenue generation and management. A platform where the results of customer outreach and marketing campaigns flow through to the sales force. This in turn produces actionable insights and recommended pricing, and all the extended capabilities needed to close a deal, operating as an integrated, consistent workflow.
Understanding Workflow
Workflow. Sometimes there are buzzwords that are hard to understand but workflow isn’t one of them. A distributor that doesn’t understand workflow doesn’t stay in business for long. Understanding sequence and dependency matters, visibility to the whole process matters, knowing what isn’t going well and how to fix it…matters. That is a workflow and the further you integrate data and processes, the more efficient your operating environment becomes. A lot of that is sales, but it’s also your marketing team and your executives, and your operating managers, and your pricing team and your business analysts. And since workflow benefits by exposure, the entire organization needs to see it – not be constrained by seat licenses.
Revenue generation is a continual cycle – actions -> lead to -> results -> lead to -> analysis -> lead to -> insights -> lead to -> improved actions. Each step in this workflow – integrated and connected across teams – leads to improvement in both the quantity and quality of revenue, top line, and margin. That is comprehensive revenue management, today’s CRM.
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