What Alternative Exists to Traditional CRM?

Yesterday, we explored the question "does your organization really need CRM?" and saw at least two types of organizations for whom CRM might be overkill.

As a quick refresher, those organizations are:

1. Highly relationship driven businesses with bespoke services like law firms, investment banks, or boutique accounting shops
2. Highly transactional businesses that rely on continually marketing like e-commerce brands, gig economy services, or nonprofit organizations

There are three components to the alternative to CRM: data, apps, and pipes.

Let's zoom out and consider data for a moment.

The highly relationship driven business creates a lot of data in the form of interactions between the organization's employees and their prospects or customers. These are emails, phone calls, and calendar events.

The highly transactional business creates a lot of data in the form of interactions between the organization's systems and their prospects or customers. These are web analytics events, app usage data, ads and email clicks, purchases or donations, etc.

In both cases, we have traceability with common identifiers like an email address or phone number (plus first and last names, addresses, etc).

By centralizing all of this into a data stack, we're able to get a view into the relationships, derive meaning from them, and use them in downstream processes.

It can also be extended further with solutions like:

• Data mastering & enrichment to consolidate and learn more about demographics, psychographics, etc
• Machine learning algorithms to classify and predict things about the prospects and customers
• Generative AI models to hyperpersonalize the language in communications and marketing

Once we have consolidated the data, it can be exposed to the organization in apps that are:

• Standalone in an analytics platform like Power BI to visualize, drill down, and learn from data
• Embedded where people are doing their work like an Outlook sidebar to know more about the prospects and customers with whom you're interacting
• Integrated into purpose-built apps like Zendesk when a ticket is created to drive specific workflows like escalating to a higher tier of support for a high value customer

To make all of this possible, we're relying on pipes that are flowing with data:

• To a centralized data stack (i.e. a data warehouse) from the various places where it is naturally created (e.g. Outlook, marketing automation platforms, payment processors)
• To send data into purpose-built apps to enhance the ability for it to be leveraged in downstream processes (e.g. HubSpot, Zendesk, Quickbooks)

By adopting an approach that relies on a central data stack and apps that are purpose-built for specific activities, we gain three benefits:

1. We're creating a better user experience by adopting platforms that are best fit for the requirements and business processes, as opposed to forcing processes to work in a system
2. We're saving the organization's employees from unnecessary work by relying on the natural processes that emit data
3. We're reducing the organization's total cost of ownership by having lower quantities of expensive CRM licenses, implementation fees, and ongoing support costs

TLDR: An alternative to CRM is collecting the natural emission of data in a central stack, exposing it via apps where people are already working, and using pipes to let data flow.