Just recently we have gone through the process of choosing and moving over to a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for our business.

We evaluated SugarCRM and we had at least 20+ recommendations to use it from our friends and contacts at LinkedIn. We got some great advice from those who had been there and done it before - The power of crowdsourcing huh!

In the end we went with Salesforce.com and our guys love it. The outlook integration has made it easy to bake CRM into everyday communications without the need to copy paste between Email and CRM all day.

Choosing to go through the CRM implementation process has been a great thing. It has already noticeably increased our sales efficiency and we have closed more clients more quickly than ever before. Throughout the implementation we were forced to focus on making sure we sell our services in the way our clients like to buy them (at the advice of our friend at Ernst & Young, Rob Kingma). This has basically revolutionised our sales efficiency and closure rates, and without a CRM this would have been almost impossible.

However now we have a CRM we have been reflecting on what is next for us in terms of business efficiency and future scalability...

Ideally we would like to see something more holistic from any of the CRM systems we evaluated.

It seems most "CRM" products are really great at sales pipeline management, but don't really cover the end to end business CRM efficiency features we dream about.

For example we would love Cross Channel Marketing Conversion linked into the Sales Pipeline Features coupled with Project management, Resource Allocation, Timesheets, Invoicing, Profitability Reporting, Customer Satisfaction Surveys. Right now we would need to integrate 10 different systems to achieve that.

What we have learnt is solving the problem of how to best acquire customers is a great problem to fix, but it creates a whole new bunch of problems focused on making sure you actually have really happy repeat customers that are profitable for your company.

This may be just as important to success, and even harder to get right.

We welcome your thoughts...

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