| | February 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Shahid Nizami, Managing Director, APAC - HubSpotALL THE TOOLS YOU NEED TO GROW BETTERNew technology comes and goes, and it can often feel like there's a new app or piece of software every week that promises to deliver business efficiencies, meet customer expectations and help sales teams be more productive and effective. While the tools and tricks are evolving rapidly, they still serve a central, age-old function - one that's becoming even more important as a business differentiator today - to improve the customer experience. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the fastest growing software on the market today. By 2025, revenues in the industry are expected to reach more than US $80 billion. It's safe to say that businesses globally are recognising that a CRM isn't just a nice to have, but an essential software for your business to grow better, deliver exceptional customer service and support internal team alignment by providing a single view of the customer. CRM software is immensely powerful, incredibly useful and should be at the heart of your front-office teams (sales, marketing and services). CRM software can be all of these things, if it meets the needs of your business, is easy to use, has the powerful features you need, integrates with the many tools you use, and when it's implemented well. Research shows that around one third of all CRM projects fail at implementation, and even more fail to actually drive business growth. Why? There are a few reasons. One is adoption failure, another is that the software wasn't built for the end user - it's jam-packed with features, but difficult to learn and hard to use. There's no room for poor customer relationship management in 20202020 has been a year of leaps and bounds when it comes to digitalisation and remote work/living. More importantly, we've observed how quickly people can adapt to using technology to support their needs. Collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom and Asana have kept work going, while businesses have continued to evolve their commerce channels, be it managing their own online portals or through platforms like Amazon and eBay. In a time of social distancing, businesses are witnessing how connecting closely with their customers wants and needs can be a key differentiator.There's one change, however, that hasn't evolved to where we, as business and sales leaders, need it to be - sales software. The way salespeople sell is changing, and has changed enormously this year, particularly in Asia as we've moved from face to face to remote selling, and our evolution in how we're selling is being hindered by bloated software solutions, solutions that just aren't suited to the rapidly changing business environment. New research, conducted by HubSpot, shows that nearly 50% of sales leaders don't believe their current sales
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