Customer Relationship Management applications

While sales, marketing, and client service remain the key application for CRM, today's applications offer business solutions beyond these traditional areas, says Mike Lorge, managing director of Sage Business Solutions. "One interesting thing we are seeing is that businesses are finding creative ways to use the workflows in our CRM systems to help other business processes and functionality. SMEs, for example, are using CRM for implementing systems to manage processes and activities that wouldn't have been automated in the past, such as purchase orders. If you need someone to approve POs above a certain amount you can create rules to manage this workflow in your CRM application. It seems CRM isn’t just about sales and marketing anymore it’s about managing all sorts of business processes.

"The ROI is almost immediate because it is a low cost product and you only have to save an hour or two to recover its cost,” Lorge explains of Sage offerings. "For our other products, Sage CRM and SalesLogix, it's not uncommon for a business to be able to redeploy one person to other activities within a year because there's less duplication of work so the ROI on a cost basis alone is under a year without factoring in the benefits from increased sales."

In Lorge's experience, “CRM as an application is rapidly approaching a point of mass adoption—it is maturing and its functionality is being influenced by the real needs in the marketplace.

"What is helping the adoption,” he adds, “is that the industry has become a lot more experienced in implementing CRM in a way that is very useful to business. While it's easy to see how to use an accounting application, it has taken the industry time to understand how to implement CRM to be of benefit to a business."