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Who Owns CRM: Marketing or Sales?
Introduction
CRM is a valuable tool that can be used across multiple departments within an organization to help grow the company, organize its people, and more. The core components of a CRM system are sales, marketing, and customer service. Some systems go beyond these three to provide more robust solutions, but these are the core.
Leads, accounts, contacts, marketing campaigns, pipeline analysis and tracking, forecasting, quota management, and more -- with all of this information available to track, manage and market within a CRM system, you would think either marketing or sales (or BOTH) would jump at the chance to take ownership of the information, workflow, etc.
Despite the systems revolving around sales and marketing, in my experience neither department jumps up to take ownership of the system. It’s the proverbial chicken and egg dilemma – which one comes first, or in this case, should take ownership of the system?
Analysis
One could say that managing a CRM system adds a lot of work to a department’s plate, and today everyone is already stretched thin during the work day. On the other hand, if you do not take ownership of the CRM system and its data, then you cannot control what happens with it. Is that a good scenario for sales or marketing to take on? I think not!
Marketing needs to be in the know when it comes to sales activities, trends, industry patterns, and even customer service concerns. When they are, they can be proactive (and not just always reactive) to changes in the marketplace, in the company, and in sales patterns.
Sales needs to be in the know when it comes to sales activities, forecasts, quotas, and leads. When they are, they can work as a team to close more deals, request information from marketing in a timely fashion, and dig deeper to get to know their prospects (and close more deals!).
Marketing Owning CRM
Working at a company for four years where my role was managing the database, and being a part of the marketing department, I saw first-hand how this works. Marketing technically owned the system – the department made the decisions of how the system would work, who would use it, what information to put in it, and what to pull out of it. But this was not necessarily ideal.
Sales Owning CRM
In working with some of my clients, I’ve seen the sales department take a stand to use the system, manage it, and make decisions while the rest of the company did nothing.
Sales and Marketing Sharing Ownership
Based on experience working with various different companies of varying sizes and industries, my assessment is that BOTH departments need to take a somewhat equal ownership of the system – it’s not an either-or situation. Marketing and Sales need each other (despite what some of them think) to be successful. Marketing needs good data (or to gather the data) in order to provide sales the information they need to close the deals. In order to help convince the prospects that their product or service is the best out there, Sales needs Marketing to put together strong materials and provide as much research on the prospect company as possible. Ideally, the two departments go hand in hand. In reality, they rarely do.
When both departments take ownership of the CRM system, they can begin speaking the same language and knowing what each other needs without guessing or waiting for tedious meetings. Metrics begin to spring up that make sense to both worlds, instead of it being one-sided, and having to convince the other of your needs. Having one cohesive system with both departments invested in it makes life easier in the long run (and grows revenues for the company).
Conclusion
Instead of continuing to fight for dollars, recognition, and respect, let’s begin to have Marketing and Sales work together. One giant step is to both take ownership in the CRM system. The system is really the workflow, fields, data, and security. The infrastructure should be left to the IT department to handle!
Kendra Von Achen is founder and President of DB Pros, a database advisory and implementation company for entrepreneurs and small businesses. For more information on CRM issues in today’s business environment, visit www.dbprosconsulting.com or blog.dbprosconsulting.com.
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9 Comments
What place has 'service and support' in this story? I prefer an independent CRM Manager as owner of the customer? Marketing, Sales and Service are supporting the CRM Manager.
I'm not sure that this is even the right question. There are companies that only implement sales oriented CRM, other only marketing oriented, or service or sometimes all three major areas of CRM. The important factor in success is that the CEO embraces the idea, funds the CRM projects and staff it appropriately. Who actually is running or owning the CRM is only important when that person or persons is/are not successful. In the end the sales team owns sales, and the CRM portion that is directed to sales needs to be successful. They are the users of sales CRM and maybe not the "owner"
IMHO, no one department "owns" CRM. The CRM philosophy/strategy (as opposed to CRM software) should be "owned by every single employee in the company. This philosophy is most successful when grounded in customer-centricity or when the organization is trying its best to evolve in that direction.
Ideally, CRM should be a free-standing department as it is in my organization. The software should be de-emphasized. I agree with Bart Goldenberg who said that CRM is 50% human, 30% business processes, and 20% technology.
But one department needs to be responsible for the budget and resources. Training, support, etc. A lot of this "sales vs marketing" can be avoided by selecting a neutral department.
Great question. In some organizations (I would call them 'mature' CRM orgs), as already mentioned, it's an AND, not an OR question. Marketing owns CRM up to a certain point in the selling funnel - for some it's the stage right after lead conversion to prospect, for others it's before that (eg: qualified lead). Depending on the size of the organization, Marketing usually doesn't get involved in the deal side of CRM (proposal + negotiation) or the day-to-day capture, report, and forecast nature of CRM. This isn't to say that Marketing doesn't consume data from CRM at these later stages, they do - just at an aggregated level. For example, marketing would look at "how many customers in the midwest are prospects for product X & Y" so they can provide air-cover (field marketing) and support for a selling region or product promotion.
Still, I think a single point ownership (of the system, the data, the processes) is important and should reside with one business function. I've seen it live in Marketing, Sales, IT and even Finance! The answer is it depends on your company, your sales funnel, and your leadership. At one company (albeit a small business), the CEO owned CRM - that's how important it was - and it was easier for ALL business functions to fall in line and do their part (for compliance to process, for data quality, for reporting).
Sales and Marketing departments sharing ownership of CRM is far better than one leading the project in isolation, or leaving it to the other. But as you stated at the start of your article, CRM is a valuable tool that can be used across multiple departments within an organization. This means the data and workflows within CRM systems are rarely restricted to one or two departments –they will nearly always involve and impact on other areas. This is especially so with the rise of xRM.
So, although getting Sales and Marketing to work together is great, I don’t believe it’s a case of ‘either/or’ Sales and Marketing taking ownership, and shouldn’t be limited to these departments. Anyone who uses your CRM system, whether they’re in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Support, Operations, Training, Accounts, Finance and so on (it varies between systems and organisations) should own it. Similarly users (not just departments) of the system need to buy in to the CRM ethos and each take responsibility for it. Otherwise, if they don’t use the system properly or keep it up to date, the information in it won’t be reliable. This means you won’t get the full benefits and potential out of the system. At worse the project may fail.
Getting this right, i.e. making sure everyone takes ownership of the system, usually comes down to managing the implementation project properly, training and effective communication. Often, CRM can be a cultural change for businesses, and much more than just adding a new piece of software. So, a CRM system needs everyone within the organisation to own it.
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Peter - I agree with your assessment completely. But when it comes down to it, someone (or group of people) has to make final decisions on using the system, changes to it, etc. That is what this article is stressing. If all users don't feel they want to use the system to benefit themselves and the company, then the implementation will never be complete.
No one department “owns” or should “own” CRM, it is simply a tool that drives the philosophy of a customer centric focus.
"Ruud made a great suggestion in that perhaps a independent CRM Manager should be a appointed for responsibilities such as budget, resources, training, and support.
However Peter hit the heart of the issue with regards to managing the implementation project properly, training, effective communication, and ownership adopted by all those who function within the application. If any of these key components are not present then there will be little or no benefit whatsoever."
The high failure rate in CRM implementations is a consequence of top management not focusing on the system as being central to the daily work life of any employee that has contact with customers. Sales, marketing, customer service are frankly only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who come in contact with a customer needs to be an empowered participant in the CRM system. Who should "own" the system? Not Sales, not Marketing. not Customer Service, nor any combination of the aforementioned. CRM is a CEO issue, and needs to be approached as such.
A CRM project project needs funding for the implementation and ongoing development. Typically marketing organizations have a larger budget as a result I think marketing should own CRM.
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