Is CRM the same as Sales Force Automation?

SFA is only the entry point into the customer relationship and “CRM”. CRM is more of an all-encompassing strategy in which you focus your company’s people, processes and technology around the needs of your customers. A well executed CRM strategy and aligned technology should provide complete insight into the total customer lifecycle thus providing increased customer value and loyalty for your current customers and improved insight into future customer interactions.
As a component of CRM, SFA automates the sales processes and provides consistency for the sales team and executive. Managing the ongoing relationship from that point is where other components of CRM come into play. You may have greatly automated your sales processes with SFA to accelerate the drive for increased sales but if your support /service organizations are not connected, you may not be meeting your customers’ expectations AND nothing drives customers away from an organization quicker than poor customer service.

CRM, broadly speaking, covers all front office functions (Sales, Service, and Marketing) across business strategy, architecture, and technology (analytics is a supporting management tool and process, not necessarily applied to CRM in isolation). Many people specialize in one aspect or another, strategy or technology, and others generalize across the spectrum with key focus areas on industries or other specializations. CRM specializations are differently applied for each industry sector as each client has different customer management processes, technical complexities, and business issues to solve.

Another way of looking at it, and the source of some ambiguity in the market in general, is that CRM as a discipline requires a deep understanding of the client's customer business processes, business needs, and internal/external market drivers. Hence the necessary, required cross-over between business and technology.

Unlike traditional back office systems, to be successful, CRM practitioners require this understanding and skills to be effective for their clients. Looking at it solely as a technology is the historical recipe for failure. In these cases, sales teams often went back to a "Rolodex" and corporate HQ were always held to the fire on lack of field usage. You do not have this technology issue when deploying a back office technology, such as HR or order management, as you are "guaranteed" 100% user adoption even if it misses the needed business alignment.

For clients with technical questions about the CRM moniker, I found that metaphor useful to clarify the difference (and its various business and architectural components) from your traditional ERP technology (all of which are changing rapidly these days).

Hope this helps. Or, you can always just call it "Customer Management" :)

You're right in that CRM is a broad category -- my own past expertise was with SFA using Siebel software and at no time during the project did we refer to it as a CRM project (it's what the exec's wanted as the project was focused on sales reps), since then my current company uses SAP's CRM package -- but only its ISA for R/3 portion (Internet Sales Application) so the use of the acronym 'CRM' should be followed by what your focus is (if any) or back to the broad definition if multiple 'parts' are used to be be too narrow to list. As always, listen to your stakeholders and/or sponsors and that should lead you to what the focus should be so everyone is on the same page ...

CRM, broadly speaking, covers all front office functions (Sales, Service, and Marketing) across business strategy, architecture, and technology (analytics is a supporting management tool and process, not necessarily applied to CRM in isolation). Many people specialize in one aspect or another, strategy or technology, and others generalize across the spectrum with key focus areas on industries or other specializations. CRM specializations are differently applied for each industry sector as each client has different customer management processes, technical complexities, and business issues to solve.

Another way of looking at it, and the source of some ambiguity in the market in general, is that CRM as a discipline requires a deep understanding of the client's customer business processes, business needs, and internal/external market drivers. Hence the necessary, required cross-over between business and technology.

Unlike traditional back office systems, to be successful, CRM practitioners require this understanding and skills to be effective for their clients. Looking at it solely as a technology is the historical recipe for failure. In these cases, sales teams often went back to a "Rolodex" and corporate HQ were always held to the fire on lack of field usage. You do not have this technology issue when deploying a back office technology, such as HR or order management, as you are "guaranteed" 100% user adoption even if it misses the needed business alignment.

For clients with technical questions about the CRM moniker, I found that metaphor useful to clarify the difference (and its various business and architectural components) from your traditional ERP technology (all of which are changing rapidly these days).

Hope this helps. Or, you can always just call it "Customer Management"! :)

I would say Sean nailed it pretty well, all I would say is that depending the software manufacturer you will have products that are more geared towards SFA or the Service Management side of CRM. So when you are looking for a CRM you should know exactly what is that you want before buying. Also what I've seen lately as a tendency for people to make the equivalence between CRM and SFA, as for most of the CRM users CRM is just about leads and opportunities :-).

Lets not get bogged down with 3 letter acronyms. CRM and SFA can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. We in the "know" can have interesting intellectual discussions about it, but most directors are only interested in using the right application to drive their business to meet their particular objectives.

Our job is to establish what they are trying to do and then enable them to do it!

This industry has had so many failures because companies buy acronyms rather than the correct piece of kit and relevant business consultancy to make it work.

Mike