Is Sales Software the Same as CRM?

NO. (It wouldn't be CRM). And - yes, in a way. To explain why, I need to go to Genesis times:

In the beginning there was Sales, nobody had heard of a thing called CRM. There was a well established class of software solutions, called SFA (this, in English, means Sales Force Automation; analysts like Gartner love describing the world in TLA-s, i.e. three-letter acronyms).

There was a great salesman, in fact, a Sales executive, who was one of the best at his place of work: a software company called Oracle (some may have heard of it). His name was Tom Siebel and he hadn't heard of CRM, either. He left Oracle to start his own company that would create the perfect SFA software. Being such a brilliant salesman (he was winning Best Performer awards at Oracle), Tom Siebel knew what to demand from his programmers - and they did create a great Sales solution.

In the meantime, a new BUSINESS discipline was emerging, quite separately from any technology. CRM was intended to be a strategy, a fundamental set of processes, a customer-centric competitive model. The processes that CRM needed included a lot of things from the Sales function, but even more from Customer Care and Marketing (and even more, going to some back-office functions). If it's a process, it can be automated - and a class of software started emerging, that automates CRM-related processes. The IT industry analysts jumped the TLA gun and 'invented' the new class of 'technology: CRM.

Mr Siebel noticed that Gartner are calling CRM 'the fastest-growing software category' - indeed, by the mid-to-late 90-s CRM was becoming a wildly popular fashion. He jumped on the bandwagon and promptly re-badged his Sales software from SFA to CRM. The rest is history: with his great salesmanship he sold it to 1,999.99 of the Fortune 2000 companies on the planet. Now the world believes that CRM is nothing but Sales software (even the esteemed poster before me).

To be fair to Siebel and all other CRM vendors, they evolved substantially since those days. Now (almost) all of them offer comprehensive suites, not just one solution, and they cover many aspets of CRM: marketing automation (campaign management and more), Customer Service (contact centre solutions and more), customer intelligence (data depositories and analytics)... and, of course: SFA. All of them have a Sales 'module', in many suites it is the centerpiece, best developed and most functional tool.

I have long stopped arguing that sales technology is not CRM. Call it whatever you want. As long as you understand that true CRM is not mere technology (which is just a powerful enabler), and is a complex BUSINESS discipline covering a lot more than Sales, there's nothing wrong in using a component from software sold as CRM for managing the sales porcess.

Sales as a porcess happens with CUSTOMERS, of course (the C in CRM, as we tend to forget what the 3 letters stand for). The letter in the middle is for RELATIONSHIPS, which is the most forgotten bit; if oyu are managing a relationship-based (!) Sales process, your sales force will be more effective and productive using a 'CRM' tool. If you ensure that each and every sales person understands relationship-based sales, and is aligned with company strategy and with policies and rules for different customer segments (CRM thrives on differentiating between customers and a fundamental principle is to always segment the customer base) - then you don't need to breathe down their necks and spy on them with some clever software. Instead, you will use the SFA/CRM functionality in the software to implement strategies, plan and allocate tasks, observe and influence pipeline progress, prevent the odd defection (some customers will always churn at some point), grow the value your customers deliver to your business (in return for value you deliver to them)...

Just my $0.02 (no tax added) -
Best of luck!

Same, no. Sales software is a part of CRM tools. CRM= sales+marketing+customer service aka a customer database usable by customer-facing departments.

Certainly tools can support your efforts to "better" manage sales, however, identifying sales processes and implementing those within a tool will give you the best chance for success.

A house cannot be built well without a strong foundation and blueprint. Your processes are your blue print and your foundation. Software is best compared with the plumbing and electricity, helping manage the "liveableness." Adding the curtains and paint, which can be compared to the add ons to the software- i.e. services like Hoover's- come last after time. If you go out of order building this, expect walls to fall and doors to not hang right. Treat this like a house and grow into it, and you will be on your way to having your dream home= well managed sales team, sales cycles, and sales forecasting.

Plan wisely!

Cheers,
Melissa McCready

As the folks mentioned above, it truly depends of the type of business and Industry you are in. When defining your CRM strategy, there are three "pillars" you can focus on: Marketing, Sales and Service.
Within marketing, there are different components you should think of, like strategy, marketing ROI, campaign management, pricing, etc. Similarly, within the sales pillar, the components you should think of are sales channel, lead & opportunity management, trade promotion management, order management, contract management, etc. Lastly, within the service pillar, examples of things you should keep in mind are service channel effectiveness, appointment scheduling, field service, complaints management, change order management, warranty management, etc.

Those three pillars are considered your transactional CRM. Once you have implemented those, you should start thinking about CRM analytics for more robust single view of the customer.

Hope this helps.

As Ellen said, it all depends on how you define "manage." What is the business purpose of the system: increase sales, compensation, customer satisfaction, inventory control? Are you looking only for a reporting system, or for a tool the sales staff will also use? Do members of the sales staff collaborate or does each rep have a designated territory? Who prepares quotes and/or sales orders, if they are even used? Where and how do marketing and customer service fit in? Does operations need to be aware of new opportunities and the progress of current opportunities? Do you track opportunities in the first place? Do sales reps need to know the status of available inventory and/or orders? Do you have inventory?

Paul. That was the exact question I asked myself before creating Frontrow-solutions. I wanted a tool that focused on sales rep activity and accountability. The CRM's I looked at didn't provide that. Frontrow-solutions reguires the sales rep to send a short coded text message after every sales call usually 10 to 15 key strokes. A rep can do all his reporting in less than 5 minutes per day. Once the text message hits our servers we date and time stamp it , identify the rep ,identify the account called on ,decipher the code and create custom reports from the code . that whole process takes 5 seconds . Management can now see in real time all sales rep activity. We have been in the market for about 16 months and have over 50 happy clients .
Frontrow is not for everyone but if your focus is to improve sales rep productivity( more calls and better calls) this works check us out at www.frontrow-solutions.com . We now have proccessed over a million sales calls from over 2000 sales reps, let me more if you would like to see some of the analytics from those calls.

I see the lines as very blurred, looking at the driving forces behind a CRM project will often find that there is a desire for better management of leads to delivery more clients, better management of clients to drive repeat business, better management of service to keep existing clients and better through targeted marketing to all sectors to develop and build on awareness and value add options that any of the above may be interested in.

The cleaver stuff come to light when you start targeting based on profiles, you analyse your data to build propensity to buy models to highlight the clients that with the right case will buy supporting products and services to tone they have already purchased

However is any of this building on a client relationship, simplistically YES, every time to interact you are using or building on your relationship, every time you sell you are building on the client relationship, but do not forget that you are dealing with People and not just a record in the database and even with all of the greatest technology we as people like to deal with people as can be seen by the shops on our high streets and the masses of people out there spending their hard earned cash.

Both are two large activities and need enough manhandling time seperately.

CRM is after sales services. But your CRM will be happy when you manage your sales staff effectively & effeciently. I dont know whether a software can manage your sales staff effectively by lowering your cost, saving time for consultancy. But we definately need a system for reporting daily activities of each sales individual.

SPM solutions helps yor sales team in reaching corporate goals.

"Organizations are now realizing the limits of what customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) systems can do and that they need new applications to manage to expected outcomes. The strong market demand for sales performance management software has shifted the focus to applications that can support the activities and processes associated with sales operations and performance. In 2008 we expect to see sales performance management (SPM) become a top priority for sales and finance organizations that are looking reduce the risk and uncertainty around meeting their sales and financial performance targets. For the thousands of sales organization still relying on silos of data, spreadsheets and e-mail to track and manage sales performance, the opportunity for improvement is significant. Ventana Research continues to advocate the importance of investment in sales performance management. We see the educational effort beginning to help organizations understand how to adopt a mature approach to sales effectiveness. - Ventana Research. ( Mark Smith Research Director )"

Easy-Commission.com and Qcommission.com are two SPM softwares which helps to measure the sales performance and effectiveness.

There is a commission software as a service at www.nirvaha.com or a direct link at www.nirvaha.com/products/commission-software.html where you can use their service online and have multiple users and/or view only users to manage the company's commissions.