CRM(Customer Relationship Management) solutions have become an ingrained concept in today’s modern enterprise ecosystem. With every passing year, we witness a new steaming flavor of CRM like cloud CRM, mobile CRM, social CRM. Gartner reports a 13.3% year-over-year CRM growth last year, and predictably it will touch 36 billion dollar market by 2017. An industry such gigantic definitely needs a mention and here I pen down the top- notch CRM trends of 2016, which are probably set to unfold new dimensions of CRM this year.
Trend 1: Marketing automation to drive CRM Market
Marketing automation forms the crux of CRM. If you want to curb your budget then using CRM for marketing greatly caters to that aspect. CRM helps in tracking campaign and a lot more like providing the marketers with valuable insights into the sales cycle.
According to Gartner, marketing automation is expected to lead CRM applications surging the growth rate with a 10.7% CAGR (compound annual growth) by 2016 attaining a total market value share of $4.6 billion.
Trend 2: Integration will be the main game
CRM will continue to evolve from a sales oriented platform to a core marketing-and-sales platform. As CRM goes viral it has become increasingly important to cater to a seamless integration of CRM with your marketing automation tool, e-commerce platform, data analytics system and a lot more. In contrary to spending a limitless number of hours in uploading and downloading CSVs of data from one system to another, one would pretty much demand that their CRM comes with these much needed native integrations with other platforms. In the near future, we will witness integration replaced by all-in-one software, marrying the ardent needs of sales and marketing both.
Trend 3: Big Data and Small Data
Big data will play a major role in 2016. While large enterprises were already a part of this bid data analysis trend, this year we will see a lot of medium and small size enterprises pop up for this job. They will be keen to offer you services supplementing your existing CRM systems. This will help in pairing the data with the appropriate prospect activity, hence providing a better predictive analytics pinpointing sales opportunities and leading to more conversions. But with all the hype about big data we tend to be forgetting about the intrinsic value of small data. This year will also witness an in-depth investigation and aggregation of the scattered data that exists in its internal CRM, and ERP systems for personal analytics and better insights.
Trend 4: CRM and Social Media
Another vital CRM trend of 2016 which is expected to drive the statistics exponentially is the insurgence of social media. Today just having an account on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t suffice the business need of the hour, rather there is a dire need to measure and analyse the impact it has on the audience. Solution to this problem is nothing but Social CRM. It provides businesses with intuitive ways to engage with customers and prospects and follow the new mantra of taking your business to the doorstep of your customers!
Trend 5: Exponential Growth of Mobile CRM
Mobile CRM solutions and applications downloads will see an exponential growth in the year. In fact, it is expected to rise by a number as huge as 500% in this year. By the year 2016, 55% of sales people will access the sales applications from smartphones and tablets. Hence mobile vendors are making it their priority and thereby helping the businesses to make swift decisions in this dimension.
Trend 6: Increase demand of SaaS Model
Saas will continue to dominate the CRM market this year and by 2015 end more than half CRM deployments have moved to cloud and that percentage is probable to shoot up to a soaring 85% by the year 2025. CRM through SaaS not only reduces the load on your budget but also ensures greater security. Hence, a majority of vendors are coming up with CRM solutions as a part of the SaaS model. So for businesses looking forward to investing in SaaS, this year is the most appropriate time.
Trend 7: CRM mapping Customer Journey
Google Analytics can map down the path your customer reached you but this year will see a tighter integration between the mapping concepts and leads in CRM. This strong coupling between the two allows the sales team to get connected to a more personalized level and pitch them better and helps the marketing team to understand where their efforts should be channelized further.
On an ending note… CRM trends will keep evolving over the next couple of years. These trends are prepared to set 2016 ablaze in a novel way opening up new horizons.
P.S. With significant changes resulting from personal adoption of CRM there will definitely be not any rest and relaxation for the CRM professionals this year 😉
References:
destinationcrm, cio, skywardtechno, capterra
Ajeet Singh
