In the early years of the 00’s, Paul Greenberg’s book “CRM at the Speed of Light” suggested a more comprehensive CRM system that manages all business relationships. Due to a reluctance to use “dot-com” technologies, e-CRM vendors were hit the hardest.
The entire industry retracted, with giants like Oracle reporting license losses of more than twenty-five percent.
Like most software industries, the CRM industry was hit hard by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The 2000s: From Near death to Floating on Clouds Under the leadership of Mark Benioff, Salesforce eventually grew to rival CRM industry giants like Siebel Systems. Geared toward smaller businesses, Salesforce was initially ignored by larger vendors. The 90s came to an end with the debut of the first major Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor. CRM also made its first foray into the mobile market, with the introduction of Siebel Handheld. Using intranet, extranet, and internet, e-CRM vendors offered a level of intra-organizational collaboration that hadn’t previously been available in the CRM industry. A number of notable, high-value acquisitions consolidated the overall market, while emerging e-CRM vendors provided fierce competition. More marketing, sales, and service applications were added to CRM on a near-constant basis.ġ999 was a busy year for the CRM industry. All of this competition pushed CRM vendors to provide a broader suite of services. Unlike other software companies that were transitioning to CRM, SAP entered the market with the sole purpose of capitalizing on emerging applications.
Enterprise resource management (ERP) vendors like Oracle and Baan entered the CRM market, hoping to use their size and ERP in-roads to dominate the industry. The last half of the decade brought huge changes to the CRM industry. According to then Director of Marketing at Pivotal Software, Sharka Chobot Stuyt, it was Pivotal that first coined the term CRM, which won out. A number of terms like enterprise customer management (ECM) and customer information system (CIS) were in use. However, this emerging product still didn’t have a proper name. Siebel Systems quickly became the leading SFA provider on the market.īy 1995, SFA and contact management had evolved to closely resemble modern CRM software. While at Oracle, Siebel tried unsuccessfully to convince CEO Larry Ellison to package and sell their internal sales application as a standalone product.
In 1993, Tom Siebel left Oracle to create Siebel Systems. It also automated business tasks like inventory control, and sales tasks like customer interaction tracking. This provided businesses with much more useful customer information. SFA took many of the features of database marketing, automated them, and combined them with contact management. Early innovators like Brock Control Systems helped push the evolution of contact management software toward sales force automation (SFA). The beginning of the 90s brought the first major step toward true CRM software. The 1990s: Birth of an Acronym and Growth of an Industry Near the close of the decade, the proliferation of personal computers and the advent of server/client architecture paved the way for an explosive growth in software development.
Goldmine and other vendors also released CMS programs throughout the 80s. Essentially a digital rolodex, ACT! allowed for the efficient storage and organization of customer contact information. In 1986, ACT! introduced the business world to contact management software. Using statistical modeling, that data was then used to help customize communications with other potential customers. Pioneered by Robert and Kate Kestnbaum, database marketing collected and analyzed customer information. The 1980s: Digital Rolodexes and Database Marketing During that time, the CRM industry has undergone sea-changes and shakeups that could have derailed the entire concept. Over the past four decades, it has evolved out of a variety of other business programs. CRM hasn’t always been the robust, stand-alone software that so many businesses rely on today.