This week, Sugar launches our 2024 State of CRM research report. This report chronicles how CRM has undergone significant changes over the past five years, driven by technological advancements, shifting customer expectations, and evolving business needs.
To take a pulse on the market today, SugarCRM surveyed more than 800 global business-to-business sales, marketing, service, and IT leaders from May 15 to July 1 to understand shifting CRM use cases over the past five years, and what new CRM activities companies are prioritizing moving forward.
Below is a snapshot of our findings:
Our new research shows that CRM has developed a more strategic role in driving sales and marketing operations than ever before with 57% saying that they perceive their CRM solution as more important now than five years ago in helping achieve their sales and marketing goals.
This year's report presents a consolidation of the data we gathered from decision-makers in organizations all around the world, in which we determined the following four key insights:
“To be successful in today’s highly competitive market, every customer-facing team needs to work together with a common view of the customer and tightly intertwined, cross-functional processes. The key to increased CRM effectiveness is the breaking down of barriers across departments. Marketing needs to know how sellers are following up on the leads they create. Sellers need high-quality leads to come from marketing. Service teams need sellers to set customers up for success with appropriate expectations. Marketing needs service teams to drive up-sell and cross-sell opportunities back into the marketing funnel.”
- Clint Oram, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, SugarCRM
Although CRM is viewed as more essential to B2B organizations than ever before, companies still face challenges with their current CRM system of record. Respondents cite the following has current and future roadblocks:
Top priorities for maximizing value from CRM systems over the next five years include gaining a complete view of all customer interactions (45%) while leveraging AI to do so (20%).
“CRM must be intuitive and self-guiding. Users don’t have time to attend training classes or fumble around with clunky and complex software products. ‘Easy’ trumps all other CRM software evaluation considerations. AI is delivering on this promise by taking away the need to sift through reams of data or ‘stare and compare’ at charts to find insights. No longer do sellers have to wait on compelling and engaging content to come from marketing. In the year ahead, the growing application and acceptance of predictive and generative AI will embolden customer-facing professionals to expect – and demand – even more from their CRM tools.”
- Clint Oram, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, SugarCRM
In order to address these concerns, modern CRM solutions need every customer-facing team to work together with a common view of the customer. This will lead forward-thinking organizations to create tightly intertwined and cross-functional processes across all teams. The key to increased CRM effectiveness is the breaking down of barriers across departments.
These highlighted stats are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what industry peers have to say. To learn more about the State of CRM Survey, please visit The 2024 State of CRM Report.
