destinationCRM.com, the online home of CRM magazine, features a great piece by Christopher W. Cabrera, founder, president, and CEO of Xactly Corp, looking at some of the problems of CRM via spreadsheet. What he highlights is while these simple CRM tools do great for keeping track of pre-sale data, they don’t give firms an integrated picture of post sale data. As Cabrera points out, this sort of information is incredibly useful in constructing a real time picture of what is going on in the field, who’s buying what, at what margins, how frequently, etc. It’s also got a great deal of predictive value, allowing firms to track bonus and commission history so to better budget for it in the future.

What Cabrera doesn’t get into explicitly (though the notion seems to be implied in some parts of the article) is how useful this sort of data can be in building a relationship with customers. If customer service reps have a client’s purchase history at their fingertips, it makes it much easier to help them through issues. And it makes the sales teams job easier, since they can anticipate and maybe even remind clients of regular orders. Say a firm orders twenty boxes of toner from a supplier every month. If that supplier has that history in an easily accessible place and the firm doesn’t make that order one month, the salesperson will notice and can call their client to make sure there hasn’t been some mistake.

Cabrera ends his article calling for technology that helps firms focus on making not just sales, but profits. I’d like to add to that saying that part of turning sales into profits is turning one time purchases into steady long term relationships.

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