Reasons for the Current CRM Market Recovery

I recently received a question on what trends are driving the CRM market recovery.  Here is my answer to this question:

Some trends that are driving the CRM industry recovery include:

1. The rise in the Social CRM market: Three in four U.S. online adults now use social tools to connect with one another compared with just 56% in 2007, leading to the rise in Social CRM tools and applications used by the US population. Social media vendors such as Radian6 and Lithium and the CRM vendors such as Oracle, NetSuite and Salesforce.com announced “Social CRM” applications, which provide integration with either a CRM data store, or a social media monitoring tool or a social channel such as Twitter. This will not only continue in 2010 but will accelerate in the next few years.

2. CRM remains high in the business agenda for CIOs, who say that attracting and retaining new customers is a high priority in the current economic downturn.

3. An increase in availability of CRM applications in the Cloud mode, which provides these benefits:

• lower initial cost of ownership of enterprise applications,
• faster deployments,
• rapid innovation,
• elimination of shelfware,
• no long-term lock-in, and
• vendor accountability.

The cloud enables organizations to use CRM during a trial period to determine whether a specific CRM application is suitable for their needs. The end result has been an increase in the adoption of CRM by organizations in the current marketplace as many organizations are finding out that CRM is a necessary requirement for their sales and marketing needs.