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"There are groups within companies that don't want to interact with a full-blown CRM application," said John Oechsle, president and CEO of Swiftpage. "They want it running in the background, but they want to access it based on the functions they want it to perform. These small purpose-built apps are...

"We think of 'subscription' broadly," said Matt Darrow, VP and general manager of product at Zuora. "It's when companies do business with customers with whom they have a known relationship, and those relationships are sticky. The subscription model is great for engagement because companies know that...

"CRM was originally created for the managers and bosses to report on the pipeline, and it was sold as a value proposition to the manager," noted Nutshell CTO Andy Fowler. "What's changing now is that CRM is becoming much more about supporting the rep -- giving them the tools they need to improve the...

"If there's anything true about B2B service, you have to do it in the context of the customers themselves in order to be successful. That's our philosophy," said CloudCraze EVP Andrew Witherspoon. "What is the purpose of CRM and marketing? It's to reach out, find and engage prospects, and to move th...

Making sales account-based is "the ability to take an account and use a holistic approach when dealing with it," said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. "You use a combination of marketing and sales to get to that account," he continued. "It's giving a name to something people already do, and it creates...

One of the most noticeable recent trends in CRM is that "there are a lot more companies looking for tools to centralize data," noted Oro CEO Yoav Kutner. "We're seeing multichannel businesses that interact with customers both through a brick-and-mortar and through multiple touchpoints.

Twenty years ago, CRM "was more of an inside-out technology," recalled Sandeep Kadam, director of CRM at Eagle Creek Software Services. "It was about making sales calls more efficient, and giving salespeople all the tools they needed so they could achieve their numbers. From there it has become more...

"Traditional demand-based, lead-based marketing is like fishing with a net," said Engagio CEO Jon Miller. "You run campaigns and marketing programs, and stuff comes out the other end. What the account-based world is all about is that you have a list of names, but you don't wait around to see if thos...

"One of the interesting things about CRM and marketing automation is that most of these systems have poor data quality," said Radius CEO Darian Shirazi. "Typically, customers buy data lists or get inbound leads, and the information associated with those accounts, opportunities and leads ends up deca...

There are three significant trends in CRM right now, according to Matt Keenan, SVP of Aptean's product group. "The first is the rapid evolution of human-system interaction. Gone are the days of sitting in front of a laptop and interacting with CRM. Customers are looking for multiple channels. The wa...

"Account-based marketing is really about marketing to the accounts that are aligned with your sales team," said Demandbase CEO Chris Golec. It's been done for years, but today there's a whole technology and practice around being able to market to accounts at scale, and this wasn't possible until abo...

"Account-based marketing is all about targeting key accounts. It's a strategy for marketers to focus most of their efforts on key accounts," said Mike Telem, vice president of product marketing at Marketo. "In most B2B businesses, you have a small number of accounts that are the most valuable. So it...

The latest CRM trends "are part of the whole movement toward digitization of the workforce," said AvePoint CEO TJ Jiang. "We see much more integration and automation in the CRM space. We've been working, for instance, to digitize a social welfare organization, where caseworkers will go in the field ...

"CRM is a mature industry, but it's fundamentally not moving the needle for the user, for the subscriber -- the sales rep or manager. It's fundamentally recording your activities, but it doesn't really let you commit with confidence to drive the right outcomes," said Aviso CEO K.V. Rao. Predictive a...

"I dare you to find a sales person or account manager who enjoys spending the last 45 minutes of the day inputting data into the CRM system," said Bullhorn CMO Gordon Burnes. "A lot of companies are facing the CRM adoption challenge. Why is it that this account record doesn't have much data in it? W...

It's surprising how much inaccurate data lives in many CRM systems, observed Eric Esfahanian, SVP of Gryphon Networks. "CRM is naturally a good source for analytics and sales intelligence if the data that lives within your CRM is automated, accurate, and something that you can reliably make decision...

Most customers aren't eager to look under the hood to examine the processes underlying their experiences, suggested Don Schuerman, CTO of Pegasystems. "The contemporary customer doesn't really care about CRM. They care about the experience they have, and in most cases they know little or nothing abo...

CRM innovations in recent years have had a significant impact on campaigns and nonprofit organizations, according to CFB Strategies President Trace Anderson. "Traditionally in the campaign world, it was an old-school mentality of just collecting checks," he said. "Even when I started working in poli...

It's important to recognize that "CRM is growing up," said Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera. "It's becoming more useful to the CRM user, who is predominantly the sales rep or whoever is managing the customer relationship. The sales performance management, or SPM, space is on a collision course with CR...

The most important trends in CRM right now are "the rise of the millennials, the rise of the promoter economy, and the rise of the conscious consumer," said Matt Price, Zendesk's SVP of emerging businesses. "The 'R' in CRM is relationship, and all of these things impact how we develop relationships ...