Four in ten businesses “outgrow” their CRM

New research from Capterra highlights a number of key trends emerging among CRM users, notably around the timescales and necessity for CRM adoption.

Based on a survey to current CRM technology users in the US and conducted over the course of three weeks with 500 respondents, Capterra found that more than half of users adopted CRM within their company’s first five years in business, and two-thirds of companies had at least 100 customers when they first purchased a CRM solution for their business.

Perhaps most interestingly, 40% of those users had switched CRM systems at least once, stating they had either become dissatisfied or had “outgrown” their previous system.

Debate over the perceived success and failure of CRM system deployment ranges, however, as recently as 2013, research from the Merkle Group claimed that 63% of CRM initiatives ‘failed’.

Despite this, businesses continue to invest in CRM. Gartner states that the 2014 global CRM market was in excess of $24 billion and that by 2017 it will be at $36.7 billion.

Within this investment, Capterra’s research states that One third of CRM users use Salesforce, while three other software industry behemoths, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP combine with Salesforce to dominate 75% of the CRM market.    

On average, businesses spend $150/user/month on their CRM. 61% spend over $50/month/user.

“Capterra’s CRM research shows how businesses are using their customer relationship management software to better measure their company’s performance, boost their sales and marketing efforts, and maintain loyalty among longtime customers,” says the report.

“Users have also leveraged their CRM data to branch into new types of business software, such as marketing automation and social media monitoring. With widespread adoption and overall user satisfaction, the biggest growth opportunities in the CRM industry will be twofold:

“[Firstly], new businesses will continue to adopt CRM technology as the economy continues to improve. [Secondly], current CRM vendors will upsell their users on add-ons and plug-ins to make better use of their CRM database, such as help desk software for customer service teams or marketing automation systems for marketers.

One such plug-in is social media monitoring, which the research states is a CRM user’s most desired CRM features (25%) alongside the ability to pull in prospect information from social media (24%).

The social media monitoring market is set to become a $17 billion market in its own right by 2014, according to forecasting from Markets and Markets.