A disconnect in desperate need of bridging...

In his post ‘Are we solving the same problem’ Seth Godin brilliantly sums up one of the fundamental problems of the CRM industry even though he’s not actually writing about IT.

The point he makes is that people are much more comfortable discussing the solution to a problem than the problem itself. If we were to understand the problems better the solutions would be better, but this tends not to be the way of the world.

Applied to the world of CRM, I think CRM vendors are great at talking about their product’s functionality, but are considerably more sketchy about the problems their products are actually solving. This would be less of an issue if the purchasers of CRM technology could fill the gap, but not surprisingly perhaps, they often struggle to understand which of their problems CRM can practically solve.

Only when this disconnect is bridged will the true potential of CRM be realized.