Taken from the CRM MVP alias with the quoted MVP’s permissions:
Larry: Today at lunch I was asked by a friend what CRM was. I was suddenly at a loss of words. How do you describe a product like Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a 30 second elevator speech to a non-techie business owner? Anyone have a spiel they’d like to share?
Curt: A Stack of real world business tools that are plug and play. And they come with versatile attachments. Those attachments are everything you already use. And it’s not going to lower the PE of your stock.
Imran: CRM is a framework which cover several out of box modules for your customer 360 review like in Sales, marketing, and services. You can customize it as per your business requirements and it has great workflow automation tool. It has great reporting and analytic services. It is service oriented and can be integrated with any system.
Joel: Actually had this conversation on the airplane yesterday. This isn’t the 30 second elevator spiel, but probably could get it in the 1 minute version.
“Dynamics CRM is Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management platform. It has all of the capabilities that you would typically associate with a CRM application, such as sales, accounts, contacts, and opportunities, but it is also fully integrated with Outlook, so users don’t have to go to another application to “use CRM.”
The real power of Dynamics CRM is as a business application platform—you can easily extend and adapt it to any line of business application with minimal to no custom programming, whether that’s managing reservations, medical records, inspections, criminal background checks, financial portfolios, properties, or fitness centers. That’s why we call it “xrm,” whatever-you-want Relationship Management.
This flexibility of the Dynamics CRM platform gives users the benefits of a custom developed app (uniquely tailored to your business processes) without the downside (custom plumbing, custom ui, security model, authentication, etc), so the bulk of the deployment can be spent on the fun stuff (like user experience) instead of the headaches of custom app dev.”
Julie: So I was flying all day and am late to the party but…
CRM is what makes people like me look organized. I only have to be organized once, then CRM takes over. And overall it’s a great platform, even for people like me that don’t write a single line of code. I can still get in there and make it my own.
Scott: CRM brings your customers into Outlook, along with their sales, service and communication history. A successful CRM implementation centralizes the key details and history for each person and organization – allowing your business to work as a team to meet the customer’s needs.
Nice.