Overview

The Rise of the CRM

20 years ago, most people would manage their contacts through spreadsheets, or through the (in)famous “Black Book”.

Today, nearly every business, has centralized such records in a CRM. As a result, a business’ CRM is often the cornerstone of its most critical operations, and the CRM market is worth over $55 billion.

This change seemed to happen nearly overnight.

Why?

CRMs help businesses scale efficiently by aggregating the right information and providing the tools to do three things:

Measure

Understand

Respond

What does this shift mean for content?

Up until recently, not much.

Today, businesses still create and manage their content with PDFs and PowerPoints, on desktops or across multiple platforms, and the same challenges that once applied to customer relationship management still apply to content management.

In this state, content cannot be properly understood, managed, measured, or improved across the business.

Your CRM doesn't just collect data. It forms opinions that help drive the company towards the twin goals of centralization and standardization, and the benefits and opportunities that flow naturally from them.

Our content must evolve to reflect this shift, providing insights of its own, and matching the expectations of the customer at every step of their journey.

The implications of ignoring this opportunity are significant.

Using your CRM to send customers a PDF is like driving halfway to work in a Ferrari, but going the rest of the way on foot.

Is your company's content making the most of your CRM?

Yes. Our content is centralized, standardized, and personalized for every prospect and customer.
Kind of. Our content is all in one place, but it's not standardized or gathering insights on its own.
No. We have a long way to go.

Two Key Principles

Centralization

Standardization

CRMs provide businesses with the ability to achieve this goal by taking facts scattered around the world on various employee laptops and collecting them in a single location. In doing so, these facts are standardized within a single source, allowing data to be interpreted and acted upon efficiently.