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Writer's pictureKatharina Krus

Just take the best of each! Customer Relationship Management.

Just take the best of each and increase customer relationship management!

Business dealThat customer relationship management goes far beyond the is a truism. After all, a well-maintained CRM system only fulfills its actual function afterwards: Now the work on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty begins.


This is where sales staff and customer service come in. They can turn customers into loyal fans who recommend the company and buy from it again and again. A CRM system helps with re-selling, cross-selling and up-selling. With the help of the collected customer data and a robust customer support, good retention marketing is created, which improves your customer relationship management.

The problem: CRM and indirect sales structures

The problem with customer relationship management starts when a company mainly uses indirect sales structures. Because no sales partner is really motivated to play back data from the customer into the manufacturer's CRM. Why should they?

While supervisors can exert pressure in direct sales, this means of exerting pressure is largely absent in indirect sales.

The solution for indirect sales and better customer relationship management:

Unless you trade leads for sales call information: The sales partner only gets new leads if he can prove that he really processes them. If he actually does, the next question arises: How is this data played back into the CRM by the partner? Manually? By telephone? And by whom?

This results in the need for a platform that is not a classic CRM system but fulfills a similar function. And which both sales partners (resellers, system houses, specialist dealers) and internal sales staff can access.

At the beginning, many of our customers asked themselves: Isn't customer relationship management in the digital age also possible with a completely conventional CRM system that is expanded to include the "indirect sales" aspect? In theory, yes. But only at the price of an enormous, years-long and, above all, costly programming effort. Why is that?



Why Best of Breed is the right choice for your customer relationship management

The reason is obvious: If, as a customer, you ask a CRM manufacturer to build a complete CRM system that also takes indirect sales channels into account, you usually get software where the customer has to adapt to certain predefined work processes and procedures. This is the so-called "best-of-suite" solution.

Companies that use a modular platform for their customer relationship management in the digital age take a different approach. You can build anything on this platform - very much like Lego - perfectly adapted to your individual wishes and company processes! This is the best-of-breed solution. Here, the customer looks for the best application available on the market for each issue.


Der Vorteil ist: Die Lösungen müssen nicht erst programmiert werden, es gibt sie bereits. Man muss sie nur mithilfe von Schnittstellen „aufeinander pfropfen“.

Imagine building a highway. One person hires a single road construction company to build the entire stretch from start to finish. (Best of Suite). The other hires several counties to each build a piece of the highway to run through their area (Best of Breed). The advantage in the second case:Everyone can build a section of the highway at the same time and then link the different sections together. The time required is much less.


What theory says, practice confirms: Surely one or the other of you remembers the Lidl case from July 2018: The company buried its 500 million euro, highly complex merchandise management system project after seven years. The contractor at the time was a single software company. A classic case of the failure of a best-of-suite project.Your leadtributor team for better customer relationship management

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