State of Customer Relationship Management: The Canadian Report 2010
Final Remarks

CRM plays a vital role in the commercialisation of manufactured goods and services. It is a critical process utilized by firms to manage and develop their relationships with current and potential customers. To maximize benefits from innovative CRM processes and activities, individual firms should develop their own specific business cases and action plans consisting of a long–term vision, KPIs, return on investment targets and project time frames.

Overall, the CRM process is an integral business function both within CRM users and their service providers employing 502,000 workers and accounting for $116 billion in investment in the manufacturing, wholesale, retail, finance and insurance, and logistics and transportation sectors.

The BiC analysis identifies specific CRM processes including skills development, innovation, technology adoption and KPI measurements implemented by BiC firms. BiC firms distinguish themselves by improving average deal size, average annual customer revenue, sales cycle time, time to quota, and sales administration time.

The findings in this report present important linkages between commercialisation, investment in CRM, innovation, skills development, and resulting business benefits. These connections can help inform a continued dialogue across businesses, governments and academia. This report also sets the stage for those interested in commercialisation and CRM trends to pursue new research and analysis opportunities.