What’s the deal with post-pandemic CRM?

This week:

• What’s the deal with post-pandemic CRM?

• How to Win GenAI and Influence People

• Just one more AI tool, I swear!

Stat of the Week

Post-pandemic’s way more IRL, but CRM’s just fine

Those sweatpants days may have flown, but the SaaS that let us WFH… lives on.

According to Gartner Research, CRM sales software had a glow-up last year, pulling in $20.1 billion. That's 16.2% growth, if you’re counting.

True, true, that’s a slip from 17.3% in 2021. But chill and hear me out.

2021 was “not normal”—it was like a bungee cable snapping back from tense 2020 (10.9% growth). All told, things look good.

Some other stats from the 2022 year-in-review:

• CRM’s five biggest players hogged just over half the market—100s of other vendors competed for the slightly smaller slice

• North America flexed a muscle-y 60.8% market share, overshadowing Western Europe’s still-respectable 20.9%

If 2021 was a waltz, and 2022 was a jig, then will 2023 witness the “return of The Charleston”?

The Week @ CRM.org

What is CRM? It’s like a data club where customer info goes to mingle. Eck, don’t like that analogy? Then check this authoritative article.

Best Contact Management Software. Because in sales, knowing Aunt Betsy's cat's name might be useful.

Best Real Estate CRM. Houses usually don't come looking for you—but with CRM, buyers might!

How to Win Generative AI and Influence People

Remember that one uncle, always telling tales at family gatherings?

That’s GenAI on a bad day. It can do wonders, but it's also prone to fibs and misguided gibberish.

According to a new guide from the Harvard Business Review, our impulse “shouldn’t be to avoid the technology” based on its lyin’ cheatin’ ways, but rather to “safeguard against that danger.”

Solutions? Multi-level LLMs or pair 'em with another system. Google's Bard, for example, now writes code for straight answers. Let’s not forget the old-school 'Human Check' either.

To demo the power of human agent-genAI synergy, a Stanford-MIT team paired with an anonymous software giant.

For the project, LLM was fused with a machine learning system of “in-context learning.” This was applied to deaden the risk of “confabulations” (i.e., wrong responses that sound reasonable).

AI, playing Cyrano, whispered smooth lines to chat agents, who could either dazzle customers with automated wit or wing it. In other words, human failsafe was built in.

After a 7-week pilot, 1,500+ agents adopted the system.

Here’s what happened two months in:

• Hourly resolved issues and number of chats jumped nearly 15%

• The slowest 20% of agents got a caffeine-like jolt, improving their hourly resolutions by 35%

ALL CAPS rage also declined precipitously (not kidding).

And that’s good news. Because generative AI might be the steam engine of our era, but it’s best not to get too steamed.

One more AI tool (via Pipedrive)

Picture this: You're about to make a sales pitch of dubious value, when all of a sudden a tiny virtual friend whispers, “Hey, focus on this deal; it's hotter than summer in New York!”

No, that’s not an obscenely dated reference to “The Great Gazoo”—it’s the idea behind Pipedrive’s new AI-powered Sales Assistant.

Over 60% of Pipedrive users are already aficionados of the Sales Assistant, so why not get some AI in the mix.

The assistant, currently in beta, gives pointers on win probability and deal velocity. If you want, you can keep tabs on the whole team's performance too. Plus, there’s snazzy Sales Inbox and AI-powered app recommendations.

So, if you ever wished your CRM was a bit more like a psychic sidekick…

This Week’s Deal 🎁

Get HubSpot CRM for free!

Tasty Tidbits

CRM blips from around the web

SugarCRM sales automation goes farmcore. Yep, NZ agriculture co. Catalyst Performance Agronomy is using the app.

DevRev announces custom LLM and analytics for their OneCRM platform. The announcement came at DevRev’s first-ever user conference, Effortless (held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Cali).

Buffini & Company made a pitch for Real Estate CRM use. It seems post-pandemic housing market challenges might be helped by you-know-which three-letter acronym.

Braze Torchie Awards announced. One of the customer engagement awards went to the Senior Director of CRM Ops. at Warner Bros. Discovery.

Stocks of the Week

^{*Figures are for the previous week (10/16/23-10/20/23), price calculated at close of markets on Friday, October 20th. We look at publicly listed CRM-related vendors only. This is not financial advice, and we make no claims on the accuracy of these figures.}