Press Release

Manchester, N.H. — January 22, 2013 — Scribe Software, the leader in CRM data integration, today announced the results of a new industry study focused on the state of CRM in the Small Business (SMB) sector, and top SMB IT pain points and areas of investment in 2013. Over 300 respondents from among Scribe’s channel partners, systems integrators, customers and prospects provided feedback and insights in late November/ early December of 2012.

Highlights from the report include:

1. CRM has become a critical business system for SMBs - SMBs are increasingly savvy in their use of Marketing, Analytics, and Forecasting:
   • SMBs use their CRM for the management of prospect and customer contact information (94%), lead nurturing (65%), email marketing (59%), and sales forecasting (59%).
   • SMBs look to their CRM to store all prospect and customer information in one place (85%), provide capabilities to easily share data between departments (77%), report on the health of their sales pipeline (64%), and to run marketing reports (53%).
   • SMBs report seamless data integration between Marketing and Sales (59%); Marketing and Finance (39%); Finance and Sales (38%).
      
2. The biggest IT challenge faced by SMBs today lies in data quality and data integration:
   • SMBs are seriously challenged in their ability to share critical financial data on prospects and customers with the rest of the business:
   • Only 40% of SMBs report seamless prospect data sharing between finance and sales, and finance and marketing. An additional 60% still report struggles on their journey to seamless data sharing.
   • 43% report seamless customer data sharing between finance and sales, and 41% between finance and marketing, and finance and customer service.
   • The methods SMBs use to achieve data integration are inadequate with only 18% reporting marketing data as being fully automated with their CRM.
   • The lack of automated marketing data integration poses reporting challenges for SMBs– 52% find marketing reporting and 44% indicate sales reporting to be somewhat or very challenging.
      
3. 2013 will be about investing in SMB marketing:
   • SMBs will invest in virtual events and conference platforms (24%), email (16%) and sales compensation platforms (11%).
      
4. SMBs report the CRM is owned by IT in 64% of cases, followed by Sales (10%), Operations (10%), Marketing (8%), and other departments at 8%. SMBs also largely report continued on-premise instances of CRM, in 66% of cases. An additional 34% of SMBs report cloud-based CRM systems. CRM Ownership Type of CRM System Used
   
   Reported CRM Systems in Use: Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and CRM Online, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, Zoho, and NetSuite
    
5. When it comes to staying up to date with IT and CRM news and trends, SMBs use multiple sources – main technology media, including InformationWeek, TechNet, CRM Magazine, CIO.com, ComputerWeek, ZDNet and eWeek, leads as their top source, followed by vendor resources (websites, blogs, webinars), industry newsletters and blogs, social media, and conferences.

To access the complete report, please visit CRM Integration for SMBs 2012 Report page.

About This Report:

• 306 respondents
• Survey fielded late November, early December of 2012