There’s an interesting story from SoftwareAdvice.com about the origin of ACT!, the first contact management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Apparently, they started out making a quote management system with a lot more features. Then they realized what people really needed was simply contact management.
The moral of the story?
We made it too complicated, and in that effort, were blind to the realization that elegance comes from simplicity.
How simple?
Every one of the major software categories has only two words—that’s all it takes to describe it.
3 thoughts on “How Did CRM Software Begin?”
Very interesting. How many CRMs are “truly” simple these days? Sometimes basic Contact Management is all a company uses a CRM for anyway. A huge feature set of bells & whistles can actually hinder CRM adoption.
Indeed! It makes me wonder “Why” — Why do do clients have multi-page RFI’s for CRM? Why do all the CRM software come so loaded with features that most users say they won’t use? Is the clients? The vendors? The business models? Or the technology?
First – there was “Gold Mine”… not ACT!
Then, the issue was company data base, and not personal contact list…
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