As the preceding example shows, a CRM strategy should be extended to the overall business strategy. A while back, I had a workshop with the business leaders of a company about CRM investment and CRM strategy, and the CEO of the company decided to be there for the first day as well.

The company's strategy was straightforward enough. It wanted to grow the business by 5% each year, increasing its market share by 5% year on year, and improving operational costs by 5% every year. If it should succeed with all these objectives, then the company would become the number one company in its market in five years based on actual data. This was the business strategy at the highest level and it needed to be broken down into business tactics.

I asked the CEO if it would be possible for him to share the business tactics plan with us. I wanted to know what specific steps and actions the company was taking to support the business strategy. Obviously, implementing CRM was not the only factor that could achieve this ambitious goal. There were other factors including people, processes, and infrastructure, but the chances were that CRM would be affecting other pillars as well, and the plan would help us to understand metrics and design solutions.

What follows is the plan the CEO shared with me:

Figure 1.4: The company's business tactics plan

The company was obviously taking a number of steps to innovate both the backend and the frontend applications and processes. It wanted to improve its business intelligence and infrastructure, in order to support the five-year growth plan.

Everyone in that workshop agreed that CRM was needed not only for improving the customer experience and managing the relationship with the clients as the first pillar, as shown in Figure 1.4, but also as the backbone of the business strategy to support almost all other pillars of that strategic plan. It would help the company in improving operational efficiency, business intelligence, agile application services, and more. CRM needed to integrate with all processes and include all people involved in the process of innovating the business in order to work.