An interview with Gabriel Gheorghiu: “One of the main benefits of CRM is that it provides a single source of the truth.”

Editor’s note: On a competitive CRM market, it is crucial not to get lost in the variety of solutions it is proposing. That is why the CRM experts’ thoughts and advices are so essential in making a choice. After all, the wrong tool can harm your business in the same way the proper software can enrich company’s development.

Today we present an interview with Gabriel Gheorghiu – CRM expert, software researcher, Oracle certified associate, consultant and analyst who focuses on business software and customer interactions. We will be talking about his work for Oracle, his creation – Questions Consulting and his CRM recommendations.

1. Which benefits the implementation of such software brings for the company?

One of the main benefits of CRM is that it provides a single source of the truth. Many companies use all kinds of tools, from spreadsheets to marketing automation or email, to manage relationships with customers but they are hard to integrate.

Another benefit is that a good CRM solution saves you time so you can focus on managing customers, not the system. It is estimated that sales people only spend 37% of their time selling which is partially because they waste a lot of time entering or updating data in their CRM solution.

2. Why did you choose Oracle platform to work with?

I wanted to learn database administration because databases are the core of any software solution. I chose Oracle because they provide the best databases and management tools that are being used by companies all over the world. Most cloud vendors actually use Oracle databases in their data centers.

3. Name new innovative solutions that you think are the most suitable for companies of any size.

One solution would be Nimble which is very different from traditional CRM because it was built to address social media challenges companies face when dealing with customers.
Another interesting solution I discovered recently is Salesbox CRM which uses artificial intelligence and agile processes to help users spend less time on administrative tasks and focus more on managing customers.

4. What is the main idea of the Questions Consulting and how business owners can benefit from its services?

My company focuses on two different types of customers: software vendors and companies looking for software. My offering for software vendors includes reports, case studies, webinars, etc. and I focus on SMB vendors who are not getting enough coverage and large marketing budgets to market themselves.
For software buyers, I rely on my experience with software selection to guide them through the selection process. Depending on their needs and budget, I can help with the entire selection process or just different stages of the like creating a demo, selecting a short list of vendors, looking for references, and more.

5. Can you share with our readers some innovative tech tools in this matter and give us a list of CRM solutions that lead in managing the projects?

I like that tools like Slack are becoming very popular but they need to be used separately from CRM. Some CRM vendors like Zoho tried to include project or task management features in their offering, but these features aren’t always very good.
In my opinion, a company that needs strong CRM and project management features will probably have to buy and use two different solutions. (and I’m not the only one to think this.

[Related Article: The Best Marketing Automation Software & Platform]

6. Can you make some assumptions on the future of a CRM market and business software ecosystem on the whole?

The CRM market is dominated by only a few vendors, which is not good for customers in my opinion. I would like to see more vendors challenging the leaders. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen since the large vendors also have big budgets for research and development or acquisitions. I see the same trend in pretty much all other markets, from ERP to HR, supply chain or PLM.
Another important trend is the multi-cloud concept which basically means that companies are adopting more than one cloud solutions, mostly because they can’t find everything they need in one solution. This usually means that companies will use separate solutions for ERP or CRM, but medium or large companies may end up using two or more solutions for CRM only. For instance, they could be using a solution for marketing automation, another one for contact and lead management, and maybe even a third for customer service. Even when all these solutions are in the cloud, using them together can be a challenge.

We’d like to thank Gabriel for his useful insights, personal recommendations of CRM solutions and thoughts on the future of the CRM market. We are sure that these answers will help our readers to establish an innovational vision of their customer service.

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