CRM Reading Lounge: Useful DocumentsCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) Quotes
Here is a collection of CRM quotes for your enjoyment (and next CRM Management Report!)
(If your search for a CRM quotation (as in price) on a CRM software product landed you here inadvertently, try some of the small business CRM solutions showcased elsewhere on SmallbizCRM.)
CRM QUOTES:
“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” – Sam Levenson
“Prospecting – find the man with the problem.” – Ben Friedman
“Become the person who would attract the results you seek.” – Jim Cathcart
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” – Og Mandino
“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein
“Today is always the most productive day of your week.” – Mark Hunter
“Earn your success based on service to others, not at the expense of others.” H. Jackson Brown JR.
“The road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.” – John Madden
“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” – Shirley Chisholm
“Either run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn
“Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is” – Vince Lombardi
“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullsh*t story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” – Jordan Belford
“Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken
“Marketing is not promoting and selling services or products, it is how your business is seen from the customer’s point of view.” – Mac Duke
“But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” – Rocky, Rocky Balboa
“Customers are like teeth. Ignore them and they’ll go away.” – Jerry Flanagan, State Farm Agent
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” – Steve Jobs
“My sales objective is to get my prospects to look at my products the same way I look at bacon” – Kurt Mortensen
Confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.” –Tina Fey
“There’s never any guarantee that anyone will like you. So if anyone likes you at all, you’ve already won.” – Chelsea Handler
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” – Bruce Lee
“Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.” –Christopher Morley
“I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.” – Esteé Lauder
“Growth and comfort do not coexist.” – Ginni Rometty
“The harder you work, the luckier you get.” – Mike Adenuga
“Great salespeople are relationship builders who provide value and help their customers win.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
“Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one coming” – Richard Branson
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new” – Steve Jobs
“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.” – just get on.” – Sheryl Sandberg
“On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a millionaire” – Larry D. Turner
“Integrity is important in building relationships. And is the foundation upon which many other qualities for success are built, such as respect, dignity and trust.” – John C. Maxwell
“Don’t try to do everything by yourself, but try to connect with people and resources. Having that discipline and perseverance is really important.” – Chieu Cao
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein
“To give real service, you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.” – Don Alden Adams
“The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.” – Helen Keller, Author and Political Activist
“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.” – Lewis Carroll, Writer and Mathematician
What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today’s consumers, a mindset shift from telling to selling to building relationships.” – Jim Stengel
“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” – Howard Schultz
“One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” – Jim Rohn
“Advice is judged by results, not by good intentions.”– Cicero 106BC – 43-BC
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24-hour days.” – Zig Ziglar
“Marketing is not promoting and selling services or products, it is how your business is seen from the customer’s point of view.” – Mac Duke
“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.” – Kate Zabriskie, Founder Business Training Works
“Customers are like teeth. Ignore them and they’ll go away.” – Jerry Flanagan, State Farm Agent
“Sales without Customer Service is like stuffing money into a pocket full of holes.” – David Tooman, Customer Service Professional
“The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell
“CRM is your GPS to a better route on your Business Development journey.” – Bobby Darnell
“Always remember that your present situation is not your final destination. The best is yet to come.” – Zig Ziglar
“Always remember you are there to help your potential customers and to make their lives better. Not the other way around.” – David Ferguson, Managing Director at Babel Academy of English
“Ask questions, listen and take good notes. You’d be surprised what you can learn about how you can help a potential client. Using a CRM on every interaction will make sure you don’t miss a detail for the next time you touch base.” – Erik Cattelle, Chief Game Officer at RezEvents
“The single most important thing in sales is the number of very well-organized activities. Hence a good and easy-to-use CRM is a must.” – Greg GutKowski, Principal at 3Clicks
“Learning new systems and processes is not mandatory…but neither is staying in business” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Thomas Edison
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”– Bill Gates
“Every sale has five basic obstacles: No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” – Zig Ziglar
“If you can dream it, you can do it, – Enzo Ferrari
“The impact on an organisation can at times be subtle and distributed throughout the enterprise…Cost savings and productivity enhancements can be seen in saving a sales person 20 minutes per week in writing activity reports, or answering four times the volume of web-based service requests in the same amount of time.” – Mary Wardley, Vice-President of IDC’s CRM Applications Research.
“Yes, CRM is all about Customer Relationship Management…but it is also about Prospect Relationships as well.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle
“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” – Winston Churchill
“On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to automate for more sales efficiency is absolutely essential. In cases reviewed, sales increases due to advanced CRM technology have ranged from 10% to more than 30%.” – Harvard Business Review
“Saying, “I don’t have time for CRM.” is like saying, “I don’t have time to look at my GPS app because I am too busy trying to figure out the best way to get from here to there.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“The idea of CRM is that it helps businesses use technology and Human Resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers.” – Unknown
“When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.” – Zig Ziglar
“A business absolutely devoted to Customer Service Excellence will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”– Sir Henry Ford
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”– Peter Drucker
“We’ve spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we’ll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.”– Peter Drucker
“..The 17 leading SMB companies all declared they were doing more implementations now than in 2004, with eight of them handling at least 60 percent of customer implementations… Of the winning enterprise vendors all but one does 70 percent or more of its implementations in house… He notes that CRM implementation by vendors is a trend that he predicts will eventually reach 90 percent… CRM Award Winners Survey, March, 2005”– CRM guru, Barton Goldenberg
“Implementing a CRM system will do absolutely nothing for your business. However, the continued and effective use of it will.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures.” -Tom Peters
“The cost of retention is $180 per customer,” he says. “But most automotive dealerships are set up for customer acquisition – which is crazy when you consider the average cost of customer acquisition is $1,000 or more.”– Arthur Hughes, author of several books on using databases to enhance CRM.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”- Zig Ziglar
“Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume.”– American Management Association.
“Successful CRM is about competing in the relationship dimension. Not as an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price- but as a differentiator. If your competitors are doing the same thing you are (as they generally are), product and price won’t give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it’s a much stickier–sustainable–relationship over the long haul.”– Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corporation
“…. dissatisfied customers would tell between 7-10 people while a satisfied customer would recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends.”– PIMS
“..estimating all customer service problems would double profit growth over a five-year period.” – Ventura
“If you think implementing CRM costs too much…you are doing it wrong.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“80% of tradeshow leads are never followed up.” – Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR)
“The average time a sales representative spends on sales: 47%; on administrative tasks; 39%.”– Selling Power Magazine
“Percent of qualified telemarketing leads that have only marginal follow-up: 40%; that are never called 50%.” – LeadMaster
“1% of repeat purchases are made out of indifference and not out of loyalty.” – Industry analysts estimate
“If you think implementing CRM is expensive, you are doing it wrong.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
“Dissatisfied customers communicate with 7-10 people while a satisfied customer will recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends.”– PIMS
“The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers.”– Sir John Egan
“How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.” – Bill Gates
“Sorry Houston, but failure is an option.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
CRM Quotations continued…
Yet more famous CRM quotations & Definitions:
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, management consultants Frederick Reichheld and Earl Sasser estimate that “companies can boost profits by almost 100 percent by retaining just five percent more of their customers,” whether you are a Big Six accounting firm, Microsoft, or Olga’s Blintz and Borscht Parlor.
“Customer retention obviously has profound implications for all businesses:
Finding a new customer costs from three to seven times more than keeping an existing one, and for many large companies, up to 95% of profits come from long-term customers.” – Price Waterhouse Coopers
“CRM…because Business Development is a ‘Contact Sport’.” – Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville
On the over-use of the word “guru” by CRM consultants: “People use the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long”.
– Peter Drucker
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software refers to the applications that help organizations perform activities in three aspects: Operational, Collaborative, and Analytical. CRM softwares facilitate companies to efficiently gather customer information, capitalize customer buying behavior, and leverage technology investments by improving quality of sales and services.
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” – Peter Drucker
“This new customer-focus approach to business has evolved in the past few years, because retaining the customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one.” – Hong.
“The big benefit of CRM is the visibility of everything relating to customers going on in your company. If you want to provide a better service to your customer, you have to be able to manage everything from complaints to sales opportunities.”
–Roger Cole, CRM consultant at reseller CPiO
“..in general, small companies are latecomers to CRM, so they have the advantage of avoiding the early adopters’ mistakes.”
–SalesLogix Corporation
“70 to 90 percent of decisions not to repeat a purchase of anything are not about product or price. They are about some dimension of service.”– Barry Gibbons, former CEO, Burger King
15% of customers defect due to technical quality reasons; a further 15% leave because of price and the remaining 70% leave because contact from the old suppliers personnel was “poor in quality”.- Forum Corporation, Mass.
“Said another way, you can succeed with CRM by being SMART: Define a customer-centric Strategy; use appropriate Metrics ; ensure your organization is Aligned with your objectives; Redesign work processes as needed, and uses appropriate Technology tools as enablers. But it all starts by putting your customers first and creating a better relationship with them than your competitors offer.”– Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corporation
“CRM is rather boring in itself, It’s the fortune you can make using CRM that makes it so interesting.” Michael McCafferty
“You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.” – Patricia Fripp
“If you torture the data enough, they will confess.” – Ronald H. Coase, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Science
(submitted by Jessica Fish)
“Everyone lives by selling something.”– Robert Louis Stevenson
“I am the world’s worst salesman, therefore, I must make it easy for people to buy.” – F.W. Woolworth (1852-1919).
80% of all sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact. 15 years ago it took on average 2 – 4 contacts before concluding a sale.
–The National Association of Sales Executives
“But then you get to a point in your career where everybody around you gets results. It’s no longer a differentiator. The people who couldn’t get results peaked earlier and are in lower-level jobs. You’ve risen to a level where what differentiates people is RELATIONSHIPS. It’s political- who you know and how you know them – but it’s also about how well you use those relationships.”
Stephen B. Kincaid, Heidrick & Struggles’ Global Leadership Services
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. – Benjamin Franklin. (1706-1790)
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
–Albert Schweitzer
“I never worry about action, only inaction.”– Winston Churchill
“We have spent the last 10 years focusing on the T in IT and we’ll spend the next 30 years focusing on the i.” – Peter Druker
“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”– Vince Lombardi
If you have any CRM quotations you would like to contribute, please let us know! Your Marketing and Sales quotes are also welcome. Submit your CRM quotes here..