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Survey Reveals Strong CRM Adoption among SMBs

Research firm ITIC recently announced the results of a survey which was commissioned by OSF Global Services, where small to mid-sized businesses are embracing CRM solutions and the percentage is higher than expected.

With an 86 percent majority of respondents, features and performance were the factors that mostly influenced their CRM purchasing decision. Salesforce, Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics, Sage and Sugar CRM are the most popular with survey participants among the larger CRM vendors. However, the combination of lesser known CRM brands plus homegrown CRMs outscored the larger CRM firms, the company stated in a press release.

This survey was notable for the in-depth and extensive user comments, according to ITIC Principal Laura DiDio. "Statistics can be made to say anything when viewed in isolation," she said.  "These C-level executives and IT managers were extremely forthcoming about what they liked and disliked regarding their CRM experiences. Their anecdotal responses were among the most thoughtful and detailed of any ITIC survey within the past three years.”

With an eye towards adoption, half of the survey respondents said they are analyzing requirements or evaluating (new or upgraded) CRM solutions. Another 20 percent said they plan to install a CRM solution within the next six to 12 months. While 26 percent of respondents revealed they do not currently use CRM, an equal number of the survey participants said they've used a CRM solution for over 10 years.

According to another report published by ITIC recently, Global IT executives rated technical service and support from Stratus Technologies (News - Alert) well ahead of IBM, HP and Dell. ITIC conducted its independent Web-based survey of 470 corporate IT and C-level executives worldwide from November 2010 through February 2011. The survey's objective was to poll executives on the reliability of 14 of the most popular server hardware platforms and 18 of the top server OS distributions.

Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.