As the business world moved from paper to computers in the 1970s, Customer Relationship Management [CRM] emerged as the new way of keeping and managing customers. Elaborate symposiums, corporate events, customer entertainment and business gifts were replaced by software. Today, thousands of companies, with millions of users, makes the CRM a multi-billion dollar industry. Good marketing has turned the CRM into software that is considered as essential to good business as an accounting system.

Mistakenly, the CRM also assumed the role of being the system that gets new customers too. This is only true if getting new customers does not involve procedural sales. If new customers are generated by brand awareness, brand ambassadors and customer desire, a well-used CRM will generate lots of take-it-or-leave-it sales to those customers. When it comes to procedural sales, all the CRM can do is generate leads and help to create awareness. Used correctly, the CRM can help build relationships, create brand awareness, and do lots of other interesting things for a business. But it won’t close a single procedural sale.

The CRM has a place in finding potential customers and keeping existing ones, but in procedural sales, the Deal Maker System is the system that produces consistent, measured and quantifiable sales results. If you are constantly looking for new customers, a CRM might help to find and keep them, but it is the Deal Maker System that turns them into customers.