Doing business is less of a buy/sell and more of a relationship thing.
There are various businesses who do the buy/sell kind of business and spend quite some amount of money trying to get newer customers, so, their cost/customer is very high.

Typically, PUSH is the word in these kinds of organizations. These feed on the hope of new customers being pushed the product each time. This is not scalable.

Slowly PULL is the way relationships are happening ie the seller is actually trying to PULL customers his side and indulge in a long and sincere relationship. This makes the relation symbiotic. Most of the time, we buy based on emotion and this further helps the cause. Since this is an emotion-based selling, the cost/customer is low. The propensity of the customer to buy more from the same folks from whom he had bought last time and with whom he shares a good rapport is very high. This results in reduction of the cost per customer aquisition. In these cases, the potential of upselling and cross-selling is very high.

Sales becomes the by-product in this case and is the reward in its own right.

All the above you knew anyway, so what is news?

The news is this :- A good CRM works on the ability to capture the meta-data present in the relationship. Once you capture that, you have to mine it to see the gems that lie within. And then, you have a long relationship with the customer which results in WIN-WIN for both.

So try and figure out what all you need to capture when you consider using the CRM. Begin with the end in mind [or at least whatever extent the end is visible that is ...]

Archie