The development and diffusion of customer relationship management (CRM) intelligence in business-to-business environments

• Firms’ wide use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems has accumulated massive customer data libraries.
• CRM data libraries are generally in the form of sophisticated relational databases.
• Managers have frequently ignored or poorly utilized the data in CRM libraries for development of market strategies.
• A poor understanding of this data, combined with poor data management, is responsible for limited managerial application of CRM data.
• There are ways for managers to guide the development of processes and tools to utilize CRM data for sophisticated market analysis.

CRM data is among the most important and comprehensive information available to management in many organizations. This is particularly the case in business-to-business marketing, where the firm's extended working relationship with its customers is frequently crucial for the maintenance of a healthy business. However, in many instances management has treated CRM data as highly specific to its client relationships and has therefore neglected to analyze this information across market segments, customer categories, and customer–firm relationship forms in order to draw meaningful conclusions for driving business decisions.The authors present a method for effectively classifying CRM information in ways that may help guide management decisions. This can lead to an improved understanding of the in-forming process in the firm's dealings with its clients, the directionality of customer–firm decision-making, the key decision drivers across deals, and the historical record of the firm's relationship with its customers. The end result will be an improved use of valuable historical information for establishing competitive strategies and the related programs and policies for retaining and growing the firm's customer base and other elements of the firm's value delivery network.