That's me in the corner That's me in the spotlight Losing my religion Trying to keep up with you.

R.E.M., "Losing My Religion"

It's all about the customer, stupid! Common sense? Perhaps in the naivete of the MBA classroom, or maybe the glazed-over eyes of the customer facing salespeople who adapt to customers on a daily basis. Hearing the voice of the customer, listening to the customer, creatively selling and delivering customer value, and being responsive to the customer are catch phrases in the rhetoric of those espousing market orientation and customer relationship management (CRM) as fundamental tenets of business success in today's "hypercompetitive" business world. Yet success in designing an organizational strategy built to serve desirable customers; developing an organizational-level business approach to serve these customers; generating a customer-centric culture that believes in the value of customer services, loyalty, and retention; and executing against a set of customer value promises is challenging and problematic. Furthermore, while CRM software companies, such as Siebel Systems, hawk their wares metaphorically in terms of their ability to sustain customer relationships similar to the old time barber or watchmaker, the reality is that developing an enterprise-level, standardized, and scalable CRM approach, even in the barbershop or watchmaker worlds, is messy once one moves beyond the single customer, single barber (or watchmaker) context.

What has this to do with the lyrics and melodies of REM? Successful CRM models, in the views of such respected CRM gurus as Patricia Seybold and Martha Rogers, require the adoption of a holistic view of the customer. Or, as Regis McKenna argues, marketing becomes everyone's job in the organization.

Adopting a customer orientation at the firm level fundamentally changes the respective roles of marketing and sales, as well as the nature of their relationships (see also Moorman and Rust 1999; Srivastiva, Shervani, and Fahey 1999). Literally, what is indicated is that the selling company as a whole, not simply the sales force, must operate on a one-to-one basis with customers. To push our religion metaphor a little too far perhaps, sales personnel will no longer be alone in the spotlight with customers or tactically in the corner of implementing a marketing strategy conceived in the home-office cathedral of marketing.

We developed the call for papers for the JPSSM CRM Special Issue with the notion in mind that the emerging enterprise-level perspective on CRM, in conjunction with our old-world religion of focusing our academic research on sales-person performance and sales management issues, indicated a need for new conceptual models and empirical research concerning CRM strategies, business processes, and technology applications. In the call for papers, we stressed the need for academic research that focuses on CRM and its applications in sales-intensive contexts, or in contexts in which the selling function plays an important role in the CRM model. With this general idea in mind, we generated what we thought were an intriguing set of plausible research topics, including:

* Conceptual models and empirical research concerning CRM or sales force automation (SFA) adoption and use at the organizational level (perhaps including social exchange, transactional cost, agency theory).

* Key success factors influencing the success or failure of CRM or SFA adoption at the organizational or departmental levels.

* Stages of CRM or SFA evolution in market-driven firms, including normative and descriptive model perspectives on the risk/reward trade-off among application versus enterprise-level adoption decisions.

* Customer management versus CRM approaches to CRM or SFA in transactional and consultative selling contexts, respectively.

* Building transactional and one-to-one (or organization-to-organization) relationships using CRM processes and technology in consumer (or business-to-business [B2B]) sales contexts.

* Building CRM or SFA knowledge management linkages in relationship or strategic partner exchange contexts.

* New models of the organization or sales force roles under alternative CRM strategies and practices in B2B markets.

* CRM strategic processes and technologies to support strategic account management and customer-focused team requirements.

* Capturing salespersons' explicit and tacit knowledge in CRM and knowledge management systems, including cognitive and motivational perspectives on knowledge acquisition, representation, and sharing.

* Novel cognitive and motivational models of CRM or SFA user adoption (including salesperson and sales manager acceptance and use).

* Low-technology models of CRM strategy, including strategic issues in developing and competing using a salesperson-centric ("talent-based") CRM model in an increasingly technological world.

* Direct marketing and selling applications in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts, including personalization, customer lifetime value, experimentation, tracking, profitability, scoring, and cross-selling/ up-selling.

* Conceptual and empirical studies of Clam and SFA effectiveness in multiple channel sales contexts (including when the customer prefers to use multiple channels).

* Role of sales force and cross-functional performance evaluation systems and compensation in driving CRM and SFA success or failure.

* Effects of CRM use and system qualities on sales force effectiveness, satisfaction, and turnover.

* Linkages of CRM to supply chain management (SCM) and partner relationship management (PRM) models in B2B markets.

* Customer lifetime value and customer profitability' analyses in sales force--intensive contexts.

* Valuing the salesperson and his or her customer capital from a CRM perspective.

* Measuring return on investment (ROI) or net present value of investments in operational CRM or SFA systems (including data warehousing, SFA processes, and SFA technology).

In retrospect, we realize it is much easier to identify a potential topic and describe it in two lines or less than it is to write even just a one-page or less abstract, let alone a 20-page paper. So, while we stand by the plausibility of the topics above, please do not ask us to write a field exam answer or an abstract on any one of them. As an aside, each of us is wrestling with at least one of these issues and hopes to share our ideas with you at a later date.

We would like to reiterate our view that enterprise-level perspectives on the customer, in particular at a one-to-one marketing level, fundamentally change the roles of marketing and sales, as well as the nature of their relationship. Achieving an integrated CRM perspective for a firm embeds the sales force in a "closed-loop" CRaM model perhaps captured at a very generic level in Figure 1. This figure places the customer at the center of the CRM model and suggests that the firm's success is dictated by the degree to which the firm is willing and able to define and implement a right customer [right arrow] right strategy [right arrow] right organization [right arrow] right channel [right arrow] right people [right arrow] right rewards success model. The upper half of this enterprise-level CRM model involves what is often referred to as analytical CRM processes, or the firm-level processes involved in analyzing customer- and market-level information in order to define strategic marketing, CRM, service, and go-to-market strategies and metrics. The lower half of the model is what is often referred to as operational CRM, or the specification of the suitable and replicable business processes designed to complement a customer's access and interaction model at the one-to-one customer level. The model is a closed loop in the important sense that the customer's experience from all touch points must be integrated through the data warehousing and intelligence system to drive customer learning and customer relationships over time.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Academic research by "sales researchers" who seek to examine sales force and sales management--related issues in a CRM world need to adopt an enterprise-level, systems-related view of the sales force role. Historically, the selling function has been considered to be tactical, that is, the sales force implemented the marketing plan (and implicitly the CRM plan) as they represented the firm to customers and produced revenue--Kotler (1977) notes, marketing "planned" and sales "executed" (often counterinteractively to the marketing plan). To the chagrin of key customers, disconnects between marketing and sales often resulted. Adopting an enterprise-level perspective clearly alters the nature of the marketing and sales linkage in significant strategic and tactical ways that largely are yet to be explored by academic researchers.

It is in this context that many of the research topics that constituted our original call for papers begin to make better sense. We sincerely hope that our call for papers, and the papers published as a result of the call, influences the future research directions of the sales academy. Our distinction as an academy might in Fact be based on a coherent perspective on CRM in sales force--intensive contexts, or when the sales force really matters in the context of the customer's value expectations and the firm's go-to-market strategy.

The JPSSM CRM Special Issue call generated a total of 21 paper submissions. The final acceptance list includes the four papers briefly overviewed below.* Due to timing issues, two other papers were moved to the JPSSM regular issue review process, and, depending on the outcome of those reviews, may be published in JPSSM later. The Guest Editors thank all the authors who submitted manuscripts for their efforts and patience during the review process. We wish each author success in his or her future CRM research endeavors.

The challenges associated with meeting our Special Issue call are many and are not always obvious. If we are to study the enterprise, new methods will need to be developed, as will new theories and different ways of thinking about sales. The four papers in this Special Issue represent solutions to some of the challenges. Frederick Hong-kit Yim, Rolph Anderson, and Srinivasan Swaminathan identify a set of four requisite activities for effective CRM implementation and empirically assess the CRM structure of these activities and the downstream effects on CRM outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, and sales growth. The empirical research was conducted in Hong Kong using a large sample of service-related firms. The results indicate that the strategy and process aspects dominate the effect of CRM technology in explaining customer and sales performance outcomes.

As an example of new conceptual approaches, Alex Zablah, Danny Bellenger, and Wesley Johnston present a conceptual model examining how process-technology, technology-employee, and employee-process gaps in CRM application programs may drive cognitive dissonance concerning CRM technology adoption. The focal construct is innovation-related cognitive dissonance (ICD). The relationship of ICD to technology assimilation is examined, and antecedents to ICD are articulated in terms of" the three gaps mentioned previously.

Implementing an interesting method to study technology usage, Michael Ahearne, Narasimhan Srinivasan, and Luke Weinstein examine the effect of CRM technology use on objective sales performance results. These authors note that an implicit assumption of prior research concerning technology adoption is that adoption and usage of the technology drives sales performance. In particular, the implicit assumption of a linear, monotonic relationship between technology use and performance is examined in an empirical study in the context of the adoption of a leading CRM technology provider by a top pharmaceutical firm. The results indicate that performance is, on average, enhanced by technology use. However, the effect is curvilinear, and, hence, employee use of the technology must be carefully managed by sales management.

Dong-Gil Ko and Alan Dennis examine the relationship between salesperson use of a knowledge-based SFA system and sales performance. SFA system use was found to be directly related to sales performance in that greater use by a salesperson of the knowledge system documents made available improved the likelihood of the achievement of sales quotas. Moreover, expertise in the sense of prior-year quota achievement moderated the effects of SFA system use on sales performance. This latter moderator effect calls for process-driven research to explore the cost caused by which expertise translates into sales performance.

As we said, the challenges are many. These papers represent a solid start to addressing those challenges, but we hope it is just a start. We thank Greg Marshall, editor of JPSSM, and, again, we thank the authors and reviewers for their support of this CRM Special Issue.

* A fifth paper, by Plouffe, Williams, and Leigh was processed separately entirely through the regular JPSSM review process because one of the coauthors is a Special Issue Guest Editor.--Ed.

REFERENCES

Kotler, Philip (1977), "From Sales Obsession to Marketing Effectiveness," Harvard Business Review, 55, 6 (November-December), 1-9.

Moorman, Christine, and Roland T. Rust (1999), "The Role of Marketing," Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue), 180-197.

Srivastiva, Rajendra J., Tasadduq A. Shervani, and Liam Fahey (1999), "Marketing, Business Processes, and Shareholder Value: An Organizationally Embedded View of Marketing Activities and the Discipline of Marketing," Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue), 168-179.

Thomas W. Leigh (DBA, Indiana University), Professor of Marketing and Tanner Chair in Sales Management, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, tleigh@terry.uga.edu.

John E Tanner Jr. (Ph.D., University of Georgia), Professor of Marketing, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, jeff_tanner@baylor.edu.