xRM is the natural evolution of CRM

xRM is the natural evolution of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Over a decade ago it started with a rolodex. Then someone decided to create a software version of a rolodex which led to contact managers and personal information managers. As people and companies began to see and feel the tremendous value that these tools were bringing, they wanted more. This incessant appetite to always want more, track more, do more, report on more, created the CRM industry which has been going strong for about a decade.

About five years ago we started evangelizing the concept of doing much more than simply managing and tracking customer relationships. It was clear that companies and people are all very unique and forcing them to adapt and work to something that was designed without intricately knowing them (people/companies) was a very tall order. Furthermore, if and when CRM was successfully deployed and companies began leveraging a common database, they again started wanting more than the application was designed to do. They no longer wanted to simply manage customer relationships; they wanted the ability to manage anything. This has evolved into what is referred to as xRM.

The x being the mathematical variable x which can be anything. Transpose the x for the C in CRM and you get xRM, i.e., anything relationship management.