What Is CRM in 2025? 13 Senior Executives from Leading Industry Vendors Share Their Definitions

What is your definition of CRM in 2025?  That's what we asked 13 industry executives during the annual CRM Playaz "What is CRM" convo series at the end of the year.  Their responses are in the short clip below.  Participants include (in order of appearance):

• Clint Oram - Cofounder and chief strategy officer, SugarCRM.
• David Singer - global vice president of go-to-market strategy, Verint.
• Adam Justis - senior director of product marketing, Adobe Experience Cloud.
• Anthony Leaper - senior vice president of Sales and Service Cloud Product Management, SAP.
• Vijay Sundaram - chief strategy officer, Zoho.
• John Taschek - chief market strategy officer, Salesforce.
• Jason Miller - chief evangelist  and digital leader, Creatio.
• Rob Pinkerton - senior vice president, Oracle CX
• Terence Chesire - vice president of product management for customer and industry workflows for service, ServiceNow.
• Tara DeZao - product marketing director for AdTech and MarTech, Pegasystems.
• John Bruno - vice president of strategy, PROS.
• Johann Wrede - chief marketing officer, UserTesting.
• Michelle Couture - global product marketing lead for customer experience, Zoom.

Edited Transcript

Paul Greenberg: What is your definition of CRM (not the formal definition of CRM)?

Clint Oram: For me it's the same that it's always been. I'm looking for a personal assistant for my customers. A personal assistant for my employees. I'm looking for CRM to tell me what I don't already know, To tell me what to do next and then go do the easy things for me.

David Singer: I think about CRM as being the art, science and practice of continually elevating your customer or consumer experiences through their entire journey. There's a lot of technology involved and critical to it, but it's really an overarching philosophy and practice that has to be executed throughout an organization to continually elevate that relationship through experience.

Adam Justis: Change one letter in that acronym. We spend a lot of time thinking about CXM (Customer Experience Management). I think of CRM as the capacity to appreciate the state of being between a customer and your attempt to facilitate that experience management.

Anthony Leaper: It is about leveraging every piece of information and knowledge you can capture in a meaningful manner to exceed the expectations of the customer at the point you interact.

Vijay Sundaram: I think of a simple statement that Peter Drucker made multiple decades ago. He said the goal of a business is to create and keep a customer. So I think of CRM as essentially that. It is the enabler of a primary goal of a business. I don't think that has changed.

John Taschek: It's to make the LA RAMs successful.

Brent Leary: All right show's over. That's all we need.

 John Taschek: It's ultimately to make the customer successful, and before that to make the individual successful inside the company.

 Jason Miller: Holistically I think it is an approach that is both systemic and brings the emotional human intervention side to how we deal with our customers. But it's ultimately up to us to enable our employees to be able to better engage with those customers.

Rob Pinkerton: I asked ChatGPT what it thought the answer to your question was. It just shot out 500 words of absolute garbage. I'll make a super simple answer of my own.

 CRM is 3 things, that's what it is for us. It helps our customers win their customers' business, keep those customers happy, and find more happy customers like the ones they already have.

Terence Chesire: It's the systems, processes, and people so organizationS can make offers and support when customers choose to engage. It's much more important to deliver on what that customer then requires. It's not just the offer, it's everything to get it done, Because they weren't reaching out just to hang out and chat with you.

Tara DeZao: Adding value to the life of your prospects and customers throughout their entire life cycle with you every day across all channels.

John Bruno: CRM is the approach and the business processes that support some key activities around targeting acquiring servicing retaining and collaborating with customers. Technology becomes a fundamental requirement, but if you're not focused on the strategy, on the approach, on the business processes, it's not going to matter anyways.

Johann Wrede: It's the system of record for every interaction with the customer that we use to then create the next interaction with the customer.

Michelle Couture: Honestly, I think I am in alignment with what John and Johann said. I think it is definitely something that is the heart of what we're looking at and doing.  I see it as a great repository for understanding key touch points and attributes and all of the different things we need, Especially from a marketing perspective, about a customer.