Today, the CRM marketplace is saturated by products from numerous companies like HubSpot, Zoho, SAP, Oracle, and many others. Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM achieved rapid success and dominated the decade. One of the first examples was the Siebel Sales Handheld, launched in 1999.įrom the early 2000s until now, the industry has seen an explosion of technology and the proliferation of software providers. Around the same time, CRM systems emerged as online SaaS products. The term “CRM” was likely first coined in 1995 by the Gartner Group.

The 90s saw the birth of sales force automation, pioneered by technologist Tom Siebel. Developed by Conductor Software, Activity Control Technology (ACT) was initially created for manufacturing industries to track customer and prospect details in one centralized location. In the late 80s, contact management software was introduced as the first form of database marketing. In the 1960s, the first digital systems emerged in the form of massive mainframe systems. The Rolodex, invented by Danish engineer Hildaur Neilsen, was a flip-through desk tool containing written customer information, much like a diary. The first mainstream customer management systems emerged in the 1950s. Businesses and technology have seen these tools evolve from Rolodexes and mainframe systems into fully automated AI-powered software platforms. CRM systems have come a long way in the last seven decades.

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