Fiction! There are plenty of papers written on CRM solutions that enable companies to eliminate their agencies. But this presumes that all your agency provides is online materials, eblasts, enewsletters and updates some Web content.
Having a CRM solution actually enables a company to use a marketing partner more strategically and surgically. Much waste in advertising and marketing comes from guessing at statistics on the customer or prospect group. Guess work costs money and the answers are usually provided by people who may not even know your customers day to day challenges intimately.
Take advantage of what the CRM system know about your customers: who opens messages, which things they open, which things they click through on, which ones buy, and so on. Having a quick snapshot of this information can be invaluable to creating a theme, key messages, and a high impact campaign with tools that carry the sales person all the way from initial inquiry, through the buying consideration process, to contract and closing.
