What are the Effects of CRM and Social Selling Strategies in the Tech Industry?

Abstract

This thesis looks to dive into the effect of Customer Relationship Management software combined with Social Selling Strategies in tech companies. Showing how effective they are on sales, customer management and the performance of the sales teams inside tech companies. As digital transformation becomes a modern reality for all companies, it influences the effectiveness of customer relationships and the changes of the behavior of buyers. In response to this, companies in the tech industry are leveraging a more datadriven approach to have a more personalized outreach. The research will take on a qualitative approach, which uses a mix of semi-guided interviews and desk research to find the answers to the main question and to the later research questions of the study. Findings have shown that the usage of CRM and Social Selling Strategies together plays an important role in building a centralized database of all of the customers that a company has and how to personalize individual outreach, promoting loyalty among their customers and can look to generate a channel for better communication between both parties. Both tools together can foster a strong line of communication between the marketing and sales departments. For this to be the case, there needs to be a strong policy behind the usage of both of these tools, so that there are no gaps of information in the database. Another part of the findings that was worth highlighting, was to see how the integration of AI might lead to more automated processes inside a company and allow them to upgrade their software and their outreach to customers, by forming an built-in system that can make most of the tasks that would need to be manual, int automatic ones, allowing for sales teams to focus their working hours into other areas and look for more ways to leverage the company and find niches that might have been overlooked, since there was too much information for them to comb through. There were various challenges that came to light through the lifecycle of the study. The integration of these tools is not as simple and straight forward as it might seem, there must be extensive work done beforehand for it to be effectively integrated into a company’s current ecosystem. There was also a limited amount of information for how these tools affect the overall performance of companies in the tech industy, which led to limited points of view that could be used to gain a deeper understading of their effect in tech-industry companies.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tanja Spennlingwimmer (Supervisor)