Customer relationship management has become the marketing buzzword of the last two decades with business-to-business companies jumping into it, many without really being sure of what they hope to achieve. and often being disappointed with the results. Gummesson (2004) describes CRM as “the values ​​and strategies of relationship marketing, with a particular emphasis on customer relationships, transformed into a practical application”. CRM has become a necessity for successfully and profitably managing customers and a company's relationships with them, with the market reaching a value of approximately $11.5 billion in 2002. (Xu et al. 2002). However, despite these significant expenses, it is estimated that 70% of CRM implementations fail. (Xu et al. 2002). There are a number of reasons for these failures, such as failure to implement it across the organization and resistance from employees. But in certain cases, the buyer-seller relationship does not deserve a collaborative type relationship; the client can only demand a transactional relationship. This is why I believe that CRM should not always be the core of B2B marketing. Many companies adopt CRM technologies because that's what their competitors are doing, without specifying exactly what they hope to get out of it. Many don't realize that they are already implementing basic CRM practices, without relying on expensive systems like Oracle or Siebel. Gummesson (2004) points out that the behavior of the classic industrial salesperson in many successful companies was the same as that advocated in relationship marketing, CRM and key account management, such as working for the long term and not evaluating customers in terms of annual profit. , targeting “customer share” and not market share. IBM was doing this in the 1960s, long before the term CRM was used. In the 1980s, successful Japanese companies emerged as leaders in modern management techniques, with strong relationships with suppliers, enabling them to produce higher quality products and at a faster rate. than their American and European counterparts. (Ehret, 2004) Their business model focused on economies of scope, as opposed to economies of scale. Industrial companies realized they needed to manage buyer-seller relationships in order to manage cross-functional and cross-organizational processes that would allow them to become more flexible. Today's CRM systems are large, multifunctional systems that allow businesses to manage multiple elements of relationships. with their customers. Xu et al. (2002) propose the four characteristics of CRM as: