Strategy

5 Places Customer Relationships Go to Die
June 14, 2013

Building a customer relationship -- the kind that lasts a long time -- is a not an easy thing. There are lots of occasions where things can go awry, touch points where signals can get crossed and communications that can unwittingly turn a customer off. In a lot of cases, the conclusion is triggered by something the business does that brings the relationship to a premature end.

How's Your Mistake Process Management?
June 06, 2013

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many. We don't like to envision ourselves as vulnerable to making mistakes.

CRM Vendors Are the Worst CRM Practitioners
May 31, 2013

I've worked as a journalist covering CRM, and I've worked with vendors trying to explain and educate potential customers about CRM. In both roles, I've seen one troubling trend that very few vendors seem able to buck. That trend is this: Most CRM vendors suck at CRM. I know -- if anyone should get CRM right, it should be the CRM vendors. They should be modeling proper usage to their customers.

The 5-Step Plan for Picking the Right CRM Consultant
May 21, 2013

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of workflows that introduce social media data or specific sales and marketing behaviors.

When Mobile CRM Goes Too Far, Part 1
May 20, 2013

The case for mobile CRM is an easy one to make. Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and the way most people work requires 24-7 accessibility. Also, not being tethered to a desktop to access customer records is a plus -- if not an outright necessity in some cases. For sales reps or anyone who interacts with customers in the field, mobile CRM is essential.

CRM's Stairway to Stardom
May 14, 2013

Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses they patronize. As a result, when I say I write about CRM, I'm often asked to explain what it is. That leads me to think a lot about a practical definition of "CRM."

How to Muff a Mobile Marketing Campaign, Part 2
May 13, 2013

You wouldn't think it was easy to bungle a mobile marketing campaign -- but it definitely is doable. Six in 10 decision makers planned to increase their companies' mobile marketing budgets in 2013, Forrester said earlier this year, reporting on a survey conducted for Acquent. However, 42 percent of those respondents were worried about achieving ROI. They have good reason to be.

Tap CRM to Give Your Customers a Pleasant Surprise
May 07, 2013

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is good. It's the way you realize the value from your CRM investment.

How to Ride the New Analytics Wave
April 24, 2013

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me. I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "what's valuable in this pile?" to "how can we slice and dice this raw material," everybody wants a piece of the action.

The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 2
April 19, 2013

Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged. They range from running afoul of still-developing regulations to security concerns, to consumers misinterpreting content. As people connect with the Internet through multiple access points, keeping a marketing message consistent is becoming more essential.

The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 1
April 12, 2013

As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that apply to ads in newspapers, radio and television apply to mobile devices -- and social media too, for that matter.

The Say-Anything Salesperson Is a CRM Killer
April 11, 2013

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of salespeople. The sales manager held up a former employee as an example of the kind of people he wanted; this guy was a go-getter.

What's Driving Marketing's Renaissance?
April 08, 2013

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a lot of emphasis on marketing.

5 Things That Kill CRM ROI Dead
April 05, 2013

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample was impossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction.

Race Against the Machine
April 03, 2013

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, is short and to the point.

Don't Rebuild Those Silos!
March 28, 2013

It's hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space.

The Perils of Making Up Your Social Media Policy as You Go
March 21, 2013

Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, your mistakes are amplified and intensified by customers.

Subscriptions, Social and CRM
March 13, 2013

"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.

Unlike Buzzwords, Relationships Will Always Be in Vogue
March 07, 2013

The jargon of an industry is a good indicator of where the mindset of that industry is at any particular moment. Think of terms like "the cloud," which are set upon by marketers and subverted to their ends until the meaning has been wrung from them. For many in IT, the cloud is a place that solves many of their routine problems, sight unseen.

With Business Foundations Shaking, Good Enterprise Architects Are Hard to Find
March 04, 2013

Enterprise architects are looking at several trends impacting their roles in the business world -- the growth of cloud computing, the arrival of big data, more security challenges, the overall rate of technological advances. These are the topics discussed at conferences.