The end of CRM, the start of MRM

In BtB, it’s about Market Relationschip Management

Customer Relationschip Management systems, programs & processes are the cornerstone of every modern company. Without them, it’s impossible to assure a good customer relationschip (especially in large companies, where everybody takes one part of the customer interaction): When your support people take up the phone, they want to make sure the customer instantly feels connected because your agent knows who he is, knows what products/services he has from your company, what is important for him, how happy he is, what are his outstanding invoices,…

It’s clear that there are a lot of solutions on the market (from the very large SAP / Siebel / Microsoft kind of solutions towards the smaller cloud solutions (Nutshell, Highrise,…).

When implementing these tools, the tricky part comes: We tend to implement them from a customer perspective (clearly, hence the C in CRM). However — especially in a B2B environment — the market is typically smaller and more stable. It can happen that a customer is leaving you, but comes back in 2 years, or is shifting part of his portfolio to you from a competitor because you have a new kind of product/service. If you want to do things right, we should stop building CRM processes and tools, but start working with Market Relationschip models (MRM): A customer who leaves you is the best lead you’ll ever have: you know his business, you know what is crucial for him (the thing he left you for might give a hint), you already have his contact information, you know his needs (at least partly: the products/services he ordered with you in the past),…

In data-model terms: stop seeing a prospect, a customer and a lost customer as different entities, they are merely charasteristics of the same entity. See it as a tag on a company name that you can use to differentiate your approach towards them (on your complete marketing mix).

How to you handle your CRM processes?

Also available on Medium.

Internal communication is not a business unit.

Typically, it goes like this: In small companies, internal communication is done by the owner of the company. It’s not in her job description (owner’s don’t tend to have a formal job description in the first place), she just feels the need to communicate to her company. All of a sudden, in larger companies, it becomes the role description of a dedicated person or even a whole business unit.

The people in this unit then can start the work of a miner. They constantly need to push all people in the organisation for information (Do we have a new product that we should push on the corporate website? Is there a new big client the CEO can use as a reference when talking to industry leaders? How good is the knowledge of all employees on corporate strategy?…). I can only begin to image how difficult their work must be. They are faced with a situation where every employee is their source of information on the one side (but nobody has off course the time to produce direct usable information) and the complete organisation is also their target group.

Off course, this is about knowledge and the thing about knowledge networks is that every single person has an interest in learning (getting knowledge), but not directly in sharing his own knowledge (because that off course takes time). As the value of the knowledge network is mainly defined by the individual pieces of knowledge in it and everybody seems to value the power of knowledge, we should try to push more the boundaries of the typical knowledge role of internal communication in large companies.

I would argue that ‘internal communication’ should not be the formal role of one or more people, it should be a part of the role description of every single employee. The role of internal communication should be transformed into a curating one:

enable the knowledge sharing and learning (through dead easy tools);
reward knowledge sharing;
create and archive of the most important knowledge;
create flows of knowledge exchange in all directions in the organisation.

Seems a lot more fun than bugging people for information also…

How is your internal communication team oriented?

Discuss also on Medium https://medium.com/marketing-strategy/39b0172b2fc9

The end of bad experiences?

City hopping in a Foursquare world.

NYC must be the place where you can use Foursquare-like tools the most easy. Maybe it’s because I’m only an outsider visiting the City that never sleeps, but the amount of coffee bars, places to enjoy an early afternoon cocktail or discover new tastes is enormous. When I was in NYC the first time a decade ago, finding a place was as easy as it is today, the only difference was that you had no clue upfront whether the place would be great, just good or plain rubbish. Every coffee you ordered was an opportunity for an new taste experience or a disappointment in humanity all together. Chances where about 50/50.

Today, things are different. Very different. I don’t think we had one drink/bite in a place that did not have a 8+ score on Foursquare… and preferably with an online OpenTable functionality (saves you a lot of trouble waiting for the place to actually open and a lot of money if you are on a roaming rate).

There is no more hiding in this world. Bad places can only exist for the group of people not willing or not able to check a place out before they enter. With this group growing smaller over time, all market players will need to push the limit, become more agile, more original, more customer oriented, more experimental, more cosy, more local, more specialised.

Tourist traps will only live so long. Don’t ever again say technology is not bringing good things to humankind! Don’t wait for the crowd and technology to change your industry, change it for them!

Article also on Medium.

Getting trough the silos (process evolution). A new C-level position?

When you start as an entrepreneur, life is hard, but straightforward when it comes to getting things done: you and you alone are responsible. If the product needs a new price, you do it. It you need to update the packaging, you do it. It’s always you. If things go wrong, you are responsible. If things go great, it’s you who made it happen.

The larger organisations become, the more processes, governance structures and job descriptions with clear lines between what is job of person A and what is the job of person B. At some moment in time, you arrive at a situation where processes seem to define everything. “Computer says no” becomes a reality. What really is the issue is when people start believing that there is a process for everything because this implies that having an issue, opportunity, idea,… that can not be funnelled in an existing process… cannot exist. In the mind of people fallen into the ‘a process for everything’-trap, it is virtually impossible to grasp the fact that their might be an idea that does not follow the ‘processes’. It’s a bit like telling to a medieval family that the earth is round. It’s just beyond their way of thinking. To make things even more complex, there is probably a separate silo in the organisation that even is responsible for processes. They tend to be the one that guard the processes…

It’s clear that innovation or even being able to adapt to the changing market in an organisation as this is … well … just not imaginable.

Now imagine a new C-level executive, directly reporting to the CEO. (S)he has no direct reports, no teams, just an MOO-printed business card and carte blanche to investigate each process, follow on every lead (because every employee can send Kafka-like stuff or roadblocks to the_mover@yourcompany.com) and force easier ways of working. He does not have to make a business case to change things, it’s the current process owner who is responsible for the business cases that proves that his current process is still the best).

What impact would this have on your organisation? Sounds like an interesting job to me!

Article also on Medium.

Agile for business

Working within and with a marketing team typically means working with always changing stakeholders (every project is different), a lot of young and eager people, a lot of overloaded decision makers, continuously changing market demands,… All the things that make business life lively. You have to love it, but this also means that quite some time is spend on aligning people, on planning, follow up, sharing information, status meetings,… This all seems like typical project management stuff and there is quite some research on that: what works and what doesn’t. However, in a typical project resources are committed to one scope, where’s in business reality today, you tend to be more in a web of different ‘projects’. Question there is: How to bring in the knowledge from project management without bringing in the heavy methodology and tools that might work in a large project setting, but nog in various day to day interactions?
Doing some investigations on how multidisciplinary teams can work more efficient together when not being in one great project, I learned some things.

things need to be able to shift/transfer quickly trough the organisation without loosing it’s point of origin
forget about one solution for the whole company if you are more than 100 people
extreme choice (as in: whatever solution you choose, push it hard and force yourself to put as much in it as possibel) has some advantages (don’t use multiple ways of communication).
one exception: face 2 face can (and should) always complement the communication method/tool you use.
as always, people and their belief in the process & the use of the tools define the outcome.

I am now experimenting a lot with Trello combined with some sort of weekly (and in some periods daily) kind of stand-up meeting to get all our campaigns, strategic work, projects,… done.
What works well for you and your team?

Why a cover letter is just waisted time (aka: The BS of a cover letter)

The official version goes that a cover letter shows your motivation and your hunger to get the job. If you do not take the time to write a cover letter, you don’t really want the job no?? A more down to earth version goes that it helps the junior HR staff to preselect the short list of potential candidates. After all, if you get 100 cv’s, you need some help in drilling down… Would be ok if you believe it’s HR who does the final decision, but in a phase of just filtering the bad ones out, all you need is a CV.

But in my opinion, it’s all BS: If a recruiter only takes time to write a half pager with some generic stuff (you know the drill: open minded, team-player, 5-10 years experience in a BtB market, project experience,…), how do you expect somebody to already want the job with all their hart?? People who say this are only interested in either the company name (“it’s the coolest brand ever”) or in the job-title (“look at my new business card”), none of them are good reasons to hire somebody.

And yes, I know, you would love to see me telling how great your company is (it probably is, otherwise the applicant would not even go through the trouble of reaching out, asking to open up the conversation), but that should not convince me to hire me either don’t you think?

Wanting a job really shows trough interaction with people, by talking to people working there, by interacting with the company twitter, by walking to the interview space in their offices.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/interview_questions

Helping people to reach their goal.

There is a lot to tell about leadership, coaching, tutoring,… and how important it is in getting more efficient, more innovative, more customer centric,… as a team or company. Off course, you should help people when their success helps you to have a success (typically always the case for your team members).

However, what most people forget is just how good it makes you feel personally when you can help people in reaching **their** goal, even if it is not linked to your objectives. It is definitely not a pure hedonistic view on it, but it’s a strong and good driver I think. And also: when the going get though, they might remember you for helping them shine!

What about you, when did you help people in reaching **their** goals.

Be hard on values.

Organisations should not be soft on values in times when things are good.
In times when things go good, organisations tend to be ’to human’. Employees who are doing an ok job, but not in line with the values are easily tolerated. Just because: they can afford.
The thing is however, that when things become more heavy, and the organisation needs to perform high to survive, you see that you are not getting there with those ’tolerated’ people. The problem now is however, that just because things are hectic, you cannot afford missing anybody now.
So always make sure you have people that are performing well and in line with your values, you’ll need the best when things are going to get rough.

Pop-up consulting

… or make it or make it Pop-up creation.

Getting the time to focus on the important (but maybe less urgent) things is not that easy. By borrowing the pop-up concept (be it from stores to agencies), there might be a solution to all your important needs. Image that a small team of external people comes in for 2 days, develops together with your internal people one concept (be it a new product idea, a go-to-market strategy, a marketing plan, a sales campaign,…), how time and resource efficient would that be. You combine the experience of your people, the knowledge and focus external people can bring to create a real output.

I know I would love it!
JOINED!ly, we can make it happen!

Competition as part of your value chain

On selling ‘your default product’… regardless of the situation and customer needs.

True story: I work in a large office building that is shared by multiple companies. The owner of the building rents floors of the building including the services: Water, electricity, heat, working toilets, vending machines for food, coffee machines,… stuff like that. This also includes toilet paper being available at all time. Of course, this work is outsourced to a specialised company meaning that all toilet holders and the toilet paper they hold is from one firm who probably does not sell toilet paper by the roll, but sells something like: ‘99,9 % of working hours, your employees have toilet paper’.
Yesterday, something strange happened: All toilet dispensers (and also the towel, soap,… dispensers) where physically removed and replaced by others. Meaning in a lot of work (handyman coming in with drills and stuff), a lot of noise and dirt al over the place for – at the end of the day – having the same toilet paper (no, the rolls where not bigger, did not have a different colour, no fancy smell,…): plain old toilet paper.
Although I off course understand the importance of having your logo on the toilet dispensers as ‘service’ company and having easy access to the toilet paper,…, the end results is quite hilarious. No change (off course, probably at a lower cost for the building owner), no possibility of re-using the existing infrastructure and just replace… well… the toilet rolls.
Wouldn’t it be ‘innovative’ to just see your competitor as part of your supply chain? After all, it is more cost efficient for the both of you if you could ‘exchange’ the physical toilet dispensers if you trade a customer. Not to mention how much better it would be for the environment (less garbage, I’m not quite convinced that the old provider will come and pick up his old dispensers) and the customer (quicker transition period).