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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
IIR's Mobile CRM, Bupadest, Dec 2008
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
Linkblog
Photos
Racketeering
Jeff Atwood’s *ambivalent* Christmas experience shows a market that is ready for disruption. Jeff got a couple of Lenovo servers only to realize the package did not contain drive mounting brackets, meaning he could not use ANY hard drives but only those by Lenovo - at an outrageous markup, that is.
I am surprised that even today business models based on racketeering work - in the commodity industry such as PC servers. It’s an industry where all the know-how and standards are public knowledge. Is it really possible NOT to be able to get those mounting brackets off eBay, $5 shipped?
Odd.
How to start with CRM
When is a good time for a company to start thinking about CRM?
There’s a thread at The Business of Software forums about CRM for μISV. An entrepreneur asked about CRM that integrates with MS Outlook; from what I’ve read there, a desktop quasi-CRM such as Act! could help him out nicely.
It prompted me to think about a) at what point should a business owner start with CRM, and b) how to build the CRM infrastructure for your small business that will grow with you.
And, c) whether it makes sense to think about it this way at all.
Upstarts and new businesses don’t have to traverse the same warped path that their predecessors have. They are starting out in the customer ecosystem; they can build their organization and processes around the customer from the get go. And if they do, will they still have to talk about CRM? I think not.
What organizations used to do was:
- Find a market
- Develop a product
- Sell
Companies are still moving around this axis but instead of defining just the “market”, they can drill down to micro-segments and individuals easily; using e-mail, social media, etc. Being able to interact at the individual customer level is natural for them.
Hence I am becoming convinced that for *new* businesses, CRM could actually do more harm than good. Instead of adding a customer management app into their mix, they should be building their whole infrastructure around their customers and conversations they have.
In other words, we won’t need the CRM acronym once CRM has become a defining architectural component of an organization.
links for 2008-11-20
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Interesting counterpoint to the user-driven paradigm of "2.0"
Game on
Joel Spolsky delivered a rather painful blow to Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman and other pushers of wishful thinking. He says:
[W]hat’ts been driving me crazy over the last year… an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it’s Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random gibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story.
Ouch.
Add to that the recent backlash against the Long Tail, and we’ve finally got a discussion going. And that’s great.
The last couple of years have been incredibly productive in terms of new thinking, experimenting with approaches to business problems, etc. - but we’ve perhaps got too carried away. As it happens when one is in a middle of a “creative rush”, the critical mind gets to stand by and wait for its moment.
I am as guilty as the next guy of milking analogies and anecdotes to examine trends and arrive at conclusions that were at the time of writing speculative at best. It’s the nature of punditry. Whether or not there’s an agenda involved is besides the point: pushing the envelope always includes holding your breath and hoping your assumptions work.
I believe in the need of advancing unproven ideas, and I don’t mind stretching it way too far; it just makes for a great topic for discussion. You’ll never get far enough if you just crunch numbers. Numbers are boring - by themselves.
But - but but but - at some point the discussion must get real. Call it reality check, it needs to happen. Not too soon and not a minute later.
There is not a better testing ground for ideas than the marketplace. The Long Tail is an idea that is going to be either proven or refuted in the marketplace. So is the “flat Earth”. So is “CRM 2.0″.
What the critics of the above-mentioned ideas are saying is that the marketplace has rejected them, or not proved them enough anyway. Good stories aside, these ideas either have enough merit to survive (and adapt, morph, etc.) or they will die a natural death. Hopefully not without a good fight.
Bring it.
links for 2008-11-13
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I don't care for his politics but this is smart. Will it prove to be more than a populist gesture?
links for 2008-11-10
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Interesting group. I suppose many startups will either be ultralight or out of business in these difficult times.
links for 2008-11-09
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I suppose that was the natural next step after getting root. Will it survive OTA updates? Doubtful. But then, Google just might want to be less evil than Apple, so we will see.
links for 2008-11-08
links for 2008-11-07
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Spot on!
links for 2008-11-06
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