Adam Sarner, who I had a great conversation/briefing with the other day, understands the role of marketing is changing in many organizations.  But the real question is, how do companies still trying to master their CRM deployments take advantage of the “generation 2.0″ (or whatever you want to call the social customer these days) mindset?

In a recent report Adam puts forth one nice starting point:

Companies should collect persona data for product development, customer feedback, loyalty management, customer segmentation, campaign targeting and persona group customer satisfaction management. They can use this data for marketing and selling. In addition, this data will provide insight into how customers want to be treated.

It is points like this that make me cringe as a marketing person – I mean, come on, now I have to replicate all of this activity for indivduals instead of large groups? Ugh…

But as a SugarCRM employee, I am excited. Not a lot of the older CRM products can handle anything that cannot fit nicely into a relational database. Bummer dudes. Thanks to our open build, and the fact that the web-based nature of SugarCRM allows it to integrate with a lot of CMS systems, or other methods of saving, searching and sharing data (hmm, the three S’s  – there’s a speaking opportunity in there somewhere), SugarCRM can easily become the type of system that enables one-to-one relationships from a marketing perspective.

Great. But the real truth behind all this, is that regardless of how great a CRM or marketing automation tool is for capturing and slicing/dicing data – the marketers still need to take intuitive action based on what data the system can provide. I have seen a ton of automated upsell tools cross my desk that failed miserably, because they failed to consider the human element at all.

I don’t have the answers, but I do know that 1:1 communication requires thinking in a 1:1 manner…