Lauren spells it out well, but I think that gradually the options she’s outlined are shrinking.

I worked at a place that built its own, and while it eventually worked, it was a catastrophic waste of assets. We had smart people, but they should have been working on core products, not trying to re-invent the CRM wheel unless they could build something so new and unique that it offset their lost time in a very short period of time. It did not.

It reminds me of another job in which I was tasked with describing all the attributes of a blogging platform so out IT people could build one. First, I said, “why don’t we just use WordPress?” Then, after an incoherent response to my question, I wrote a document that described WordPress, and IT reproduced it. To everyone involved except the management, this was a waste of time, and valuable time at that: it represented the time of the engineering team, which could have been devoted to adding truly unique features to our products.

These days, with so many options available, you should avoid the build-it-yourself option. You have better things to do with your money and your time – especially your time.

That leaves two options: a vertically-oriented solution, or an integrated “horizontal” solution. These are two valid options, and there are a ton of really unique CRM solutions targeted at specific vertical markets. There are about 800 CRM applications out there, and the vast majority of them are targeted at vertical markets – real estate, construction, non-profits, sporting goods, you name it. However, I suggest you do plenty of study to understand exactly how well your business is aligned to the vertical market the vendor is seeking to serve. If you’re making hay by significantly tweaking the model used for selling into your vertical market, or if you work with multiple unique verticals, you need to make sure a vertically-oriented solution can flex to fit all your needs.

If a vertical solution isn’t going to cut it, you’re down to a horizontally-oriented solution – and if you’ve reached this point on the journey because you have unique business needs and processes, you need to focus on flexibility. Integrating is great, but it comes with a price tag unless you do your homework and understand which CRM applications can be made to work with your processes without breaking the bank.

A lot of horizontally-oriented CRM vendors have made a lot of money selling cookie-cutter CRM to companies that either had simple requirements or which didn’t fully understand what they needed. For the first group, you have success on their terms – simple, straightforward and rigid processes that are handled easily. The second group usually results in a lot of shelfware and CRM users who are further hardened against adoption when the next solution arrives.

A lot of this was discussed in “An Introduction to CRM,” which I wrote last year. If you’re already using CRM, don’t dismiss this white paper because it seems like it’s for beginners; it’s not. It’s for anyone assessing their needs for CRM; we often fail to form requirements in the context of our organization, and that’s why CRM so often fails. What seems good to IT and the VP of sales my fall flat if there’s not an in-depth understanding of how the business works and how the CRM application maps to those processes.

All three of the directions Lauren outlined are valid, but perhaps not all three for every company. If you sit down and really understand how you work, that list may dwindle to manageably small number very quickly.

When you work with CRM all day, you start to look at your interactions through CRM-tinted glasses. Sadly, much of what you see encapsulates the way CRM is either misused or ignored.

For instance:

Dear business that sends me too much junk: I appreciate that your email marketing system is integrated with the same list you use for direct mail, but I fail to understand why you insist on calling me “Christophe” in emails as you did in your direct mail. A 10-character field for “first name” probably seemed sufficient, but there are some of us who have longer names. You’re telling me you care more about the size of your data fields than you do about my name – and, if you actually knew me, you’d just say “Chris,” anyway.

While my mailbox and my in-box brings me daily reminders of this little CRM fail, I’ve never really done anything about it. But maybe I should.

If, as customers, we want businesses to be customer-centric, shouldn’t we as customers should start pointing out these failures where they happen?

It’s all well and good to point out how clueless businesses are, but the reality is that running a business is an all-consuming task at times. Maintaining the processes that make a business work may not leave time for managers to step out of their roles and try to see the business the way the customers do.

So, fellow customers: let’s start speaking up.

I’m not talking about offering complete re-designs of complex processes. No amount of well-intentioned advice will ever salvage Comcast’s customer service system, for example. What I’m suggesting is the mention of small things that can make a big difference.

It could be as simple as suggesting change to a website to make checkout faster, or a tip to improve personalization of customer communication, or expressing a desire to shift delivery times to coincide with periods of the day when your workforce is less busy and better prepared to receive merchandise.

The adoption of these little suggestions is a good thing for both you and for the business you buy from. For you, you get a better experience as a customer, and you get the good feeling that comes when you are heard and acknowledged. The business builds better relationships and can rightly claim to be moving in the direction of customer-centricty – and if what they’re doing makes you as a customer happier, it’s likely to make other customers happier as well. It also helps the business escape the foibles of failing to view its actions through the eyes of the customer.

And, if the business chooses to ignore your suggestion, that says something, too.

The other side of this is that we customers need to be much more vociferous when companies do the right thing for us. Sending an email or a letter when customer support does a great job, or when a sales person makes extra calls to round up the products we need in time, or when a clerk chases us down to give us our change, should become a regular response – it has an impact on the business that’s out of proportion to the action, but can also help reinforce that behavior across the entire business. And it also tends to reward the employee who went above and beyond the call of duty for us. Such employees embody the ideas of customer relationship management, and they deserve to be noticed – perhaps even more than the CRM screw-ups and failures that we tend to dwell on.

This is the fifth year that  I’ve compiled a list of the best CRM blogs, and the trend is clear: more and better blogs on the topic of CRM are out there than ever before. In 2008, it was a struggle to find 20 good blogs on CRM; now, there are so many good ones that picking the 20 best is a difficult chore. But the cream rises to the top – using the criteria of content quality, consistency and influence, our list represents the 20 must-reads for anyone hoping to be on the cutting edge of CRM thinking.

We try to present a mix of theory and practical advice. One clear lesson that can be drawn: if you’re an independent business owner (as many of the non-affiliated analysts on our list  happen to be), your blog serves as a combination of calling card, curriculum vitae and cocktail party conversation. It works very well for many of these bloggers, and their sustained success – on the Top 20 list an in their businesses – show how valuable a blog can be.

We also have our share of big-firm analysts, journalists, service specialists, marketing folk and whatever Marshall Lager is. (Kidding, Marshall!)

We disqualified our own blog, of course, and we also kept away from other vendor’s blogs. We also tried to narrow the focus to CRM bloggers, vs. those shifting to collaboration, marketing automation and other CRM-like technologies and practices; that’s a function of the growing number of CRM blogs, not of any diminishing of quality of bloggers covering those spaces.

So without further delay, here’s our list of the 20 bloggers who made the biggest mark on CRM in 2011:

1. Pgreenblog and CRM: the Conversation

How do you outdo yourself as a perennial top CRM blogger? Take the community you’ve built (virtually as well as through tireless face-to-face networking) and create a remarkable contest designed to expose up-and-coming CRM vendors. Paul Greenberg, the author of both of these blogs, drove “CRM Idol” by enlisting help from all over the CRM spectrum; this effort dominated the middle part of the year in his blogs. That gave many small CRM vendors premium placement for their videos and the reviews done by Paul’s expert team of judges, exposure that outstripped anything these companies could afford to generate on their own. By understanding that innovation comes from the small, hungry companies – and by providing a chance for that innovation to shine through – Paul rendered a great service to the entire CRM world, and he used his dual blogs to do it. The contest also helped move the ball toward the realization of Paul’s vision of a Social CRM world; much of the innovation demonstrated in the contest is pushing hard in that direction. So, now that Paul’s effectively described the Social CRM future, now he’s working to make it a reality. Thank heaven he uses his powers for good and not evil.

2. Beagle Research Blog

If you’re confused about acquisitions, feature additions and strategic decisions made by CRM companies, you can bet Denis Pombriant was confused, too – briefly. Then, while the rest of us were still scratching our heads, Denis went over and wrote a blog post that made perfect sense of the day’s news. You may not always agree with him, but if you don’t it isn’t because Denis is provoking you; he can take bold positions without being brash or abrasive about it. He’s also the go-to guy for putting CRM in a macroeconomic context; just as Brent Leary excels at digging down to get to the needs of small business, Denis is great at elevating his analysis to a global scale, often touching on themes of sustainability and energy. Denis also keeps a busy schedule of trade shows, so if there’s an event you wanted to attend but couldn’t, check the Beagle Research Blog – Denis is probably at the show, and he’s also probably explained the major announcements.

3. ThinkJar Blog

With his tongue-in-cheek faux-egomaniac persona front and center, Esteban Kolsky seasons his commentary with both a sense of humor and a brutal honesty, which makes his blog unpredictable in a way no others on this list can be. He’s not really a egomaniac – he actually is as smart as he says, and his knowledge spans the CRM space. He’s not interested in CRM by itself – he’s interested in the entire business software ecosystem, because only by building the complete solution can businesses realize the full potential of the technology available to them. An ex-Gartner analyst, he often offers his takes on the acquisitions and strategic moves made by the big players in CRM, but then he’ll turn around and get much more tactical in his next post. Esteban’s blog is a genuine grab-bag of information, but every time you reach in you’ll pull out something of value delivered with an insider’s insight.

4. Brent’s Social CRM Blog

Brent Leary pushes the definition of what Social CRM is by talking about the larger ecosystem, but he doesn’t do that as a big thinker pontificating about his grand ideas. He’s a small business guy at heart, so if he’s talking about CRM or about any other related technologies – ERP, marketing automation, lead management, or whatever – he’s talking from the context of what they can do to solve business problems. Brent also models smart blog behavior for his clients; the blog is chock full of videos, sound files, graphics and other goodies he collects as he hustles and hurries through the Social CRM world, often with some fairly weighty guests. And, like Paul Greenberg, he sees a lot of value in exposing innovators to the greater world; Brent’s CRM-ISH awards honor companies doing things related to CRM, an area where there’s plenty of innovation just waiting for a boost.

5. 1to1Blog

Ginger Conlan and her team provide readers with a year’s worth of object lessons and expert insight drawing from the experiences and expertise of writers Tom Hoffman, Mila D’Antonio and Cynthia Clark and from a tremendous array of guest bloggers. They’ve struck a great balance between humanity and expertise – the reporters’ observations set off the experts’ well-crafted ideas to provide a readable balance that also carries plenty of value. The blog and the topics it covers demonstrate how the lines between CRM and marketing are blurring in the age of social media, and how this communications revolution is accelerating the impact of customer experience on the bottom line. Best of all, the blog is updated at an almost daily pace – the crew of writers and special guests are prolific and if what they’re talking about today doesn’t hold an immediate lesson for your business, just wait 24 hours. Chances are good the next day’s content will be immensely helpful.

6. The CRM Consultant

Perhaps the most effective tutor of prospective CRM buyers (and those looking to upgrade their existing systems), Richard Boardman draws from his practical experience as a consultant to help head off implementation failures long before implementations ever start. A strong proponent of spending time in the planning stages to define requirements, set goals and behave in practical and productive ways during the early stages of CRM decision making, Richard provides thoughtful useful and eye-opening advice in the form of multi-part guides to these preliminary steps. The sad thing is that he comes to this information from seeing so many businesses fall into the same precise traps; by becoming a expert on what causes failure, he’s also made himself a skilled tour guide for those seeking a path to success. Managing costs, working with consultants, convincing the CEO – Richard provides advice for these very common components of implementing and managing CRM, and then some. If you’re engaged with a vendor or a consultant, you need to be engaged with Richard’s blog, too.

7. Value Creator

Weighing in from the west coast is Brian Vellmure, whose blog reminds me of a versatile camera lens: it zooms in on small, pertinent social CRM details, and can zoom back out to capture the big picture of how the innovations applied to business are changing the world in broader, bolder ways. He’s not limited to talking about the nuts and bolts of CRM – in fact, that’s not his territory at all. Brian is more likely to talk about the environment, the attitude, the strategy and the psychology of how businesses relate to customers than his is about the technology they bring to bear. This year was a busy one for Brian – including a switch of blogging locations – so he had fewer posts than in the past, but his inclusion of the slide decks he uses for speaking gigs should provide food for thought (and should also help you see what a good slide deck for a speaking gig looks like!).

8. A Title Would Limit My Thoughts

Although he holds a significant position at Sword Ciboodle, Mitch Lieberman also maintains this blog for his own independent musings. Mitch isn’t afraid to ask a big question and then let it hang without an answer – some things we don’t know the answer to yet, after all, and Mitch is sanguine enough to avoid acting like he knows the answers all the time. However, he does bring a wealth of wisdom to the blog in the form of well-considered thinking and the voices of other experts when they can help shed light on a topic. Mitch did a great job of talking about the value and the strategies around social media and customer service – as well he ought to, working for Sword Ciboodle – and he did it in great depth and detail. Regardless of the technology you end up using, if you plan on delivering state-of-the-art service, you owe it to yourself to check Mitch’s blog to figure out the best ways to do it.

9. Michael Maoz

Analyst blogs face some challenges – when you’re paid to give expertise to your customers, how much of that expertise should you give away via your blog? Michael shows how it should be done: there’s some great nuggets of data, but the blog deals primarily with Michael’s informed opinions and attitudes about what’s going on in CRM, customer service and social business. No, wait – the blog delivers Michael’s attitude-informed opinions. When it comes to social media and social business, he’s refreshingly free of the euphoric optimism of other observers and appreciates the social revolution for what it is: a hard, long and potentially costly slog to a new way of doing things which shares some difficult similarities with other business revolutions from years past. The nice thing about a mature voice like Michael’s is that it has some context to compare what’s new now with what was new then – and can inform you on past lessons that can you can draw from without making the mistakes that defined those lessons yourself.

10. CRM Search Blog

Chuck Schaeffer is one of the smartest CRM people I know. The former CEO of Aplicor, he’s turned his talents to CRM Search, and in the process built quite a cast of fellow bloggers. In addition to Chuck’s insightful posts about what’s going on in the CRM industry, you also get the likes of Marshall Lager, Blake Landau, and Denis Pombriant on a regular basis (although I had to knock points off for allowing my drivel into the blog on occasion). Chuck understands on a fundamental level what vendors do right and what they do wrong, and he has the ability to intuitively spot vendors’ strategy changes and to explain what they mean. Best of all, Chuck has an insider’s knowledge but no longer is beholden to anyone. If you’ve taken a peek at the in-depth and bluntly honest analysis on CRM Search, which is very much in keeping with the tone of this blog, you understand why the CRM Search blog does a service to readers while making CRM vendors a little nervous.

11. A Software Insider’s Point of View

While Ray Wang’s blog is a little less engaging than the author in person, that still makes it better than most blogs. And, from a pure content point of view, it’s hard to beat Ray’s take on things, from social business to developing a business strategy. Frequently peppered with insights from Constellation Research’s work, the blog is a mix of big thinking and in-the-trenches business news analysis. You’re as likely to get an analysis of Lithium’s latest round of funding as your are to get a comparison of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the needs of developing a high-level business strategy. Ray also includes a series of interviews with disruptive business leaders – that is, disruptive in a good way. There’s also plenty of Constellation news – hey, this is essentially the research firm’s company blog – but you can work around those posts to find lots of little acorns of knowledge. Want to find a data point to convince your boss to go all-in on a social strategy? Visit this blog, read, and pay attention.

12. Wim Rampen’s Blog

Wim has mastered the twist-ending approach to writing a blog. He’ll often start with a premise – “The Customer is Always Wrong,” to cite one popular post – and start delivering on that premise – only to turn it around and demonstrate why “conventional” thinking leads to folly (in the case of the above-mentioned post, the reality is that businesses define “right” and should be working harder to help customers get to that definition of “right”). That makes for an entertaining read; Win’s nearly 15 years of experience in CRM makes for an informative read. He’s also mastered the art of being a “social” blogger, doing more than his share of reading of other’s work and bringing back ideas and links to his readers (while adding his own take). Doing this results in a lively comments section populated by some of the big brains in CRM and Social CRM. Wim’s insight on customer service, social media and value-co-creation make this valuable reading, and Wim’s behavior as a blogger and member of a wider community make it instructive for anyone looking to develop their own social behavior as a professional.

13. Social CRM Ideas

Mark Tamis didn’t get off that many posts this year, but the ones he did pen took swings at enormous ideas – business process management, social messaging, the meaning of Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6, and so on. He also gave a platform to a few guest posts from Graham Hill, another well-respected voice for customer collaboration, and he devoted a lot of space to CRM Idol. But perhaps the most interesting thing Mark did was to give a reason for Social CRM that could reach business leaders. Back in November, he wrote that Social CRM was exciting, in part, “Because it will generate many new data points that we can use to motivate and pilot our organizations.” Mark sees reluctance to change and a chronic inability to manage change as dangerous and widespread barriers to fully realizing the goal of customer-centric businesses, and his ability to articulate Social CRM’s value not in grandiose marketing-speak but in terms that decision makers can internalize easily is evidence of the incisive thinking that the hallmark of his blog.

14. Michael Fauscette

Another terrific analyst’s blog, this one is far-ranging and gives Mike Fauscette the opportunity to connect the dots behind his general areas of coverage to provide context for his more precisely-focused customer analysis. But even if you’re not an IDC customer, Mike’s blog gives you great context for the trends that are impacting your decisions. For example, in November he wrote about the concept of innovation management – a topic certainly not limited to CRM but one that has major ramifications in the era of Social CRM, the evolution of the social business and the introduction of myriad new technologies. Same goes for his breakdowns of the what it mean to have a social business, or the underlying tactics needed to create successful collaboration – Mike can connect the dots that explain why you need to do things and the factors that make those things necessary, even if he doesn’t tell you how to do them (but, hey, isn’t that your job anyway?).

15. The Customer Relationship Management Blog

A newcomer to the list, Lauren Carlson, the main voice of this blog, scored bigtime with a satirical post back in July sending up the “unreliability” of cloud applications (as opposed to on-premise applications, which NEVER go down. Right?), but her regular posts are on target and as informative as that one was funny. In baseball, she’d be called a “spray hitter” – her posts are all over the place in terms of topic, but she deals adroitly with all of them. She also talks to some of the brightest luminaries in CRM to gain inspiration and information for her posts, so in many cases what you have is a smart writer adding a new angle on ideas from other smart people. In the Social CRM era, that’s really helpful – the way ideas are phrased may resonate differently with different business people, so Lauren’s fresh takes on these ideas have great value. There are also a host of guest posts from people with practical experience, making this a useful grab-bag blog. Stick your hand in there and see what you pull out.

16. Customer Service Stories… and Other Thoughts

Customer experience is a great buzzword and an inconsistent reality. Barry Dalton is both infuriated by this and the benefactor of a lot of fodder for his blog, which focuses on customer service and the object lessons that real-world attempts to help customers provide. Often, those attempts are hamstrung but improper deployment of resources, bad assumptions about customers, and processes that have gone hopelessly out of whack, but few businesses seem committed to attacking these problems head-on until their effects are brutally clear. If you’re developing a customer service component to your CRM efforts, read this blog, and if you run across something that sounds like your business, start ringing the alarm bell. Barry also delves into more strategic ideas, like customer self-service and the effects that increasingly effective service have on customer expectations and behaviors. It’s a fun read, too – that’s part of Barry’s service to his readership.

17. CRM en Latinoamérica

The most influential voice for CRM in Latin America, Jesus Hoyos’ blog is in Spanish – but it’s readily translated into English thanks to a nifty little button on the page, and the topics Jesus discusses are directly translatable, too, regardless of your geographic location. What’s great about Jesus is that he strikes a precise balance between content creation and content curation – he’ll lay out an idea, and then provide numerous links, lists and other data available on the web to back up his idea and provide additional inspiration. Jesus is another regular on the CRM show circuit, and his many presentations make their appearance on the blog, along with videos and photos – he really understands what a blog can be. An advocate of social CRM, he’s first and foremost an advocate of picking solutions that fit the business needs of the people using them. In Latin America, with a range of different customers of varying degrees of technology sophistication, that’s an essential strategy – and it’s a strategy that Jesus does a good job of exporting to the rest of the world.

18. Forrester Blogs

While they are tossed into the dogpile of analysts that make up Forrester’s somewhat unweildy stream of posts, Bill Band and Kate Leggett make their impact felt through their timely, thorough and readable posts. Bill’s the classic SFA/CRM analyst (with great posts this year about the Forrester Wave results and Forrester’s guide to mobile CRM best practices), while Kate pays attention to customer service primarily, but their coverage areas overlap a little. That makes for some great posts; Bill excerpts his analysis, and Kate creates great lists of rules, strategies and philosophies that are immediately useful for anyone trying to evolve their service organizations. They both understand the value of social media in CRM and service – and they use Twitter effectively to notify the world when their posts appear. Follow them and you’ll be able to read their work as it appears instead of paddling through the larger Forrester blog stream.

19. B2B Lead Roundtable Blog

Adding some additional voices has only made this blog stronger. Brian Carroll of Marketing Sherpa fame is all over the process of collecting leads and ushering them through the pipeline. That’s not as easy a task as it used to be – nowadays, the technology that enables us to collect more lead data also increases the expectations for sales productivity, and thus sales pros are stuck in an ever-steepening spiral of increased quotas and performance metrics. Brian and his team – which includes J. David Green and Andrea Johnson – provide useful advice for managing this steep expectation curve, and they also are skilled at relating to sales people. Part of the beauty of the site is the way it treats archived webinars – not only does the blog talk about the topic, but it breaks out the specific elements of the conversations and gives times. That allows time-pressed viewers to go right to the point in the webinar that most interests them – a very reader-friendly feature that points out how sales benefits from CRM ideas in more ways than just on the bottom line. Between the video, the webinars and excerpts form Marketing Sherpa’s reports, this should be required reading for CRM users focusing on the sales side of things.

20. Third Idea Blog

Although I wish he’d post more, Marshall Lager covers a lot of ground when he does write, and he covers it very well. Few CRM writers give their readership as much credit as Marshall does. That means he talks about complex concepts and vendor maneuvers with both authority and amusement – and he clearly assumes you’re in on the joke. See his insightful and unsparing disassembly of Oracle Open World 2011 – he has little need to fill you in on the soap operatic details of the show and proceeded right to explaining how those activities actually harmed Oracle’s business. Marshall also uses the blog to promote events like CRM Idol or the SuperNova Awards, and his status assures his inclusion among the judges’ panel. And, if you want to know which CRM events are worth following, keep an eye on Marshall’s blog; his analysis of an event indicates that it’s the place to be (for better or worse). Also, I can safely say that Marshall is the only member of the Top 20 to have referenced the Buggles in the last year.

One of the things social media allows us to see clearly and instantly is that some people don’t get social media. I see this every day in the CRM Outsiders Twitter feed (we’re @CRMOutsiders, by the way). Many of the people following us and being followed by us pre-date my arrival, including one gentleman who hails from the south Florida area.

I’m not going to call him out by name, but his handle is important. He’s an exec at his company, so when he signed up, he used the name and the company as his handle. If he were me, he’d be @ChrisSugarCRM.

There’s no secret what company he works for, and yet I’ve never seen a post about the company. However, being that we are a continent and four time zones apart, prime time for him is still work time for me. Thus, I have seen lots of commentary on sports, most of it spouting obscenities like a Tourette’s syndrome-afflicted merchant marine with a bad case of the Mondays.

During the NBA playoffs, there were allegations made about Dirk Nowitzki’s mother that would make a hardened veterinarian blush. Dolphins football brings a profane and homophobic running commentary. Even the Florida Marlins, as self-evidently awful as they are, were the subject of an assortment of posts that featured proctological references to batting helmets, challenges to their sexual identities and one reference to Hanley Ramirez resembling an, ahem, lower simian attempting to have romantic relations with a football.

At first these Tweets offended me, but they are so over the top they started top become funny. It’s also not often you get such a great example of what not to do with social media: identify yourself with your business, and then act like an absolute boor.

However, he’s still plugging away, his business still exists, and he’s obviously outlasted any social media manager the company may have had. His Twitter persona is different from his real-life persona – it’s got to be, otherwise he’d be busy flogging his resume in search of a new company he could utterly embarrass on Twitter.

Personas are an interesting thing, especially in the social media realm. The person we portray ourselves as in Tweets is different than the person portrayed in LinkedIn, or Facebook or wherever you may be, and that persona is different than the one you have in person. If you’ve ever read an angry screed on some social media site written by someone you know to be a bashful nebbish in real life, you can grasp this phenomenon.

From a CRM point of view, this raises some interesting questions, like this one: Should you create a different social profile for people based on the personas they adopt in different social media settings? How do you manage your interactions with all these personas? And how do you identify the personas that are most lucrative for you to foster relationships with?

I wrote about this idea a long time ago - so long ago I refer to CRM 2.0, rather than social CRM. The idea is still a bit out there (and immersive role-playing environments like Second Life seem to be fading in popularity, not threatening to subvert real-life reality, dimming the idea of personas a bit), but it does make sense to shift your business’s efforts to the channels where people are more likely to buy. If discerning between their personas helps with that, perhaps it’s something to track, even if it’s only to vary the way you respond to conversations in different venues.

At the same time, it’s important to keep track of the personas that represent your company. The same person who’s a respectful, articulate gentleman on the corporate Twitter account might be an out-of-control wild man on a developer’s forum or vertically-oriented site. Let everyone in the company know that there’s an image you need to project when you’re associated with the company – as in, when your handle or user name is identified with the company – and that, while you don’t want to deny their personalities, you also need for them to realize they’re representing the entire company. If what you’re communicating on social media wouldn’t be appropriate in front of customers in the office, it’s not appropriate in front of customers in social media – as in, potentially thousands of customers or could-be customers.

A few years ago, I did a webinar with some respected thought leaders in the area of sales about the impact data was having on selling. No one was willing to use the term “data-driven selling” – that was too much for sales people’s sensibilities. But the guests were willing and able to admit that the new way of selling revolved around relationships and the only way to increase sales productivity while at the same time building stronger relationships was to rely on data – and, more specifically, rely on data that was organized and ready to use.

Fast forward to the deja vu I experienced in August this year, when I had a chance to moderate another webinar, this time with Tony Hughes, SugarCRM’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand. Tony’s an author – he’s written a couple of books on selling topics, including the well-reviewed the Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of RSVPselling. Tony is all about the relationship in sales and so it was no surprise to hear Tony say that the key to selling still resides in the sales person and the need to establish trust and value in the prospect’s mind.

But, with my CRM hat still perched atop my head, my mind keeps drifting back to the data. The information you know about a customer is the secret weapon that helps you build rapport and leapfrog ahead of your competition (who are also desperate to gain that relationship advantage). Sales departments are really in a data arms race, based not around who has spent the most but around who has spent the best on technology to arm their sales staff with that precious data.

But it’s not just about the technology and the data. As my other writing specialty has demonstrated, it’s not the plane but the pilot who wins the fight – selling skill plays a major role. The sales person is still the make-or-break variable in the sales equation. Tony made that point eminently clear in tracing how sales has evolved into what it is today. The relationship and the sales person’s need to cultivate it is one of the few constants.

Before the webinar, Tony wrote up his thoughts in a white paper that we were proud to publish under the CRM Outsiders banner. It’s called “The Evolution of Professional Selling;” you can get a copy of it here and, once you’ve downloaded it, you can participate in our brief survey to determine just how exactly sales pros are selling today. Not only will your participation be helpful (we’ll publish the results, so you can get a feel for where you are along the evolutionary curve) but the first 200 to take the survey will get a copy of Tony’s book in the quickly-becoming-quaint print format.

Selling will always be more an art than a science, but it’s a poor artist who doesn’t take advantage of the science around him to create better art. Check out Tony’s white paper (and webinar, and book while you’re at it) to see how neatly technology and sales talent can dovetail together.

As I keep saying, there are as many ways to use social media for your business as there are businesses. The best way to use it, of course, will be based on the behavior of your business and on the behavior of your customers. It will not be based so much on the advice of social media experts – unless they’re strongly advocating you to look hard at yourself and the people who buy from you before making any decisions. Those people may know what they’re talking about.

There are other experts out there as well. Take author and founder of Social Media Explorer Jason Falls, who has a new book called “No Bulls#!t Social Media.” (An aside: do female cows find the term “bulls#!t” sexist?—the editor.) He’s interviewed by Michael Stelzner here in a discussion that purports to dispel social media myths.

There are exactly two myths tackled in their take-down. First is the clearly spurious notion that you can’t measure social media ROI (better dispelled by people like Kathy Herrmann and presentations like this). Anyone who still believes this is just grasping for an excuse not to explore how social media and social CRM can help their businesses.

But first, Falls comes out swinging against “social media purists,” who are somehow convincing people to use social media for just the touchy-feely parts of customer relationship building and are never getting to the selling part of the relationships. Who these purists are is difficult to ascertain – they aren’t people in the social CRM pundit-ocracy, surely, since the activities they describe are directly connected to sales.

However, I have heard cautions about some of the things Falls advocates, like not being afraid to include a selling message in a Facebook post. He gives a great example that runs counter to those blanket warnings; it’s about the sale of a remote car starter from a person in a small town to a customer in the same town that that seller already knew.

Or maybe it’s not a great example. The buyer and seller already had a relationship – they’d friended each other. The seller was a small businessman and already knew his customer base well, according to Falls. In this case, suggesting a remote car starter on a frosty winter day is hardly a semi-anonymous act of selling – it’s a call to action directed at people with whom a relationship is already well-established. It’s anything but a cold call.

The trick here is to ensure you have authenticity on your side. I don’t think Jason is dramatically off-base in what he says here – you should certainly take advantage of your relationships with customers to make sales, and if you can do it with a Twitter message or a Facebook post, then mission accomplished. However, i think some nuance is lacking. You need the relationship foundation to be solidly built in order for a social media pitch to work. Without past positive contact, a call to action in social media looks and feels like a sales pitch – and is an inhibitor of building that foundation that’s so critical to a long relationship with the customer.

How do you walk that tightrope? Well, now we’re back to the start of this post. The approach you take to steering a course between the extremes – social hobbyist and social hard-seller – depends on the behavior of your business and on the behavior of your customers, and more strongly on the latter, since they’re the ones who will pass judgment on the effectiveness of your approach. It will require careful writing and proper targeting, but it can succeed – if you’ve already laid the foundation for success.

I never get tired of talking about CRM as a discipline, not a technology. Yes, yes, yes – the technology allows you to scale the discipline, but ultimately, the ideas, initiatives and actions that result from CRM and reach customers are not executed by technology – they’re executed by people. (Clint Oram, SugarCRM’s CTO, riffs on this a bit in today’s IBM Smarter Planet Blog, with his phrase “focus on the opportunity, not the technology” showing up in several Tweets as a result).

This is why I always advocate for paying attention to those non-technological aspects of the chain of events that runs from contact acquisition through sales and then across the entire lifetime of the customer’s tenure with your business. Imagine this chain as something hung across a low bridge running across a river. Parts of the chain dip in the water. These links are the ones that you as a CRM manager can’t see – they represent sales people, delivery staff, contact center agents, and other people and things in the chain that your CRM technology has no control over, but which can spoil the customer experience and break the chain.

Here’s an example: a couple of months ago, my washing machine blew a seal. The utility room caused me to have a flashback to my Navy damage control training days; the thing apparently gave up right at the height of the cycle and dumped multiple gallons of water on the floor.

After much cursing and mopping (two more skills learned in the Navy), I needed to buy another washer. Instead of jumping in the car and making the rounds, I hit the website of Costco. I like Costco – they do a good job of customer service, and a decent job of managing their millions of customers. Soon, I found the one option that would work, a nifty Whirlpool washer, and pushed the shiny button to make it mine.

Delivery, however, had to be facilitated by a third party. Here’s where it got weird. I received a message several days later to set up delivery, and returned the call shortly thereafter. The woman on the other end said that they only delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was now too late for a Tuesday delivery. Okay, I said – how about Thursday? At this point she became a bit flustered because she didn’t have the schedule for Thursday and asked to call me back. Why begged the question: why did she call me when she had no ability to help?

A couple of hours later, she called, and I got on the schedule for the next delivery day. That was Thursday, according to what she said. Accordingly, I rearranged my schedule and worked at home Thursday, but as the hours ticked by with no sign of my washing machine, I decided to call someone. But the only number I had was for Costco. The rep there was dismayed that it was now 4 p.m. and the washer was nowhere to be seen – but she had no way to know who was delivering it. She was effusive in her efforts to make up for the delivery issue, but really what I needed was a washing machine.

Through the Costco rep’s detective efforts, she soon had the delivery company on the phone. The same somewhat bewildered woman told me they didn’t deliver on Thursdays – just on Fridays. Okay, then: can you deliver my washer this Friday? She “pulled some strings” and got me on the schedule, much to my feigned joy.

The next day, sure enough, the washer arrived. The delivery guys then spent several tense minutes trying to figure out how to get the old washer out, which I found weird since I wrangled the darned thing into the house on my own when I got it seven years ago. Ultimately, they took the back door to the house off the hinges and took out the expired machine, then brought the new one in before replacing the door.

And so, after two days of working at home and some aggravation, I had a washing machine.

Whose fault was it? Costco’s chain of little customer events started out well, then reached one of those links they had little control over – the delivery company – and went awry. Then their rep did everything she could to get things straight, and another dip with the delivery guys battling my utility room door.

Costco had very little control over these aspects of the customer experience. Their part of it was very pleasant, in fact. But the next time I made a major appliance purchase, did I go to Costco? No. And it was because of these links in the chain that they had little visibility and little control over.

Are there invisible links in the chain of your customers’ experiences – and do you know where they exist? Getting these things wrong will undo the good will your CRR efforts build, so follow the chain, spot the areas that can cause problems, and partner with the people who are in charge of them so that you can all be part of the greater CRM effort. The technology is great, but without people living the CRM discipline behind it your efforts may come to nothing.

I know my default definition of a customer: it’s someone who buys something from someone else. That’s the quick and dirty definition, and it applies well to most B2B and B2C selling situations. If you’re the seller, the need or desire to trade money for products or services on the part of someone else makes them the customer. Duh!

Well, hold that duh. My wife is in staffing and recruiting, and she does a darned good job of it. She has started to use the word “customers” in ways that don’t involve a traditional selling situation: her hiring managers are her customers. I’ve started to see this crop up in other places – IT seeing the users of technology in a business as its “customers,” for instance, or non-profits viewing the people they serve as “customers.”

I really like where this expanded definition starts to take us. Instead of viewing customers as buyers, they become people we serve. Our aims for serving them vary – we may want money, or we may want to accomplish a mission. But suddenly a customer is no longer someone who is there for us to take something from. Instead, the customer is someone for whom we’re doing something.

The challenge then is this: if the customer is someone who is benefitting from the efforts of another person, then what should we call that other person? He or she is no longer a “seller” in every case – and “server” sounds like the person who brings your food in a restaurant. (If you have a good name for this role, let me know!)

This re-definition of what a customer may be also indicates the power CRM has at managing relationships of all types. I’ve seen CRM used to track all kinds of relationships within businesses (sometimes, less elegantly than would be optimal, but still) – people to people, people to processes, people to things. That’s why companies like SugarCRM and Microsoft are presenting their platforms as great tools for developing business applications that aren’t purely CRM – they can take the management lessons learned from 20 years of CRM and apply them to managing all kinds of relationships inside and outside of the business.

But let’s get back to the traditional use of CRM as a tool to gain and retain customers. I’ve written in the past that many businesses slip up by emphasizing the “M” in management over the “R” in relationship. Customers want a relationship (or at least a good experience); they don’t engage with you hoping to be managed. Looking at the definition of “customer” differently can help shift the priority back where it belongs, on the relationship (and on the customer experience).

While the developers may be able to export the abstract concepts of managing relationships to technology, the secret to developing a culture of customer service at all touch points isn’t going to be mastered in the technology. It’s going to spring from hiring the right people at the outset, and making sure they understand that the secret to sales is in serving the customer, not necessarily in simply doing what’s needed to extract money from him.

Really. No Joke.

The Mobile Applications consultant, from Providence, R.I., has asked that people keep their purchases to $3 or less and that they tweet or blog about his project. He has also put in the facility to allow individuals to “pay it forward” by adding funds to the card if they so wish. His Twitter Account posts the current balance each time a transaction is made on the card.

It was while researching Mobile Payments for a start-up company in Boston that he came up with the idea. He took a screenshot of his Starbucks card on his iPhone and emailed it to himself. He found that by opening the image on any of his phones that the Starbucks barista could scan it and take funds from his Starbucks card account. He then made the image available to the world.

People with no smartphone were printing out the picture and taking that into Starbucks, one person even had the barista scan his laptop screen.

At the start of the project, in July, Stark had less than 100 followers on Twitter, so the card balance was always fairly low. But then, over the first weekend in August, his experiment was discovered and his followers have already gone past the 5,000 mark in a matter of days.

The card is constantly emptied and charged, with anonymous donations being made by those individuals wanting to contribute something back.

Stark has been criticised by some people who say he should donate money to a good cause rather than giving away coffee to people with smartphones, but he sees his experiment more as an example of “humans being good.”

“It’s literally giving people hope,” Stark said. “Ultimately the goal is for more people to do this kind of thing. I admit it seems a little frivolous to give away coffee to people with iPhones. But imagine if you had a CVS card and you could give someone $10 for their Alzheimer’s medication. The concept of frictionless social giving is very attractive. And this is just the beginning of that.”

It may be that, in the years to come, this kind of activity becomes the norm, with businesses being able to “give” their services for “free” – funded, in part or whole, by donations from users or individuals who see it as a worthwhile cause, in the same way that Shareware computer programmers accept donations for their software.

So is this a simple social experiment, or is it, perhaps, a great marketing and advertising ploy? Stark is getting his name known globally for the price of a few cups of coffee and that’s simply got to be cheap advertising!

You can visit Jonathan Stark’s Starbucks Card here.

This post originally appeared on the SugarUK Blogs.

The various pricing schemes can create confusion among buyers as they try to assess the total cost-of-ownership (TCO) of different CRM services priced under various schemes. For example, there are still several companies offering license-based pricing models. Also, some companies offer a subscription option in addition to a perpetual license option.

In July we did a comparative price analysis of four leading CRM solutions for mid-market organizations. Forrester Research defines mid-market organizations as any organization with revenues of less than $1 billion and/or fewer than 1,000 employees. The CRM solutions included in this TCO analysis are:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
• Sage SalesLogix
• Salesforce.com
• SugarCRM

For this analysis we looked at the following costs and requirements: for premise-based solutions we included the server and end-user (named user) licenses and annual support and maintenance fees. For on-demand solutions we looked at the annual end-user (named user) subscription fees. Each solution had to include mobile access, integration with Microsoft Outlook, a customizable reporting engine and configuration and customization capabilities.

We looked at the three-year TCO (total cost of ownership) for a 10-user; 25-user; 100-user and 500-user deployment. We assumed the following storage requirements: 5GB for the 10-user; 10GB for the 25-user; 15GB for the 100-user and 25GB for the 500-user deployments. For this analysis, we used standard list pricing as available in July 2011. Term, volume and other discounts (such as discounts available under the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement) have not been considered.

You can download this analysis here.

Here’s a preview of the 3 year TCO for a deployment of 25 users: