And I’m not really a technology guy – I’m a writer first, so I guess I’m a word guy.

That fact – combined with the varied inputs I get from my non-technology friends – helps drive home a point that the CRM industry – and those seeking solutions to customer relationship issues – needs to recognize: we aren’t speaking the same language.

Talk to a vendor and you are exposed to a blast of jargon: CRM, SFA, CEM, APIs, the cloud, SaaS, multi-tenancy, single-tenancy, multi-instance – and those are just a smattering of the technology terms. We also use the semi-codified language of professional sales: leads, prospects, conversions, close rates, pipeline, funnel, and so on.

Most people can “sound out” one of those terms easily enough. Dump them all out over the course of three sentences and you’re going to have a baffled newcomer to CRM on your hands. I routinely have to explain CRM to people when they ask me what I write about, and they are not typically unsophisticated people – nor are they people who would not benefit from using CRM in many cases.

The confusion comes about because CRM users speak their own language – the language of their own problems. They don’t speak the language of the CRM industry; that’s a language conceived in the context of software development. CRM users speak about their own conditions, because those are the pressing issues that are hobbling their businesses. “Marketing is having trouble finding new customers,” or “We’re losing customers to the competition,” or “We need our sales team to be more efficient,” or “We need to stop making customers angry when they call for service.”

Those terms – and a lot more of them – are the way the drivers for investigating technology solutions are articulated by people who are immersed in business, not in technology. This is an entirely different language than the one spoken by the vendors, and it may fatally compromise the search for a solution unless the organization is large enough to have an IT department skilled at translating between the language of business problems and the language of business technology.

Last year, I had a great conversation with Mike Morgan, the CEO of PRM experts RelayWare, about this very topic. He recounted explaining to potential customers his product, and then having them come back at him with their tales of business problems. Then, he’d have to connect the dots – it wasn’t immediately obvious to the potential customers that the product he had described was an exact fit to their problems. Mike realized he had to act as a translator to convert the way the two sides of the conversation spoke into a common language that helped the potential customer toward a solution and the vendor toward a sale.

“They don’t Google ‘PRM’ or ‘CRM,’ said Mike. “They Google, ‘How do I manage partner information.’ And often, that gets them to a solution that has less horsepower or scalability than they really need.”

So what do you do with this realization? If you’re a CRM buyer, do a little research before speaking to vendors, but realize that the language barrier exists – and then look for vendors who are willing to learn your language. That’s a great indication of their enthusiasm for the concept of CRM, and a good marker of a promising CRM partner.

If you’re a vendor, remember that CRM is necessary only in the context of the business using it – it’s there to fix business problems. Implementation is not an end – it’s a means. Thus, it’s very important to re-frame your discussions to the context of the potential CRM user (or, really, for the user of any sales enablement or marketing automation technology) and to use language that he or she uses to describe problems. Put the technology in a context that the user understands.

Just as you shouldn’t force CRM users to alter the way they work to fit an application, CRM vendors shouldn’t depend on CRM users to alter the way they understand and articulate their business problems to fit the vendors’ ways of describing solutions. Know the language barrier exists in many businesses, and work with users to break it down.

One of the cagier things Brent said touched on where customer service is today. We all hear about things like Comcast Cares, in which complaining customers on Twitter are handled via social media. Ooooh! Neato!

Well, not that neato. See, the social media service channel is still largely disconnected from the regular service channel. Customers go to Twitter because the regular service channels have utterly failed them. Instead of service via social media, Brent called it “social PR” – it’s a reaction to the customers’ ability to broadcast their dissatisfaction, and an effort to silence the squeaky wheels rather than improve the overall quality of service for all customers.

I see a similar trend happening with larger social CRM efforts, or at least efforts to engage in a two-way conversation with customers in social media. Instead of really building processes that make social engagement part of the daily plan for employees, there’s a band-aid attempt to engage with people at the extremes – either really angry or really happy – and then only when there’s a lull in business. In other words, the person in charge of social media has other tasks, and engages when and if he can, starting with the most intense customers.

That degree of engagement is better than nothing, but it creates what I call “the cameo appearance effect.” Instead of being truly present in discussions about your business, you play a walk-on role, like Jack Benny in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World.” Your presence is more than welcome, but you’re there and gone – and people are left wondering where you went.

If customers choose to take it personally, it can seem as though you don’t consider them sufficiently important to talk to. Sure, you posted a response to Texasarmadilloguy when he had a problem with your product, but you can’t be bothered when Jellomonkey13 asks about something similar shortly thereafter? That just seems rude. The customers aren’t privy to your back-story: the guy who monitors Twitter and Facebook and all your other channels has meetings all day that pertain to the other aspects of his job (which are often considered more important than social media) and gets mere snippets of time to read and respond, and so he never saw Jellomonkey13’s post in time to react to it.

How do you avoid the cameo effect? You have to choose the right people, processes and technology (sound familiar?) to do the job, and then make sure social engageacment efforts are funded as though they are serious aspects of your CRM efforts – because that’s what they are.

Which would you prefer:  a conversation in which the other party is half-present, or no conversation at all? If your customers would opt for the latter option, you need to up your social game or cut your losses. But with customers becoming more social, abandoning social is not really an option.

What is your business doing to try to stay engaged, and how do you find the resources for doing it well? If you’ve figured out a solution, send it my way.

The discussions clearly delineated the factors that make the move toward social anything difficult. There was a sincere desire to connect with customers and to build real relationships; the era of one-to-one marketing is truly upon us. But at the same time, we’re being asked to do this on an industrial scale – thus, marketing automation, sales performance tracking, sales alerting and so on.

The question becomes this: how do we use these productivity enhancers to get us to the point where we have a one-to-one conversation – or, as Chris Kovac of integrated marketing firm Nicholson Kovac suggested, how do we ultimately drive the conversation off social media and onto a telephone call?

That’s a tough one – because we use social media in our businesses precisely because they are where the customers and potential customers want to communicate. The phone call you hope for as a salesperson can change the nature of your relationship with those contacts. How do you negotiate that transition?

The other aspect of scale that has me thinking is how it can be a conversation multiplier. You’ve probably heard the concept that a discussion on a social media channel appears to be a 1-to-1 conversation, but in reality it’s an 1-to-1-to-many conversation. There’s a direct communication aspect, but there’s also an aspect of broadcasting to it – which fits nicely with our ideas of scaling our efforts in an industrial way.

However, if your responses in a conversation are particularly good (or, heaven forbid, particularly bad), they can spawn an entire new set of 1-to-1 (through channels like email) and 1-to-1-to-many (through social media) conversations. Those are great – unless you lack the capacity to handle dealing with them all. Then you have a real problem. Ignoring conversations you catalyzed through other conversations is a great way to alienate people – you leave them asking, “why aren’t we worthy of your attention?”  You also miss great opportunities to get to the stage Chris Kovac described, and then you’re just leaving money on the table.

I don’t think we’re to this point yet – most social efforts are still hit-and-miss as we figure out what works and what doesn’t. But some time in the near future, a business will nail it, and then fail to plan for its success by lacking a strategy for translating 1-to-1-to many into 1-to-1-to-a-sale.

Have you thought about the ways you can transition from a social media relationship to a 1-to-1 relationship? Have you looked far enough into the future to a point where your on-line conversations may begin to place demands on your team that they can’t handle? Or will technology come to the rescue?

People. Process. Results.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Chip Meyers, Sales Operations Manager at Insource Performance Solutions. Insource, in addition to being both a SugarCRM customer and an InsideView customer, they have a really cool tag line! My own mantra has been “People, Process and Technology – In that order” for many years. But, looking at the Insource tag line, I had to take pause, and think – ‘hmm, that one is a bit more powerful’. Insource is about helping companies ‘get it done’; “refine, manage and execute labor-intensive processes within our customers’ manufacturing and distribution facilities.” But to take it even further;  “Insource is accountable for increasing throughput, improving quality, and reducing cost.”

My conversation with Chip was not as much about what Insource does, but the early stages of customer engagement, the sales process. However, I became a little nervous when I began doing a little bit of research, as the bar seems quite high, based on what Insource itself, does for its clients. I am not sure I am ready to change my own personal tag line just yet, but if I do, I know where to look!

Expectations

In speaking with Chip, I started off simple and light and asked; with respect to the implementation of the system (SugarCRM and SalesView), what are the expectations?:

Our corporate culture is all about performance; that is what we sell.  So with anything we do; be it a new customer engagement or implementation of a new resource, there is an expectation of success.

That pretty much says it. In order to dig in a bit, I further asked how success should be (and is) measured throughout the organization. Chip’s answer here surprised me a little, but then discussing it further it was more clear. To save you the same confusion, I will give a little bit of background. Insource does not consider itself a “transactional sales company” rather, Insource is more focused on “long term engagements with customers, and to become part of their organizations”. So, back to the measurement of success:

Although we are a metrics driven company I’m going to focus on the subjective way we are judging CRM success.    I am not that interested in activity metrics of a typical SFA (although Sugar can do that) I am interested in results.

During the course of the conversation, Chip relayed to me that the cycles are typically three to six months, sometimes longer. This falls squarely in the Business to Business realm. During the sales cycle, there is an accumulation of a tremendous of amount of customer information. This information needs to be captured, shared and the users need to adopt the application if they are going to find value. The sales cycle is not simply long without cause, the products and services provided need to match the needs of the clients. Customers will speak with many different parts of the Insource organization, including Sales, Engineering and Operations:

The data capture starts with Sales, and transfers through to Engineering and ultimately to the Operations team who manage the ongoing relationships.  Sugar has enabled that flow of information to be much more efficient and that ultimately improves our ability to serve our customers.   As everyone has seen this happening, adoption has improved.  I call that success.

How smart are the customers – Very!

I wanted to bring my conversation back around a bit, to some topics we will be talking about with Chip at the event in Boston. This is also very high up when the topic of Social CRM or Inbound Marketing are discussed. I asked Chip his perspective on whether “prospects are more educated than they used to be, just a few years ago?” Chip has a great answer, worth reading in full. The interesting part is the transition over time:

Without a doubt!  We are one of the original innovators in our field.  So, years ago, our challenge was just explaining to people what the business model was and why it made sense.  Now there are a number of companies trying to do what we do, and therefore more general awareness in the marketplace.  We are now at point where we are seeking to cut through the clutter and get our message heard above the din. In our business, like many, it is all about serving the customer and making ourselves invaluable to them. An effective CRM strategy and aggregating market intelligence so our business development team can be better informed than our competition is critical.

I cannot add much to that, so I will leave well enough alone. I am quite impressed with how Insource is approaching the process. As Chip relayed to me a couple times, it is about culture. With a strong focus on customer success, any technology decisions simply need to fit in, enable and scale what people are already doing. I am hoping that you will join us at the event next week, where Chip will be demonstrating the applications in action!

This post was the 3rd in the series, the first an interview with Dharmesh Shah, Co-Author of Inbound Marketing and Founder of Hubspot, The second an interview with Umberto Milletti, CEO and co-founder of InsideView, (about Intelligent Aggregation) – all leading up to what is shaping up to be an awesome event in Boston on March 23: Bridging the gap between Social Media hype and business value, sponsored by BrainSell.

So here goes…(I apologize in advance for the parts that don’t make sense.)

…If you are a B2C company, and you are getting excited about being “social” with your customers, you are 200 years too late. You should be excited about being able to better manage and measure the results from the fact that you (hopefully) already interact with your customers in various channels, and for various reasons.

I’m seeing that a lot of the “social” companies that have a good footing right now – Jive especially – stem from internal social collaboration concepts. This needs to be pushed outward. I think they get that and I look forward to seeing how that progresses. Lithium does a good job of creating a manageable customer community – so it will be need to see how those two drive each other’s innovation.

Social monitoring and “listening” tools are great. But we need these to be simple enough to plug in to platforms and channels/networks to inform active decisions, or at least let us know that something might be “about to happen.”  Radian6 – I believe – is on top of this, but frankly I am too socially illiterate to really know right now.

From a B2B sales perspective – how does social media and other web 2.0 data make a sales person’s life useful? I look at tools like Insideview’s SalesView and that makes a lot of sense – showing me aggregated data, but also the hot spots (so to speak) in my networks as they pertain to my contacts, prospects and accounts. Of course, all of this stuff is best viewed from inside a CRM system. While that is great news for companies like SugarCRM, I hope that doesn’t make companies like InsideView too dependent on CRM systems (which are so moored to relation databases and static data) for distribution and relevance. Or it gives InsideView a huge ace in its hand – bringing crappy old CRM products like Siebel up to date.

Back to B2C – when it comes to “social CRM” you have to think about your goals, not just “metrics” in a generic sense. Are you trying to create communities?  Or, are you trying to glean feedback from people “out there” and then aggregate that for valuable use? Just “getting people together” is kinda useless. I wrote a few weeks back about beRelevant. I just met again with their CEO Randy Hamilton and they really understand the concept of generating value among the social consumers in the world – creating either endless or purpose-driven feedback loops for brands in a very cool user format. They have a ways to go in really launching that concept, but it’s a very compelling place to start.

Ok, glad I got those out of my head…I’ll probably completely disagree with myself by the end of the weekend…but please, I invite you to comment and help me get some more grasp on a lot of these concepts…

Sugar partner PSTech will be exhibiting its Sugar/Cisco integration – powering next generation telephony tools. The CTI value proposition in a Sugar/Cisco combo is very strong – with automatic capture of call details in the Sugar record; screen-pops; click-to-call; and other cool integrations with Sugar activities, and the ability to search the Sugar database right from an IP-enabled phone.

Also, IT services provider and Sugar partner it-novum will present its integration between SugarCRM and SAP. The strong back-office features of SAP coupled with the flexible CRM tools in Sugar are a great “complete solution” covering most processes and activities within any organization.

Both it-novum and Sugar partner Genius4U will be manning the SugarCRM booth in the CeBIT Open Source Arena.

In addition, two customer case studies showcasing SugarCRM will be presented at the event. Bernecker  & Rainer’s Owen Davies will outline how his company worked with Sugar partner Kinamu to integrate Sugar, SAP and Lotus Notes – check it out here. And Matthias Brück , IT Manager and Manager Global CRM at Roxtec International AB will discuss his firm’s successful international roll out of Sugar to more than 200 users (more info here).

If you’re en route to Hannover for the show next week – come check us out and say ” GutenTag!” to our partners and customers in attendance!

The webinar is being hosted by 1:1 Media, and you can register online here. The webinar will take place Wednesday, October 28 at 11Am pacific time/2PM eastern.

We will be talking about issues such as how to know when it is time to upgrade your CRM system, key adoption driving tips, and a look at key trends driving CRM development.

We will be taking questions throughout the webinar, so feel free to join the conversation.

It is great to see the different types of CRM enthusiasts in the Sugar universe – from the single Community Edition user to the several hundred seat large scale implementation. But all agreed that they loved Sugar for the flexibility, the low risk associated with the deployment, and the great TCO proposition.

A special thanks to some of the great participants at the events. For one, our customers Milsoft – who pitched in with some great off the cuff reference information based on their extensive roll out of Sugar. And thanks go to Epicom – a Sugar VAR partner who has helped a lot of businesses find success with Sugar in the southwest region.

All in all – a great series of events and some great insight gained from how people use Sugar. Thanks to all attendees, and the ensuing user groups in those cities are bound to be a huge success thanks to the enthusiastic Sugar users we were fortunate to meet this week.

Thanks to his innovative take on technology, healthcare and simply improving processes around people and systems – Todd has been named CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Very cool.

A bit of a boast post – but does go to show you – if you have software flexible enough to help you realize your vision, good things will follow

The prospect deals in software they distribute to both customers and partners – and thus have software bugs they track with a stand alone app. Ideally, bugs would be tracked to customer cases, but the CRM system they have cannot support this today.

As a tech-focused company, this firm also has various projects that need to be managed – again ideally integrated with the CRM system to manage activities and availability of resources.

Finally, as a growing company, there are hiring processes and other HR issues that are currently not supported by any automated system – just the usual email and spreadhseets scenario.

I explained how Sugar as a platform is more than just CRM – including the project and bug tracking modules but also noting the Module Builder platform and how easily one could create an HR-candidate tracking system. The prospect, who would be the admin of the system, said “It’s like getting four for one – I don’t have to administer and maintain a bunch of systems” and even noted that a 4x reduction in license price was less of the benefit to his peace of mind.

So, my question to Sugar users that leverage the additional modules such as project management, bug tracker, Module Builder, etc. – which is the greater benefit: the ease of maintenance or the cost savings implied?