When businesses are searching for CRM software, they aren’t just looking for a generic system to manage their sales, marketing and support teams. These days, companies choose software like people choose their cars. It is all about finding the right fit for your specific needs. A married couple with twins on the way will want an SUV that can fit two strollers in the back. A farmer with 150 livestock will need a CRM solution that can track health information and breeding statistics.
To meet this need, Microsoft has partnered with value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide customized software built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. Just like new cars at a dealership, there are a ton of options to choose from when it comes to customized CRM software. So, Software Advice, Inc. decided to simplify things a bit by choosing 20 major industries and highlighting a vendor customization for each one. This isn’t a “best-of” compilation, but it is a great resource that gives you an idea of what all is out there for your industry. Check out the blog post here.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
5. Build “Eco-system” for Adoption Management. Most CRM initiatives are launched to change way of doing business in organization – if they don’t, the economics of such an initiative should be questioned. However concerns about adoption challenges often shift the focus to functions and features from processes and economics.
I just re-read an excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group. Jeremiah used to work for Forrester Research and just recently joined the Altimeter. There are a couple of quotes that started me going
Beyond monitoring, insight from the social sphere is untapped. Social media monitoring is just the first baby step, most companies haven’t tapped into what the data actually means.
We all, more or less, know what monitoring is. Here is an example of definition that come reasonably close to the marketing context after the word “enemy” is replaced by something more appropriate, like “customer” or “consumer”, depending on what is one monitors.
The act of listening, carrying out surveillance on, and/or recording of enemy emissions for intelligence purposes.
So presumably obtaining “the insight” and/or “intelligence” is the purpose of the exercise. The most interesting question for me is – what are we going to do with this precious intelligence when we get it?
The second quote from this post, used here out of sequence, is
… marketers were used to ‘Bowling’, where marketers could easily throw a message down the aisle and hit the pins with great confidence. Now, he eloquently describe, it was more like ‘Pinball’ where a marketer could load the message up, shoot it out, but have no idea where it will end up.
It seem to me that despite all the talk by the “enlightened” marketers, by “listening” they still try to figure how to control the flow of messaging, rather than to “hear” and engage into conversation. “Listening” without deep desire to “hear” cannot yield any insight or “Aha!” moment, and these are the ones that lead to meaningful and measurable actions. No wonder there is so much yearning for a magic ROI formula for Social Media investments. It is very difficult to figure a return on knowledge you didn’t bother to learn yet.
Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
A blog about experiences, curiosity and the never-ending search for ways to do better things better