EVOLUTION OF BPR

New partnership in “Socialprise” neighborhood

Posted on the July 28th, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Sales Force Automation by Gregory Yankelovich

The IT industry is notorious for it’s love of jargon. There are so many terms flying around that most people cannot keep up with their meaning. Enterprise 2.0 is one of those terms.
This definition comes from the second source of all truth, Wikipedia

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

The new term, coined by Marc Perramond of InsideView, is rapidly gaining popularity

Socialprise applications are a natural convergence of social media and enterprise applications, and emerge as a mash-up of both the information and user experience of these previously separate universes.

Socialprise applications enable organizations to discover and distill highly relevant information from an expanding sea of structured and unstructured data sources and present it in the meaningful context of specific business processes.I wrote before about SalesView, one of the first "socialprise" applications I have encountered. The product is a "mashup" of Contact centric information, available in multiple Web sites, with popular SFA Enterprise applications, such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, and others.

I wrote before about SalesView, one of the first "socialprise" applications I have encountered. The product is a "mashup" of Contact centric information, available in multiple Web sites, with popular SFA Enterprise applications, such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, and others.

 

Well, today the InsideView announced their first strategic partnership with Landslide Technologies, the company that provides "work style management" software "for salespeople, not their managers".

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -July 28, 2008-InsideView today released SalesView for LandslideTM, a fully bundled business search and intelligence application available to all Landslide Technologies customers. InsideView and Landslide share a singular focus on generating sales results from the ground up by helping individual salespeople.

The Landslide will develop their own "mashup" to the SalesView platform and will market it to their existing and new customers.

AMR misses the target

Posted on the July 19th, 2008 under CRM, Enterprise Software by Gregory Yankelovich

Would you come for advise to a doctor who cannot pronounce Health Care? I wouldn’t and it is mystifying why companies would want to pay for CRM research report from AMR – “The Customer Management Market Sizing Report, 2007-2012″ if it’s analysts do not understand that CRM stands for Relationship Management – not Customer Management. Even Wikipedia does not recognize such a thing. I would guess because there is no such thing. You can attempt to manage customers, but it will not be a very long attempt or very successful one because there will be no customers any more to manage.

Small company CRM

Posted on the July 15th, 2008 under CRM by Gregory Yankelovich

A few weeks ago, during InsideCRM webinar on Top 10 Things To Know about CRM, one of the attendants came with the question – is there a reason for CRM in a very small company, one person company? The answer I gave then (“primary value of CRM to one person company is in Contact management”) indicates that I am not very quick thinker, and that I tend to focus too much on Sales pillar of CRM strategy because it is much more challenging to implement profitably. However what I lack in speed…

This question came into light again when I read this in Seth Godin’s blog

If your small company can’t deliver a better experience (in areas people care about) than a big one, why on Earth should someone do business with you? I’m not saying you must have faster service, a bigger website, lower prices and twenty-four hour a day phone support. I’m saying that for some of your customers, you have to be monstrously, demonstrably, better.

There is surely no need to break informational “silos” at a one person company, when a person has informational “silos” problem it is more of a clinical challenge that a business one. However the flawless Customer communications, fulfillment, billing and support processes are a very real and formidable challenge even when you have very few customers. Properly used CRM application can help you do just that through use of simple practices of documenting ALL your Customer communication instances and the promises/commitments you have made during these communications. The next step is to create and automate simple workflows to translate these communications into Calendar entries with ticklers to remind you when the time comes to act on your promises. Commonly most people find these things to be too tedious and time consuming to practice, but of course most people do not succeed in small business.

It is unfortunate that so many CRM initiatives, large and small, are focused on achieving some efficiency instead of effectiveness of doing right things by your Customer.