Featured Authors


This section highlights the contributions of our Featured Authors, individuals who are recognized for their achievements in advancing practice of Customer Relationship Management both within the U.S. and internationally. We are pleased to announce a stellar line-up of contributors including: Dick Lee, Jeff Tanner, Wayne Thompson, Michael Chuchmuch, Jeff Pedowitz and many other CRM industry luminaries.


Would YOU Listen to You?

Chris Carfi
Christopher Carfi




Communication breakdown
It's always the same
I'm having a nervous breakdown
Drive me insane

- Led Zeppelin

Are you still communicating with your customers using the same lame, stilted "business-speak" that you always have? One of the classic resources on preventing this is McMarketing vs. The Real Deal by Carolyn Elefant.

Although it was penned for individuals in the legal profession, it is chock-full of good stuff, generalizable to any industry.

Some juicy bits:
"It's pretty clear that law marketing has invaded large firm practice - and guess what? They're all doing the same thing. Two large firm attorneys spoke at the conference that I attended; both had the requisite power point presentations which they'd also printed out on paper emblazoned with the firm logo and contact information. Both attorneys gave polished presentations, explaining just enough, in general terms - but not "giving away the store." In other words, none of the papers cited the statutory support for the matters discussed or listed references where people might go to learn more. So, that I gathered is Practice 1 of Biglaw McMarketing - give away enough to make 'em call you, but no more."

(By the way, McMarketing Practice 2 is "Be Elusive." You've never done that to a prospect, right?)

Although Carolyn, a solo practitioner, was presenting against The Big Names on the card, let's see what happened at the end of the day:

"Finally, here's the beauty of not following marketing rules sometimes and just going with the flow. By the end of the conference, the rumblings about starting a trade association became a true organized effort and I was drafted as Legislative Director and interviewed for the local TV station. Because of my blogging background (naturally, I touted my professional blog during my talk), I was able to throw together a website for our fledgling organization while others started the efforts on the Hill. Had I just waltzed into the conference and left after my talk, this opportunity never would have fallen into my lap. Only I know it really didn't fall, it's the product of a foundation that I've been laying in this field for at least a decade." (emphasis added)

Doing generic presentations with PowerPoint is pretty near the top of the list of Things That Are The Devil. (Happy to add that I think it's been at least three years since I walked into a customer meeting with a presentation, unless it was specifically requested. The look of circuits popping when calmly stating "No, no presentation...actually was hoping we could chat and you could help us better understand what your goals are" is priceless.)

While on the subject, here's a clue. All press releases look the same. Yeah, you've written one like this at some point in your career (and, guilty as charged, I have too):

[Company name], a [noted | leading | large] provider of [insert industry name here] solutions is [happy | pleased | thrilled] to announce [a new customer | a new product].

[Paragraph with lame details here]

[Paragraph with glowing quote from executive here, that was written by someone else]

[Paragraph with contrived quote from a customer here, that was written by someone else]

[Paragraph from a "Noted Industry Analyst"® here, that took three weeks to get approved through the analyst's business prevention department]

[Pollyanna penultimate paragraph painting priceless predictions for the future of the industry]

[About Company X, a rehash of the lame stuff in the first sentence of the first paragraph]

I can hear the cries now..."Oh, we can't be creative and do things differently. We wouldn't look like the others in our industry, then. And besides that, it's hard."

Yes, it is. That's why it is worth doing.

Visual Communication

Actively pursuing a more visual communication style is one way to begin to make yourself stand out against your competitors when communicating with prospects and customers. Unfortunately, "visual" is a place that is often uncomfortable to "traditional" business folk, those of us steeped in spreadsheets and cover letters. And, yes, in some ways, it is like learning a new language. We have been taught that the safe, five-sentence paragraph is The Way You Communicate in business. However, there are an increasing number of resources available both online and offline that provide a number of pointers. Here are four of the best:
  • Logtic+Emotion- David Armano's blog constants expands the boundaries of what is possible in clear, visual business communication
  • Communication Nation - Dave Gray is one of the pioneers of visual thinking, and has forgotten more than I'll ever know about its application to business
  • Visual Insight - Eileen Clegg is a visual journalist who takes business meeting notes like no one else you have ever seen
  • Thoughts Illustrated - Dave Davison is one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley, and is constantly exploring new mashups, ideas and startups that embrace visual ways to simplify communication and corporate/customer knowledge management


Although it may take some time to become comfortable with the tools of visual communication, don't fret. The learning curve is worth it, and you'll soon begin to see benefits both in the expanded vocabulary you'll possess that you can call upon to communicate complex ideas, as well as the vast difference you'll begin to notice in differentiation against your competitors.

Read more from Chris Carfi. Go to:www.cerado.com

To contact Chris Carfi: click here and select his email.


Migrating from Sales-Dominant to Multi-Channel Strategies

John F. (Jeff) Tanner Jr., Ph.D. John F. (Jeff) Tanner Jr., Ph.D.







What we are willing to accept as truth is often what we are told repeatedly. It costs 5 times as much to acquire a customer as it does to retain one. Turnover in a well-run sales force is still at least 30%. Salespeople are in it for the money. These truths, often believed to be self-evident, are not proved by the exception; rather, the exception has been made the truth by pitchmen and evangelists and believed by those who need a silver bullet.

Loyalty is, perhaps, the most nagging of business truths as it seems to be the most logical, obvious, and personally relevant. We know from our own experience as buyers that we are willing to pay more for brands we love. We tolerate problems and forgive poor service, and we tell our friends that they, too, should buy this brand, but do the truths about loyalty transfer to the B2B world, especially when salespeople are the primary go-to-market channel? And how can companies maintain customer loyalty among those customers that just are too small to be served by salespeople?

Migrating customers to lower-cost channels and thus increasing customer value (profit) has been one of the promises of CRM. The process, is not easy, particularly given how companies have used salespeople to build loyalty. Transferring loyalty from the rep to the company is a laudable goal. Achieving that goal, however, requires some significant re-thinking, beginning with the implicit strategy of using salespeople to develop loyalty.

Salesperson as Cause
Some industries seek to hire salespeople who can bring accounts with them. The risk is, of course, that those salespeople will take those accounts elsewhere at the first sign of the next big paycheck. In some industries, such as services, the consensus is that if an organization loses a salesperson, losing only 50% of the rep’s customers is considered good. Other negative consequences, is performance limits, increasing cost-to-serve ratios, and customer knowledge hoarding, can also occur when the recruitment model is to acquire accounts through stealing salespeople.

Rep loyalty models can occur as a natural sales strategy. One strategy is to hire a new salesperson to develop a territory. At some point, that salesperson has developed a few accounts to such a size that smaller accounts can no longer be managed. A new rep is hired, the lower-value accounts transferred to the new rep, and the cycle begins anew. The objective is for the rep to build a relationship which then should lead to cross-selling, strategic collaboration, and the other benefits of loyalty.

As a customer acquisition strategy, salesperson relationship models can be effective. Further, relationship management on the vendor side by an account manager makes sense. The challenge is how to broaden loyalty beyond the individual. Further, rep loyalty does not yield advocacy, though it may yield greater margins via price premiums, as well as tolerance and forgiveness (as long as the rep remains with the company), and cross-selling opportunities.

In addition, many B2B organizations face a cost-to-serve matrix that is out of whack. Managing small but loyal accounts with salespeople is expensive and annoying to those accounts. Years ago, Shell’s Oil Tire and Battery division migrated lower value dealers to the web and call centers. Expecting a customer uproar, imagine Shell executives’ surprise when dealer satisfaction actually increased. Many of the lower-value dealers considered salespeople to be a regular intrusion into their busy days, not the trusted advisor that Shell believed.

As illustrated in Figure 2, companies have a greater propensity to relate with some buyers than others. Typically, a company’s propensity to relate is a function of account size; more will be invested in a relationship with larger accounts than smaller. There are, however, some organizations that recognize that value is also about advocacy and collaboration, and there are some smaller buyers worthy of more relationship investment because of these other criteria. For example, there are some buyers, called “lead users,” that through their use (and often adaptation) of the product lead the company into profitable new product development and/or new markets. These buyers create value through product development, though their size may be small.

At the same time, some customers have a greater propensity to relate than do others. They are more attitudinally and behaviorally loyal, and for whatever reason, the product and brand are more central to their professional life. As Figure 2 illustrates, customers will self-manage the relationship when it is appropriate.


Migrating Lower Value Customers to Non-Sales Channels
Migrating lower-value customers to non-sales channels is a strategy adopted by many B2B companies struggling with the high costs of a field sales force. One challenge is how to not fall victim to Cost Reduction Management, because that can weaken the customer’s propensity to relate. There is a real need to reduce costs, to migrate lower value customers to lower cost channels. At the same time, there is also a need to replace those things (or as many as possible) that make a salesperson invaluable: listening, responding, and adapting.

A salesperson listens to the customer as part of a dialog. A salesperson who has a successful relationship with a customer does not just tell the customer what to buy but also listens to the customer’s descriptions of what is needed, what the context is. The problems in buying the product, using the product, and disposing of the product when finished. Listening, as performed by professional salespeople, is comprised of several actions: capturing the customer’s message; interpreting the meaning of that message; and acknowledging receipt and understanding back to the customer.

Further, a salesperson then responds by using the knowledge that was gained. Perhaps it is training the customer in order to retain more value in use, to alter the product or service to better meet needs, or provide tools to navigate the political channels and make the desired purchase.

Finally, the salesperson adapts. Adaptation could mean a new sales strategy or advocating for the customer and getting poor policies changed. Salespeople also adapt by changing the altering. Note: Amazon is not adapting when you are told that others who bought X also bought Y. Making affiliative offers is simply responding. Recognizing that a customer wants a deeper or shallower relationship and changing how often that customer is called upon is adaptation. Similarly, changing from an affiliative to a consultative sales approach is adapting.

When companies migrate to non-sales channels, or to channels that intermittently use different people for each conversation, the challenge is to mimic those three characteristics of listening, responding, and adapting. Responding is probably the easiest action, if listening occurs. The listening challenge in non-sales channels is capturing and understanding the customer’s message.

Adaptation can occur when predictive models are built and new offerings made. Yet real-time adaptation is difficult, again because of the listening challenge. Systems are becoming available, such as one offered by Infor (www.infor.com) that create near real-time models to enable quicker adaptation, but in many instances, the ability to create a near real-time model cannot result in near real-time adaptation. The channel simply cannot respond quickly enough but these models do enable faster response and adaptation than traditional modeling.

In spite of the difficulties, migrating lower value customers to other channels still makes sense. At the same time, one challenge is to avoid engaging in Cost Reduction Management.

Involve customers in the migration process. Many companies assume that customers prefer salespeople to other methods of contact but that’s not always the case. Sales calls take time and aren’t always convenient – lower value customers may actually prefer alternative methods of ordering or receiving service. Involve some of these lower value customers in designing alternative methods of contact and find out how they want to be served.

Make it easy to continue to do business. There are still some businesses that make it hard to find a phone number, a name, or any other way to contact the company other than by sending an email to a “contact us” address. While nearly everyone has some internet experience, assuming your site is obvious in its design can sink a migration effort. Customers don’t want to search for contact information – make it easy for them to do business with you.

Continue to listen, respond, and adapt. Companies usually do a great job of making it easy to buy, but the only information they can gather is transactional data. Customers have a lot more to offer. Research indicates that customer loyalty grows much stronger when customers believe they are listened to, and further, they believe they are listened to when someone responds with some form of “I hear you,” and then takes some action. Recognize that there is more to automating customer contact than creating an online purchasing portal – build into the system ways to collect data and then acknowledge that you are listening and responding.


Making the Move Of course, moving customers to lower value channels is only part of the overall challenge. Salespeople may fight it, recognizing that they are losing revenue that will have to be made up elsewhere.

In addition, customers are losing an advocate. Who will stand up for these lower value accounts? Who will represent these accounts when pricing and product decisions are being made, and will that representative have the same clout as the key account representative?

Lower value customers are lower in value only individually. Combined, they can be a powerful profit engine that will stay loyal and profitable, especially when migrated to other channels that more clearly meet their needs.




What’s in Your Resume? “Spare Change” or Real Change Leadership?

Mike Chuchmuch Mike Chuchmuch







There’s nothing like Spring to spark new CRM project opportunities supported by new strategies, goals, budgets and in many cases new talent. Obviously, these new CRM initiatives will require skilled and experienced change consultants to guide the people-side of the project and ensure that human aspects are understood and embraced as mission critical. Remember – the fundamental vision around CRM is about the creation of new customer relationships – that’s a people thing. The technology will help contribute to the environment in which the relationship is built and sustained but the focus is still on people and the human aspects of change.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to conduct professional interviews with many candidates presenting themselves as change consultants and “change leaders”. What I have found, as have many of my colleagues in professional recruiting, is that although many hang out the shingle, few really have the experience and deep knowledge to be called change leaders. So, I pose the question, “What’s in your resume?” Is it about “spare change,” the type of change consulting that has been done “on the side,” or are you truly a change leader with the depth of knowledge and experience required to take the lead in unraveling the people side of the project? As a candidate, your challenge is to demonstrate your depth of knowledge and skill in leading a number of critical change elements in a CRM project to the hiring manager or practice partner. Let’s look at three key areas: Change Strategy, Change Ownership and Change Communications. Review these areas so you can be better prepared for that interview....

Leadership in Change Strategy:
The Challenge: Unfortunately, many CRM project strategy sessions end-up focusing on the technology rather than the critical aspects of “What will the new relationship with our customers look like and how will the organization need to change to support that new relationship?” The skilled change leader will contribute to strategy setting by asking key questions and facilitating the discussion concerning the need to address the human aspects of change. The change leader helps the project team and helps the key decision makers understand the need to embrace change as a part of the CRM project strategy.

Be prepared: As a change leader, you should be able to talk about projects where you facilitated the discussion of key strategy questions. How did these discussions help focus the project on the human aspects of change? What was the result of your leadership regarding getting project leaders to think about the impact of people issues on the success of the project? These are great interview questions – but they relate directly to the types of questions you as a change leader would ask at the strategic level. Consider the questions listed below. Have you led a project team through discussions concerning questions such as these?
  • Why is a new relationship between the customer and company required?
      • Why will the proposed CRM program deliver this new relationship?
    • Is this different than the old relationship or is this just about implementing software?
    • How is new value created for the customer and the organization through the delivery of the new CRM program?
  • Will we need a new organization structure to support the new relationship?
    • Will the CRM program require changes to current business processes?
    • How will changes in current processes impact the people who carry-out day-to-day operations?
    • How do we create stability while we are making the change?
    • What are the resources we need to carry out the transition?
Leadership in Change Ownership:
The Challenge: Change is not about imposing new procedures on the workforce, it’s about dealing with people and their resistance to change. Let’s face it, no one, and I mean no one, really likes change. Our human nature drives us to our comfort zones whatever they may be. Threaten our comfort zone and we resist change. The change leader must have the ability to work with people in overcoming their reluctance to embracing the new.

Be prepared: As the change leader, can you talk about projects where you have increased stakeholders’ ownership of and commitment to change? What were the challenges? What did you do to overcome these challenges? How did this change impact the customer’s relationship with the company? Be prepared to go deep in discussing your tactics as the interviewer may be looking for the “how” behind the “what.” Think in terms of the following…
  • How did you determine your stakeholder list and how did you conclude what these stakeholders needed to support the CRM-driven change?
  • How did you explain the implications of change and its impact on each stakeholder involved?
  • How did you communicate the need for change so that the future change state was positive, the current state negative and the change process itself - neutral?
  • How did you create ownership for the change with each stakeholder?
  • How did you manage relationships and expectations?
  • How did you collaborate with stakeholders to reach agreement?
Leadership in Change Communications:
The Challenge: The focus of communications is not just about listing the facts or the schedule of the project deliverables. Frankly, anyone can do that and, if anyone could do that why would a change leader be required? No, the communication challenge is much more than “Just the facts ma’am.” Consider the concept of stakeholder “value and values.”
  • Value – “Will this change be worth my investment of time, effort and interest? What do I get out of this? What’s in it for me?”
  • Values – “Does this change and its results sit well with my sense of what’s important? Will this change support what I believe to be ‘right’ for our customers, our company and our employees? Will this change support who we are as a company, who I am as an employee and what I believe to be true?”
Here’s a great quote from HBR…
"When change efforts fail, typically, the problem isn't with the change programs themselves. Rather, it's that they're not envisioned or communicated in a way that builds followership… For major organizational change to occur, the initiative must spread across organizational boundaries and down through hierarchies to individual employees. It must also touch upon employees' fundamental psychological motivations for working in the organization. " - Harvard Business Review.
Be prepared: This is not an easy area of change. Think of projects where you have been the change leader focused on communications. How did you determine key stakeholder values (what they believe to be true) and how did you uncover “WIIFM Factors” (What’s in it for me)? How does the concept of value and values translate to and for the customer? How did you use this knowledge to support communications that were meaningful rather than just factual for all stakeholders? How did this serve the building of followership? In your interview, be prepared to go beyond the standard “check-in-the-box” approach to talking about building a communications strategy. That’s foundational knowledge. As a change leader, you need to be able to explain how you used communications to…
  • Make people feel important.
    • How did you use communications to position them as a critical part of the future solution?
  • Provide reward. What was its impact on shaping desired behavior?
  • Build ownership to the change throughout the company.
    • How did you incorporate employee AND customer input into communications?
    • How did you segment the communications approach and content so that it was specifically focused on key stakeholder groups?
    • How did you choreograph alignment of the messages so that the end result was one “complete” message?
  • Address difficult employee groups and their resistance to change.
In conclusion, these three areas of change, as important as they are, are not the only critical aspects of delivering good change. Much more can be said about the change leader’s arsenal of skills and abilities in the tactical application of change tools, the use of feedback to shape and influence desired behaviors, even the way change success is defined, measured and transitioned to project owners. For those who see themselves as change leaders this has been a reminder of the things you know. Reflect on how you have used your skills to bring greater value to the project, the organization, and the customers through the application of excellence in change. For those with change consulting experience but are not quite leaders yet, hopefully this has helped to emphasize that change is about people and helping them to overcome their reluctance to embracing the new. As you develop your knowledge, skills and experiences, ensure you are working on the people side of change not just process redesign or “business case to technology use case” alignment. It really is that deep insight and ability on the people side of the equation that will make you a change leader.




How to reach Latin American Customers using CRM

Jesus Hoyos Jesus Hoyos









“Se Habla Español”

Miami is well known as the hub for doing business in Latin America as well as the center for many Latin Americans to shop at many stores in South Florida. It is well known that many Colombians travel to Fort Lauderdale over a weekend to buy for special occasions. Many Mexicans shop at Miami malls during Thanksgiving, especially on the famous Black Friday. This trend is evolving, since many Latin Americans have U.S. forwarding mail boxes in order to shop at Amazon.com or Target.com. For example, they purchase a Wii or Playstation using a Miami address and once the shipment gets to Miami, it is then forwarded to the final destination in the region. One clear case is also the customer experience, I know many of my friends that shop online at Victoria Secrets or Bath & Body Works, but are anxious to have local stores in many of the countries to be part of the in-store customer experience. There are more than 1,500 friends in Facebook requesting that Victoria Secrets opens a store in Puerto Rico, and when my sister visits Florida she has her half-a-day shopping experience at Bath & Body Works.

What this means for your business? It means that your online and brick-and-mortal strategy needs to include the differences of targeting Hispanics or Latin Americans. Differences? Yes. Targeting Spanish speaking customers is not only about messaging and branding, but about segmentation, targeting, execution and campaign follow up. Your on-line and off-line campaigns should be appropriately versioned to different Hispanics or Latin American segments. Spanish speaking audiences are not identical and geographic differences play a large role among the different audience groups, such as cultural traditions, country of origin, and the Spanish language.

The challenge is the diversity among all the Latino audiences. This can make it very difficult to achieve your marketing goals, especially if your company does not understand this diversity. The diversity gets complicated when you need to understand that it is the same language but different cultures, Latin Americans living here with work visas vs. 2nd or 3rd generation of Hispanics, bilingual vs. Spanish only as the main language, tourists visiting, or simply anybody from any country that buys on-line. Each country or Latino group has its own identity, with their own nuances. You even have regions within countries that have differences in lifestyles and industries, such as Mexico City and Monterrey, or Buenos Aires and Cordoba. Puerto Ricans in New York have many differences from Cubans in Florida or Mexicans in Chicago.

Many companies have taken the blanket approach of using the “Se Habla Español” strategy. Who are you targeting when you use this approach in your direct mail, email marketing, web site, store and call center? If your business is using the “Se Habla Español” marketing strategy, are you targeting 2nd generation Hispanics, Latinos traveling to the States, Mexican or Argentineans living in their respective countries, Puerto Rican living in the States or the island, or John Davies, Hispanic living in Miami. I used to get many promotional emails from a major hotel chain in both Spanish and German. I figured out that I was getting the Spanish email since my first name is Jesus, and the German emails since my last name has its roots in Germany. I also get many Spanish promotional materials at home, but I rather get English promotions, but as of today, nobody has asked me my preferences. They are assuming that I want my promotional materials in Spanish. “Se Habla Español” is a mass marketing strategy. One size does not fit all Spanish speaking customers; there are distinctions in marketing all Hispanics and Latin Americans.

A good example of a company not following the “Se Habla Español” marketing strategy is Kraft. Kraft has comidakraft.com, a web site with social networking components to find and exchange recipes of many Latin American dishes. You have the option to have the content in Spanish or English, it is also a multi-channel strategy with emails and newsletters, a call center with bilingual reps and the magazine, Comida y Familia. The key aspects of this multi-channel strategy are that they ask for your customer preferences, and part of their customer engagement is the understanding the Latino and Hispanic customer, understanding the distinctions among the different cultures. Kraft understands that the line between mass-marketing and direct marketing is no longer there, and having this customer knowledge is critical in order to maintain the relationship with the customer. The customer knowledge that Kraft gathers via their multi-channel strategy is helping to segment, target and execute campaigns to the different Latino and Hispanics markets.

What does this means to your CRM or Marketing strategy? Latin Americans overseas or Hispanics living in United States should be part of your customer definition as segments, and they can be in multiple segments depending on their purchasing behavior, lifestyle or customer lifecycle. The analytical, operational & collaborative CRM systems should include functionality and processes to manage the different groups of Hispanics or Latin Americans. This means the technology: your call center, campaign manager software, website, IVR, email management, POS, billing system and all other CRM systems. Once the technology is enabled to capture data from your customer, then you need to be sure you have the proper processes and people to manage the customer experience.

If you want to reach and keep Spanish speaking customer either in Latin America or United States, you should include the following points in your CRM strategy:
  1. Focus on distinctions between cultures.
  2. Do not assume that the Spanish in a call center in México will work for customer in Argentina, use accent neutral agents in your call centers.
  3. Have local search marketing and website strategies in both languages.
  4. Get to know your customers, personal relationships are very important.
  5. Create specific profiles to know your customer based on their behavior and preferences.
  6. Ask them about their language of preference: English or Spanish.
  7. Content could be in any language as long as your focus on the customer culture and emotions.
  8. Make sure you have a execution plan for each segment – one size does not fit all.
  9. Map the customer profile with market data about nuances and distinctions based on each segment.
  10. Your CRM systems need to provide the processes and functionality to develop the relationship with the customer.
  11. Do not assume when making marketing decisions, use your customer data to make decision about each segment.
  12. Make sure that your operational CRM has the ability to include the middle and maiden name as well. Your CRM system should be able to accommodate the name of Ernesto Miguel Ramirez Hernandez.
  13. Partner with local marketing agencies to understand the distinctions between Hispanics and Latin Americans.
  14. Include mobile marketing & social media in your strategy. These technologies are growing very fast in Latin America. There is a reason why Facebook, MySpace and Google are investing heavily in the region.
  15. Use marketing automation or database marketing to segment and target the proper segments.
  16. Call Centers are still the prefer channel of communications but include email and your website as part of the strategy.
The more I think about these suggestions, your customer strategy should be the same for all customer, get to know them in order to better market them. Companies should never assume they know everything about their customers, especially Spanish speaking customers. If you want to reach and keep customers, you need to get to know them by understanding your customer data.

Jesus Hoyos constantly writes in his blog about the CRM industry in Latin America (www.crmenlatinoamerica.com) and is the Managing Partner of Solvis Consulting, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in CRM consulting. Jesus can be reached at jesus.hoyos@solvisconsulting.com.




CAN YOU BE CUSTOMER-CENTRIC WITHOUT LISTENING?

Dr. David Mangen Dr. David Mangen








What does it mean to be customer-centric? While it means many different things to different people, central to the goal of becoming customer-centric is the fact that you, as an organization, must actually care what your customers think. Ultimately, you must be willing to accept their active input into core aspects of how you run your business. How do you do that? By taking every opportunity to actually listen to what your customers have to say about almost all aspects of your business. You must listen to the Voice of the Customer (VoC).

Now, many of you might be thinking that you already are using a Voice of the Customer process; it certainly has achieved significant presence in both the market research and Six Sigma communities as a recommended part of the process of new product development. In these fields, it is typically meant as a part of the process of identifying customer needs and requirements for new products and services. Without a doubt this is a part of what I mean by VoC. I submit, however, that this approach is too narrow for the truly customer-centric organization. It implies that as long as you listen to customers while you are designing your products, you have done a sufficient job of being customer-centric. Not so. A good first step does not complete a journey.

Why is more needed? Several years ago we conducted some research on the factors that predict successful CRM implementations. One of the key factors that predicted successful, profitable implementations that provided a good ROI was the extent to which the company had adopted a corporate culture that placed customers at the center of the business enterprise. What this means is that all levels of the organization — from the boardroom to the washroom — were attuned to the central importance of the customer and were operating in a fashion supportive of that corporate mission. Later, research indicated that today’s customer, especially when making high-value considered purchases, is likely to demand that the companies they do business with have empowered employees who address customer problems and needs throughout the life cycle of product ownership. While quality products are obviously a crucial part of this equation, these data clearly indicate that all levels of the organization must be attuned to the mantra of customer centricity — they must listen to what customers expect at that level of the relationship, and then respond appropriately.

But why all levels? Are not upper management and other corporate functions that do not directly touch the customer freed from these constraints? No, they are not. In fact, the active adherence of upper management to the principles of customer centricity is crucial for success.

Upper management sets the tone for an organization, both in words and by actions. Consider an organization where the official edict from upper management is that “we’re going to focus on our customers” but then:
  • Systematically cuts the budget for the customer service department.
  • Chastises a sales staff member who recommends a lower revenue product more aligned with a customer’s needs as opposed to a higher revenue product that will still do the job, but with lots of additional functionality that is not and never will be used by that customer.
  • Attempts to create customer relationships characterized by “hostage loyalty” where the barriers in place to prevent the customer from abandoning the relationship are such that only the most disgruntled will do so.
What is the message that customer-facing employees in this organization hear? Do they believe the words, or the behaviors? Almost invariably, the observed behaviors will trump the words, and the customer’s needs will take a back seat to the company’s (or the employee’s) immediate short-term interests.

Adopting customer centricity throughout the organization is also crucial because of the behaviors exhibited by today’s empowered customer, who is likely to come to any transaction with significant information concerning the competitive landscape and a willingness to leverage that information to his or her advantage. Increasingly, customers are researching and evaluating company behavior towards employees and suppliers as well as customers as a part of the total information set used when selecting a possible supplier. Look at the negative publicity that Wal-Mart has captured in the blogosphere for its employee and supplier relations, or that Sprint received a few months back for “firing” customers who made frequent calls to customer service. More recently, Facebook’s blunder with the launch of Beacon was met with a massive backlash fueled by the Internet and aided by MoveOn.org. How often would human resource or purchasing department policies influence a customer’s purchase decision twenty years ago? I’m sure it happened, but relatively rarely; now it is becoming pervasive. The web allows the customer to be in control; smart businesses recognize this and work it to their advantage.

Listening to your customers and other organizational stakeholders at all levels of the organization is so crucial to achieving a corporate culture of customer-centricity that I will be devoting three more articles throughout the coming year to different aspects of this topic. We will look at VoC from the eyes of employees, and how they can be empowered to really serve customer desires if management supports and reinforces this behavior. Another article will focus on the classic applications of VoC as used in new product development. Finally, we’ll address the issue of incorporating VoC into your company’s system of metrics, and how this can become a part of your management dashboards.

1. The Blueprint for CRM Success. Dick Lee, David Mangen, and Bob Thompson. St. Paul, MN: HYM Press, 2002.

2. Customers Say What Companies Don’t Want to Hear. Dick Lee and David Mangen. St. Paul, MN: HYM Press, 2006.




What they didn't teach you in Business School: 5 Critical Things Today's Professional Marketer Needs to Master

Jeff Pedowitz Jeff Pedowitz







Today's business schools have come a long way since the day I graduated. The programs are more involved, internships are more prevalent, and the case study programs continue to impress. With all the improvements, I find that today's graduates are still lacking some key skill sets that will ensure their success on the job in years to come. Additionally, professionals that have been in the field for more than five years are also lacking key skills that threaten their job security. In this article, we examine 5 critical things that every professional marketer needs to master.
  1. How to use technology to scale demand generation: There is no questioning that today’s marketing professional is much more tech savvy then previous generations. They can text, blog, engage in social networks, and use the internet in a variety of ways. What they haven’t learned how to do is leverage these technologies to build sustainable revenue streams for their companies. Marketers tend to overuse email at the expense of other channels and miss opportunities to engage with their prospects and customers in a meaningful fashion. Instead of using technology to scale, many marketers spend their days in hand-to-hand combat, performing a variety of key tasks manually. This is very inefficient and slows top-of-the-funnel growth. The first thing marketers need to do is build processes that can source leads from a variety of channels. These processes should include target profile, messaging, scoring, routing, follow-up, management, and disposition. Once these processes are in place, marketers can then select and use technology to drive demand. The most successful marketers leverage an ecosystem to drive a continuous flow of leads. There is no silver bullet. By building a variety of acquisition channels, marketers can more predictably grow their business. Key technological components should include:
    1. Automating Event Marketing, Registration and Follow-Up. This includes webinars and live events.
    2. Implementing website tracking at an individual level to monitor digital body language and build active buyer profiles and personas.
    3. Implementing lead scoring and lead incubation programs to determine sales-ready leads and market to the remaining leads not ready to buy.
    4. Integrating online forms with CRM systems and developing automated form handling routines in addition to the auto-responder.
    5. Using RSS to syndicate content and drive traffic to the website.
    6. Building or sponsoring specific social networks.
    7. Hosting an active blog on the corporate website.
    8. Integrating website tracking with online and offline demand generation programs.
    9. Leverage streaming video and audio as part of podcasts or viral campaigns.
    This is just a starting point, but the above items should be considered a staple in every marketers demand generation arsenal.
  2. How to develop a sustainable and healthy relationship with sales: This topic has gotten a lot of press over the last year. One of the biggest reasons sales and marketing are not aligned is because they are not measured on the same things. A sales team is always measured on revenue and thinks short term – this month, this quarter. A marketing team is typically measured on leads, programs, or softer metrics and has a much longer time horizon – 6 months, 1 year, etc. To ensure a better working relationship, there are several critical things every marketer needs to do:
    1. Ensure you are measured on revenue, not on leads. As long as you continue to be measured on your spending, you and your department will be considered an expense. In business, expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Get your team to be measured on revenue and this will significantly change your alignment with sales. Once you are being measured on the same things, your approach to marketing will be completely different. You won’t think about how many leads you drove this quarter, you will think about whether your programs helped make the quarterly sales target.
    2. Have a shared and written definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. You can deliver all the leads you want to sales, but they will continue to reject them as long as you have different ideas about what a lead is and isn’t. Set up a working session with the sales team and determine what constitutes a qualified lead. Examine both traditional measures such as budget, authority, need and timeline. Also take a look at online behavior – content downloads, webinar attendance, key page views. Develop a scoring matrix around these components and ensure that you deliver only those leads to sales that meet these criteria. Revisit the matrix on a quarterly basis and adjust as needed.
    3. Set up working teams. Instead of having siloed functions, pair up field marketing with the regional sales team and give them a shared goal. It is amazing what will happen when they have to work together instead of pointing fingers at the other.
  3. Reporting on Marketing Success in Financial Terms: Remember those accounting classes we took in school – the ones we slept through while we anxiously looked forward to the creative ones? Guess what? The awards we have been giving each other over the years for our creativity don’t count anymore. Today’s board wants to know how we are spending the company’s money. It is no longer sufficient to report on leads, clickthroughs, impressions, or campaign awards. Today’s marketing professional needs to be financially savvy. They need to know lead to customer conversion ratios, return on marketing spend, lifetime value of a customer, net present value of a lead, and a variety of other business metrics that indicate how well marketing is managing the company’s money to grow revenue. It’s time to dust off that textbook and get back to basics. Your job security depends upon it.
  4. Develop strategies, to get, keep and grow your customer base: It is easy to focus on programs that bring in new customers – that typically gets most of your budget. But what about your customers? We have all heard the adage, it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one – but is it? If you are not allocating more than a token amount of your budget to service your customers, they could be looking elsewhere. Many companies have a variety of products and services that they want to sell to their installed base to build wallet share and improve loyalty. With all the talk about Net Promoter and the clear correlation between customer loyalty and long-term profitable growth, it is essential that today’s marketing professional implement programs that address customers at every stage of their need cycle. There a number of methods that can be invoked here, from customer advisory boards to using technology to deliver automated cross-sell/up-sell campaigns, today’s marketer can reach their customer and grow the long term value of the relationship. It just takes a focused effort.
  5. Understand and Align with the Customer Buy Cycle: I have lost track of how many professional sales training courses I attended over the years. They all prescribed one process or another for controlling the sales cycle and getting in synch with your customer. These methods worked for a long time until the Internet came along. Now, your customers have the power to initiate the buy cycle, long before you even know about it. We are not in control of the sales process. The customer is in control of the buy process. They go through various phases – awareness, identification, evaluation. The key to selling today is to understand where the buyer might be’ at any given time and to develop strategies and tactics that serve up the appropriate content and messaging. Do they need a white paper or an analyst briefing? Do they need a demonstration or an ROI calculator? The marketer that changes their focus from selling to helping customers buy is the marketer that will succeed in today’s competitive climate. Search engine optimization, site navigation, pay per click, link referral, decision/offer maps are all techniques that can and should be leveraged to help you align with your customer. There are many skills today’s marketer needs to master to not only keep their jobs but to grow and enjoy a satisfying career. At the root of it, understand how to leverage available technology and implement the proper financial metrics. Doing this will put you well on the way to marketing success.





Writing the CRM Resume

Dick Lee Jeff Tanner, Ph.D.







When it comes to getting any job, all that you have already learned about writing resumes is sufficient. When it comes to getting the CRM job of your dreams, however, just any old resume won’t do. In less than a minute, you’ve got to catch the attention of a hiring manager, and in less than three minutes, convince that manager to give you an interview. A resume is like an advertisement or a brochure. In most cases, you aren’t there to speak for yourself, so the resume stands on its own. Even if you have to use some standardized online format, you can still adapt the principles described in this article to sell yourself and get the CRM job you want. Begin by listing what is required of someone in the job you desire. The more accurately you can predict the job description, the more likely you can include the proper elements in your resume to prove you fit in that job better than anyone else. Once you’ve written that job description (or secured a copy from the company you want to work for), you can start on your resume.

The Layout

Employers, consultants, recruiters, and professors who study business communications continue to argue over how to lay out a resume. Nothing sparks the argument as much as the question of whether to start with an objective, a summary, or just start listing credentials. An objective makes perfect sense for the new college graduate or relatively inexperienced candidate. If you have significant experience, a summary can be useful. As a professor with an active consulting practice, I see a lot of resumes, many from students or former students. I recently got a reume from “George,” a friend of a former student. After looking it over, I could not determine what type of position “George” was looking for; as a result, I couldn’t help much. Even if you are responding to an advertisement for a specific position, having either an objective or a summary can help any reader match you to a position.

The argument against is, of course, that you can’t be pigeonholed. Well, if you can’t be pigeonholed, you are asking someone else to determine who you are and what you can do. Few are going to take the time or effort to make those decisions for you.

If you don’t have a specific objective in mind and you have good experience, begin with a short summary. For example, “Team leader and team player, with experience in creating and executing business plans for significant growth,” or “Developing career in marketing consumer package goods through building online consumer communities,” can describe one’s experience. The first would indicate someone with business unit leadership experience that should be transferrable across industries and company size; the latter illustrates a young, rising professional in a vertical industry. Other elements that can be useful in a summary are descriptions of company size and special attributes, such as “experience in stretching resources in high growth situations.”

As with all positions, CRM employers want what you can do, not what you know or what you have. A key challenge in effective resume writing is converting what you know or have into what you can do. “Knowledge of Salesforce.com” is good; “Customized reports and served as the local helpdesk for Salesfoce.com in a sales organization of 40 salespeople” is much better. Use verbs specific to key activities that you have already done so that potential employers can easily understand your capabilities. Similarly, experience is great but growing experience is better. Paul Nelson of IBM said, “I don’t need someone with one year of experience repeated ten times; I need someone with experience that shows growth in responsibility, ability, and results.” The challenge is how to present that experience in terms of what you have to offer. Verbs like developed, created, implemented, executed, and grew can illustrate what you learned and accomplished during your experience.

The conventional resume layout is to list your job titles in reverse chronological order, starting with your current position. As you’ve probably figured out, listing titles and responsibilities is simply not sufficient. If you want to get the interview, you’ve got to prove that you can perform.

To Get the Interview, Prove Performance

CRM is a results-oriented field. While CRM requires soft skills such as those that make for effective customer service and creative marketing communications, CRM success is measured in additional sales and conversions. One of my former students took his first job in CRM with a local bank. When he sent a resume to a major airline for a CRM position, he was able to list examples of CRM campaigns he developed along with the results. For exemple, if your CRM history includes working on campaigns, report the lift you’ve achieved. If you worked on a new loyalty strategy, describe the results. Even if it is something as short as “Team member for loyalty campaign development and execution resulting in 125% of sales goal,” you can still get the message across that you achieved real results.

Combining soft skills with results can be a special challenge in the CRM profession. Few other areas of the organization require the same degree of technical and soft skills; a good resume communicates your abilities in both areas. The key is to specify what those soft skills are.

For example, the communication skills developed by salespeople are different from those developed by managers. Can you demonstrate how you inspired others? How your questioning, listening, and presentation enabled you to grow sales? Or how your ability to understand the needs of others enabled your team to be successful within a vast and seemingly impersonal organization? Have you had experience training others? Soft skills often have hard results. Effective salespeople sell more. Top customer service representatives deliver higher customer satisfaction ratings. Inspiring team leaders enjoy higher performing teams. At the same time, however, soft skills have soft results. The hard results have to be there but flesh out the effectiveness of soft skills. The extent that you can demonstrate both skills, the more complete picture a reader has of your abilities.

For example, “Developed team of customer service personnel, three of whom now lead their own teams” illustrates that your abilities to develop include the ability to grow the organization. Similarly, “Strengthened customer-oriented culture through training, visioning, and advocating for customer service team,” shows that you represented your team to the rest of the organization, improving the customer culture for the organization. Add in the hard results, such as growth in repurchase rates, and you’ve successfully combined the soft and hard skills.

Test the Resume

Few of us would dream of sending a resume out with a typo or spelling error. Yet few of us actually test that the resume we send out says what we want. Grammatically and visually, the resume may be perfect but if it doesn’t communicate who we are and what we want, it is a failure.

Consider borrowing a trick from marketing researchers called protocol analysis. This method of research involves having someone read a marketing communications piece aloud and simply stating what it makes them think of. Have someone read your resume aloud in your presence. Then ask them what each portion of the resume says. Probe for understanding involving different words – if they can paraphrase in different words what it means to them and that meaning is what you intend, then you’ve done well.

If you try protocol analysis, it is a good idea to get someone who doesn’t know you well. If they know you too well, they fill in the blanks from their own experience. Further, if they know the field, you can probe to determine where they see you fitting. If they don’t know the field, they can still give you an idea of where you would fit in their organization, an idea that can further provide direction for improvement.

Getting the Job

Of course, getting the CRM job requires more than a resume. For some readers, this article might spark some planning on how to build, not write, a resume. If you can’t demonstrate hard results, how can you get to a position where you can? What are the soft skill results that you can prove?

Getting the job also means sailing through the interviews. We’ll leave that to future articles on www.mycrmcareer.com.





AVOIDING SIX SIGMOIDOSCOPIES

Dick Lee Dick Lee
Principal
High-Yield Methods





Once upon a time, as recently as 15 years ago, when we used the term “process” most people understood what we meant. If we were referring to manufacturing process, they absolutely understood, because that was the only kind of process practiced back then. But then along came Sales Force Automation and Customer Relationship Management. The business world had its eyes ripped open to the reality that process does exist outside of manufacturing, or at least it should. So we started mucking around with sales process contact center process and occasionally even marketing process. Most efforts to apply process to these customer-facing functions were, to be frank, amateurish, and marginally effective at best. So, in stepped some manufacturing process consultants ready to show the CRM world how to do process right, and also to pocket some hefty fees for dragging rigid manufacturing process approaches into flexible, variable environments where they don’t belong. Then, funny things started happening on their way to “showing us.” The outcomes of applying six sigma and Lean, the two primary manufacturing approaches these consultants employed, ranged from fair to dismal. In fact, some efforts to apply six sigma left deep scars.

Small wonder. Here’s a process methodology that thrives on improving and standardizing how individuals work at their workstations; it microscopically measures variances in how work is performed; it requires very high throughput of repetitive work to measure at such infinitesimal levels; and perhaps worst of all, is that it treats workers as machine parts in a classic “command and control” manner. “Hey, we tell workers how to work, and they do what they’re told.”

Seriously, why would anyone want to walk into a work environment where most process breakdowns occur, not at the individual work stations, but in the hand-offs of work and information among functions and stakeholders; where managing cross-functional workflow and information flow is key; where effective measurement occurs at the macro level; where frequencies are low but variability is high; and where employees are significantly empowered, and then try to implement six sigma? Not smart for the consultants, and painful for their clients. Which is why I call these implementations “six sigmoidoscopies.” But then, the whole six sigma in the front office bit got flipped on its ear.

A bunch of folks scattered around the globe, mostly trainers and sales consultants, wanted to dive into front office process to work in sales and marketing and customer service. They saw the CRM boom underway, and they wanted a piece of the action. Lots of people did. No crime there. But what sets these critters apart is that they decided to empty the six sigma toolbox of everything six sigma, leaving only basic, generic process engineering tools, and then, audaciously, still called it “six sigma.” Not a great way to impress companies and managers yet unaware of the six sigma flops. Worse yet, they started becoming aware of each through the web, and they actually began holding conferences espousing “six sigma in sales and marketing.” Shifty or what?

Hey, it’s a free world, some of it anyway. Even though smarmy stuff like this “faux sigma” offends me, I might have ignored the whole gambit except one of the ringleaders, who I once considered a colleague (“once” being the operative term, here), called me looking for my endorsement of this sorry stuff. He also wanted me to speak at one of their conferences. I said something to the effect of, “Bill (named changed to protect the guilty), you don’t know squat about six sigma. And what you’re practicing sure isn’t sigma.” Guess what he said back? Something along the lines of, “Yeah, Dick, I know, but my practice needs more buzz.”

I told him what I thought, which I won’t repeat here, but he kept bugging me about this stuff. Finally he got me to agree to participate in a global teleconference he was hosting for his fellow “faux sigmeys,” hoping I’d be convinced. What I heard on this conference call made me want to hurl. These guys (and gals) were so full of themselves that I couldn’t get a straight answer from any of them to my questions. Questions, such as, which six sigma elements they were applying that differentiated what they were doing from dumbed-down, generic process. Lots of fluffy answers. I got a tad irritated. And I pressed them to differentiate their stuff from the marketing and sales process practices introduced by Joe Lethert, the founder of lead management company Performark, back in the 1980s - practices that were more sophisticated than what I’d heard on this call. Joe happens to be a dear friend of mine, and these six sigmeys naively claiming credit for some of his innovations 25 years ago rubbed me the wrong way. Their response? “We’re different because we’re measuring outcomes.” Huh?

I had to scrape myself off the ceiling. “That’s why you claim you’re practicing ‘six sigma,’ because you’re measuring outcomes?” I finally extracted a grudging acknowledgement from some participants that the sole basis for labeling what they were practicing “six sigma” was, indeed, measurement. Too bad they hadn’t yet reached the level of measurement sophistication Joe and Performark had attained decades ago.

Guess who they never asked to participate in one of their conferences again?

But without asking for my opt-in, they did sign me up for a newsletter about six sigma in sales and marketing. I received one in the mail the following week or so. Guess what the cover story was about? It was a rebuttal to all the critics of “faux sigma,” insisting that that they were practicing six sigma because they were measuring. C. Edwards Deming, the father of modern process, must have been rolling over in his grave. What a crock. But some companies fell for it. And paid for it. But that’s their problem. For right now, if you ever hear the words “six sigma” in connection with CRM, run for your life! It doesn’t matter whether it’s the real thing or a sham, implementing it still hurts. Didn’t know companies had their choice between two different varieties of sixsigmoidoscopy, did you?

Fortunately, we don’t have to end on this negative note. At least a few process professionals, joined by some non-process trained business side folks, are doing real work to improve process in sales, service and market and in many other variable work environments. They’re off to a good start. The fact that the process tools they’re developing work outside the front office should prove a market builder that draws even more heads-up folks into the effort. Hey, before long we could have a budding variable process industry, which would be great for CRM, where most process work to date has been anemic. Having a cadre of folks who are process-experienced and do respect the unique process needs of the front office can only improve CRM outcomes, which still need lots of improving.

CRM and corporate alignment consultant Dick Lee is founder and principal of St. Paul, MN based High-Yield Methods. HYM is the originator of the Visual Workflow process methodology. Dick has written several books, including The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide and Strategic CRM. He’s hard at work writing his next book, Process to the People. For more information about Dick and HYM, visit www.h-ym.com.











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