I heard a lot of pithy sound bites Monday at the opening of CRM Evolutions in the heart of muggy Manhattan. Most targeted business relationships with their customers.
My new friend Joe Galvin, an independent B2B sales analyst, was more skeptical about Opening Day. He observed a greater emphasis on customer service platitudes and less about the selling side of CRM. Still, the conversation was exciting and informative - coming less than a month into my new role as site curator of The Social Customer and The Customer Collective for Social Media Today LLC.
Of the three tracks in this gathering - Social CRM, CRM and Deployment Strategies - I spent most of the day in the first. However, it appeared that being social ("media" seems to be getting dropped more and more in casual conversation) was the universal theme joined at the hip with Customer Relationship Management.
For those of us tweeting (follow along at #CRMe11), it was a field day because so many comments across the variety of sessions easily were captured within 140 characters. Heard frequently: determine your social strategy before investing in a CRM solution. Others wondered if anyone really knows how to effectively mesh CRM and social in real-time - not that SAP, D&B and others don't have some impressive-looking solutions.
Some of my favorite lines from speakers Monday:
- We're beginning to change how we look at CRM on the outbound side ... we're realizing customers control the relationships and they want different things today - Mitch Lieberman, VP of Marketing at Sword Ciboodle.
- Pursuing the technology without a social strategy can lead to very expensive trouble. "You have to identify what problem you are trying to solve before you put technology in place." -- Lieberman.
- Sure, look at the trends and create a strategy, but you must consider your tactics as well. - John Taschek, VP of Strategy, Salesforce.com
- If you can't collaborate within your company, talking to customers isn't a good idea. "Fix your silo problem first," -- Mike Krigsman, CEO, Asuret, Inc.
- "It's isn't just a matter of talking to and listening to customers .... Listen to the wrong people and you won't have customers." -- Esteban Kolsky, Founder, ThinkJar (pictured here).
- To utilize social CRM, "make sure you have a collaborative culture - people, process and technology." - Kolsky.
- Customers want one-stop shopping for all their needs in the relationship cycle, and smartphones and tablets tend to be the preferred channels in this convergence - Ken Wincko, Senior Director, Marketing, Dun & Bradstreet.
- "Is your business tweetworthy; Is it something you would want to share?" -- Frank Eliason, Senior Vice President of Social Media, Citibank.
- "The center of the business once was New York. Now it's Main Street. It's all across the world in little spots. It's right here on the phone right now. -- Eliason.
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An early pleasure: insight from the morning keynoter, David Gergen, now Senior Political Analyst for CNN who served in the administrations of four U.S. presidents. He led up to his message of trust by contrasting the styles of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and former president Richard Nixon, both of whom faced tremendous challenges in office.
Trust, he said, was one of the central differences between the two men: "People didn't trust Nixon and he didn't trust them."
Whereas the British people rallied behind Churchill at a time of war, Nixon "broke the bonds of trust," Gergen said. "He didn't listen to his constituents. He thought he was above the law. As a result, when things when wrong, it crumbled very quickly."
Nixon announced he was resigning from the presidency exactly 37 years to the day that Gergen addressed the conference.