In the land of sales there are many rules but none more poignant than the first two: ABC (always be closing) and "it's always easier to sell something to someone that you have sold something to before."
In 1993, Don Peppers and Martha Rodgers authored the book "The One to One Future," from which the acronym CRM emerged. Their thought leadership helped create an entirely new software industry that leveraged business intelligence technology to build data warehouses, data marts, query and reporting tools, OLAP and now predictive analytics. Peppers and Rodgers followed on with a great series of books, including "One to One B2B" and "The One to One Manager," all of which are great reads even today.
In the mid 1990's CRM took off and one of the most famous business stories emerged from Wal-Mart. A brilliant CIO named Randall Mott built a huge data warehouse on customer purchasing data and determined that baby boomers bought beer and diapers when they came to shop. So Wal-Mart put beer and diapers near each other in their stores and significantly increased sales of both.
In 2007 I took on a new role at SAP and became the leader of what we call the Business Influencer Group. BIG works with industry thought leaders and luminaries that influence what we call the C suite. This role has enabled me to build relationships with some of the most brilliant thinkers at the top universities in the US, in addition to other luminaries and key thought leaders. This week I will share some of their insights in the world of CRM, today a key business initiative for any company big and small.
During the 1990's many of the original thought leaders focused on large enterprise CRM implementations. Thought leaders today such as Ranjay Gulati of Harvard, Mohan Sawhney of Kellogg, and the modern day father of CRM, Paul Greenberg, are excellent resources for small business leaders in search of customer intimacy and loyalty. "CRM at the Speed of Light" by Greenberg is one of the most popular books on this area and is an excellent practical guide and resource. Paul Greenberg also is one of today's most popular bloggers on ZDnet, and the 4th edition of his book is available.
The research and teachings of Gulati and Sawhney focus on the total customer experience from a perspective of product, cost and experience. Organizations can benefit from their thinking by looking for additional ways of creating value for the social customer value and enhancing the customer experience.
Sawhney defines what he calls routes to customer value:
- "Routes to customer value - there are 3 ways: ultimate goal is functional, economical or emotional value, this maps to the other 3 to achieve superior customer value - genetic routes to customer value."
As you can see sometimes these thought leaders have their heads way up in the clouds and think out of this solar system. As Ranjay Gulati says, "I like to keep my head in the clouds, but my feet on the ground." Feet on the ground means that he builds his house on a rock and spends a great deal of time consulting with customers and companies. According to recent research, CRM is again one of the top three information technology oriented business initiatives for many companies large and small throughout the world.Lower cost offering
Best customer experience
Most innovative product
We have now entered the era of the social customer and we create more data every day about our customers, the fact is in this new era the social customer creates more data about themselves on the social web. Until next time I wish you great marketing and selling to the social customer.