CRM Weblog

CRM is Not the Solution to a Broken Business

Tracey Schelmetic writes that CRM is not as far as long as most would hope. She compares the current state of CRM to owning Sea Monkeys as  a child.

CRM still falls prey to the kind of expectations that I and other kids (at least I hope it affected other kids, or I’m publicly owning up to some embarrassing childhood revelations) had about Sea Monkeys, until we tried growing them. Our expectations were sky high, and we were sold a romantic fabrication. Sound familiar?

She later goes on to point out that there are limitations to what CRM can do:

CRM won’t fix your business if it’s broken. CRM won’t help you keep customers if you don’t give them a substantive reason to stay. CRM won’t improve your product or your marketing, and it probably won’t lower your cholesterol level, despite what the brochures say. It also won’t improve the attitudes of your call center workers unless those attitudes are directly caused by frustration resulting from not having the right tools and information to serve customers better.

She notes that integration is the fundamental key to successfully implementing a successful CRM solution.

“Well, the call center is ready for CRM, but the back-office people, accounting, warehousing, the outside sales team and several of our suppliers are not,” proceed no further.

Russ Hill also recently wrote on the sadly disappointing integration issue:

Without this link between their customer base and supply chain, retail executives lack a complete picture of their business and do not have the information necessary to make better business decisions.

Have your ducks in a row before implementing your CRM strategy, or you are stuck facing the Sea Monkey syndrome.

Google CRM?

With the recent free launch of Google Analytics and many Google CRM related job postings Louis Columbus speculates that Google wants in on the CRM market.

What does Google have that nobody else has? A quest for pure information and a boatload of user data. Google can partner with external sources:

Taken to an extreme, Google's search engine capability could become the basis of backfilling customer histories by integrating APIs with Hoover's, Dun & Bradstreet, Value Line Investment Surveys, Standard & Poor's and many other information services firms. Suddenly smaller competitors in services vertical markets for example would be able to level the playing field by cutting the learning curve in half when it comes to learning about prospects -- Google technology would do the work of the inside sales reps.

and look at their internal data, some of which includes:

• user search history and seasonal market shifts
• related searches
• keyword bid price history by competitor
• ad spend and traffic estimates by competitor
• which could be cross referenced with how their linkage profile, public relations, and stock prices change
• ROI on ad spend if the competitor shares that data with Google

Google will not post that company X bid amount Y and sold Z units, but they have that data and can use it to help manage your ad spend and tell you what terms are in aggregate underpriced. Since Google has the largest database of intentions many large corporations with small sites will be forced to advertise.

When your site theme, linkage profile, and AdWords keywords overlap greatly with some of your competitors it is easy for Google to tell you were else you should be advertising. They may even go so far as to tell you where your biggest problems in the conversion process are.

Google offers (or may offer) marketing, tracking, user data, pay per call, and payment services. To offer the best local search Google also wants to obtain real time inventory data from major shopping chains. How hard would it be for Google to add a few more hooks into the system to offer a proper CRM solution? Perhaps they can charge a bit more for a few extra goodies, although, unlike Louis, I think the core product will probably not be ad cluttered. Google is willing to give away a ton of value just to get data. Louis predicts:

Google is on its way to being a platform and with that goal, product proliferation will follow. In 2006 it would not be surprising at all to see three things happen pertaining to Google:

1. Free CRM and Sales Force Automation gets launched.
2. Google Venture Capital sightings increase.
3. Friendster becomes a bargain for Google and gets acquired.

Read more about Google and CRM at CRM Buyer.