CRM and ERP News

Here are several excerpts from an article by Laura Patterson, the president and founder of VisionEdge Marketing, The Power of Persona:

Often sales executives try to implement a common sales methodology that leverages the processes used by the high performers. This process is known as sales enablement, and it is a key factor in accelerating customer acquisition. For these processes to be successful, every salesperson must have the knowledge on how to handle different selling situations, such as how to position against a particular competitor and how to communicate her value proposition to each person in the buying process. The sales organization relies on marketing to create the tools to support the sales enablement process.

The purpose of these tools is to help the sales organization improve their effectiveness in generating revenue and earnings. Marketing and sales need to collaborate with each other to ensure appropriate materials and tools are created and properly distributed. Examples of sales enablement tools include tracking and disseminating best practices, providing case studies, and more recently creating personas. In fact, a recent study by MarketingSherpa revealed that 40 percent of business technology hardware marketers, 22 percent of software marketers and 19 percent of professional services companies are now using personas as a sales enablement tool.

What Are Personas?

A persona is a concise description of a specific customer type.

It's important not to confuse personas with profiles. Personas are narrative descriptions that bring user profiles to life. They present an alternative representation of user profile data that is easily understandable and is designed to communicate customer details that are easy for team members to keep in mind during the buying process. Personas should be developed to help the salesperson recognize and identify with the prospect as people rather than a collection of facts.

An example of a profile might be:
Gender: 50 percent male/50 percent female
Age: 18-34
Education: Wide range: high school education and most have a BA degree or some college education
Marital status: 50/50 Married/Single
Comfort with technology: Average, comfortable making purchases online

This example of a persona illustrates the differences.

Persona for network engineer: Mike, 34, works normal business hours most of the time. Mike is well-paid, has six years of network management experience and is a Cisco-certified internetworking expert. Mike started out in the network operating center and has two primary areas of responsibility:

1. Isolating and resolving the more complex network issues that have been escalated from network technicians

2. Planning and rolling out changes to the existing network environment

Mike's job is part interrupt driven (isolating complex problems and working out solutions) and part planned (rolling out changes to software, managing configurations). Mike uses a ticketing system and network management system regularly and also uses basic utilities for telnet/ssh, tftp, ping, trace route, etc. He is very familiar with Perl because he has experience-writing scripts and has an in-depth understanding of managing networks. He does not know xml or java very well at all.

Profiles are the foundation for constructing personas. And while these two concepts seem similar, they are different. Profiles describe types of prospects, customers or users. Personas describe specific people.

Why Use Personas?

A well-crafted persona enables you to stand in your customer's shoes and take a more customer-centric view. Using personas has a number of benefits, including providing the organization with a common point of view about customers' goals and needs, a vehicle for helping develop an initial set of market requirements, more focus on what customers will use rather than what customers may say they want, and a process for prioritizing development efforts.

Personas provide a valuable insight into the motivations and personalities of specific buyers and users. While they are simple in form and structure, the information they contain is powerful. It can be applied to decisions throughout the sales enablement process. They can help with understanding specific requirements, facilitating alignment, and expediting the sales cycle.

Creating Personas

One of the best ways to gather this data is to interview real customers. You will need access to real customers to conduct the research. Your first step will be to decide who to interview. You should include both current and potential customers. Plan on conducting at least 15 to 20 one-hour-long interviews for each persona type.

Once you complete all of the interviews. review the data with an eye toward looking for patterns and clusters of attitudes and behaviors. These clusters can then help you to define the customer's attitudes and behaviors. Give each persona a brief description. There is no ideal number of personas; however we suggest keeping the set small, perhaps four or five primary personas.

After you've identified the clusters, you can start creating the personas by adding details from the interviewees' behavioral traits. Analyze your interviews and select details that stand out such as working environment, frustrations, relationships with others, skill level and demographics to include in your narrative. Then give each persona a name and a photo or graphic representation. Once finished, you should have captured information about your customer's goals, needs, behaviors, concerns, experiences, likes, dislikes, etc.

Now that you have several detailed personas describing your customers, you can adapt and customize your sales tools.

Messages that resonate with each persona can be developed, and sales presentations and materials customized accordingly. Using personas allows you to better focus your sales and marketing training and materials improving your overall effectiveness.

For much more on this subject, be sure to check out the complete source article.

A BeTuitive post linked me to a Guerrilla Consultant article by Mike McLaughlin, The Art of the Client Interview.  Here are several excerpts:

When a prospective client calls about a project, it's natural for your pulse rate to rise a bit. After all, it means your marketing worked. As you settle into the conversation with the client, the first and most important step you take is to learn more about the opportunity. How you handle this essential activity can make the difference between winning the job or heading home empty handed.

First Impressions Are Tenacious

Whether we like it or not, a client's early impression of us influences the outcome of a sales opportunity, and that impression is formed in the initial sales interview. A client's first impression may not last forever, but beginning the sales process with a good impression beats having to overcome the fallout from a poor one.

Creating a positive, initial impression means emphasizing substance over technique. Instead of relying on canned sales questions, PowerPoint slides, and body language 'techniques,' lead your client through an insight-based discussion of the issues. You may not win the 'Smooth Salesperson of the Month' award that way, but you'll win in the client's mind and that's what counts.

Of course you'll need a few questions to get the conversation rolling, but expect to develop most of those questions as your understanding of the client's issue evolves. And if you're ever tempted to ask a client, 'what keeps you up at night,' cover your mouth and count to ten.

When you first step into a client's office to discuss a project, you're likely to be viewed as a salesperson, and that can be a tough impression to shake. But using the power of insightful questions and discussion during the interview, you can shed the salesperson label and replace it with that of business adviser. That will add immeasurable strength to your sales process.

Discover Differentiation

Professional service marketers know that every project opportunity deserves its own 'win theme.' It's rarely enough to compete solely on a firm's expertise. Instead, successful firms compete on the basis of both expertise and client-specific insight.

You can search the Internet about a company's issues until your fingertips are numb, but that search can't replace the insight you'll develop from a client's answers to your relevant questions. If you uncover just one nuance about the proposed project, whether it's about the specific client issue or potential barriers to completing the project, you have the basis for crafting a differentiated--and winning--proposal.

But you have to dig for those subtleties. It takes time and, more importantly, trust for a prospective client to open up to you. After all, the client is probably talking with other consultants and hearing similar questions. So your ability to conduct an interview that forges trust with the client and encourages candor gives you an important differentiator--client insight.

You'll also eliminate needless guesswork about how to frame your proposal if you've conducted thorough interviews. And if you have a need to follow up with the client after the interview, you'll have substantive matters to discuss. The information you glean from the client interview will advance your sales effort by providing you with the raw material to create a compelling and differentiated offer.

The Rest of the Story

The business world is full of sales advice, and much of it is very good. One thing is certain, though: If you do a great job in the early stages of the sales process, you're more likely to benefit from all that great advice. Stumble out of the gate, and you're likely to play catch up just to stay in the race.

The sales interview gives you a chance to put your best foot forward as you demonstrate your skills at analysis, diagnosis, creativity, and empathy. And few things serve your sales process more effectively than great interviewing skills. It's not unheard of for a client to hire a service provider on the spot after a great interview.

So keep this skill in top form, and odds are you'll be able to use the rest of that good advice about sales--from crafting great proposals and closing, to execution, follow through, and building long-term client relationships.

Here are several excerpts form an article by Bob Conlin, CMO at Centive, Sales Compensation Best Practices:

Sales compensation plans are one of the most powerful tools organizations have to affect sales performance. Properly designed and deployed, sales compensation plans drive superior performance and result in achieving and exceeding sales and revenue targets--without exceeding compensation budgets.

Unfortunately, most companies fail to adequately test and model sales compensation plan variables and attainment scenarios. This failure is largely due to the inability of their current spreadsheet-based sales compensation management systems to easily create and effectively run models. Restricted by their inability to model plans and attainment scenarios, executives are often reluctant to make the significant plan changes needed to better align their sales team with corporate sales, revenue, and profit goals.

Best practice sales-compensation management calls for sales and finance executives to work with sales operations to build and model compensation plans, analyze and forecast related commission earnings at both a macro (plan) and micro (individual) level, and then choose those sets of plans that best fit corporate parameters for sales performance, revenue, and associated commission costs.

This best practice exercise begins with the requirement to leverage a sales compensation management system that supports the ability to easily build multiple compensation plan models. Spreadsheet-based systems typically do not meet this requirement; the complex macros and linked worksheets needed to support multifaceted sales compensation plans are too difficult and time-consuming to build within a desktop application. To be effective with this exercise, multiple models need to be analyzed. Spreadsheet-based systems do not easily support this best practice.

Multiple models are needed because executives need to evaluate a myriad of changes and options--for example changes to quotas, commission rates, territories, and organizational structures. Attainment levels also need to be modeled--for example, a company may expect sales and the revenues associated with those sales to increase in some areas or with certain product lines, and decrease in other areas or with other product lines. So not only do executives need to model multiple plans, they also need to run multiple attainment scenarios through each of the modeled plans. By modeling both plans and data, executives are empowered to evaluate results and implement the plans that best fit their organization's business model.

During the modeling phase, results should be analyzed at both the macro level (i.e., what are the total compensation costs associated with this modeled plan?) and the micro level (i.e., how will this plan affect the earnings for particular sales team member?). Good sales plans should result in attainment that follows a standard bell curve, with the majority of reps grouped near 100 percent quota attainment. However, bell curves don't reveal details, and you need to make sure that new plans won't negatively impact your top performers or unfairly reward poor performers.

After the right sales compensation plans are implemented, sales and finance executives should actively monitor actual attainment and commission costs and compare them to their modeled plans. Modeled versus actual analysis helps ensure that companies are in position to quickly react should unforeseen influences affect results. In fact, best practice sales compensation management calls for executives to run new models periodically during the year to reflect market influences that may not have been initially factored in.

By modeling commission plans and forecasting related costs, sales and finance executives gain confidence that their sales plans will drive superior performance at a reasonable cost. In many ways, a sales team is like a highly tuned race car; it can achieve amazing performance results, but can quickly skid out of control if not carefully monitored and tweaked when results don't meet expectations.

Here's an insightful article by Allison Kaplan that originally appeared in The Minneapolis-St. Paul Pioneer Press:

It's that time of year when we reflect on what really matters, like being able to find a salesperson when we're ready to pay.

Better customer service never seems to come in Santa's bag, so the following list of retail resolutions is intended to inspire salespeople, store owners and producers of objects of all kinds to make improvements. Because no matter what differences exist between us, fundamentally, we all want the same thing: To shop without pulling out our hair.

You've got to dream big.

Dear retailers:

• Unless you'd like to go out on a date, don't ask for our phone numbers at the register. Being pumped for personal information makes a shopper think twice about buying.
• When a customer presents a gift receipt to return merchandise, don't ask for the original receipt. Obviously, she doesn't have it. As the term 'gift receipt' suggests, the item was a gift.
• On the subject of receipts, why do they seem to get longer with each trip to the checkout counter? All we need is a record of the purchase A A- not an unwieldy scroll of advertisements, store information and coupons for the very items just purchased. Inevitably, the coupons will expire before these goods are used up.
• Also on the subject of receipts, set the cash register to print out the copy that needs signing first. Then, we'll have something to do while the customer copy is printing, rather than standing there jiggling our car keys, as so often seems to be the case. It's all about empowering the guest.
• Scan the credit card for us until your store can streamline the self-scanner situation. That machine is always covered in tape, or it is positioned too close to the counter to make a complete swipe or it simply doesn't work. We're annoyed.
• Don't think you're fooling us with the buy one, get one half off sale. The only people who need two are twins.
• Keep a few sweaters and jackets and mittens and boots in the store at least through February. It's a long winter, and we're apt to lose stuff.
• Stop basing shipping fees on the price of the item (Macy's). It should not cost more to mail a dress than a new piece of luggage because the little slip of a dress happens to be a designer garment. Base the fees on weight, just like they do at the post office.
• Offer a broader range of sizes in stores, not just online. Whether tall, petite or curvy, we'd all like the opportunity to try things on before buying.
• If you're going to sell pants that are a mile long, include free alterations A A- even when the merchandise is on sale.
• If you're going to 'support a cause' with sales from designated merchandise, have the integrity to disclose how much is actually being donated and where the money is going.
• Lots of us appreciate fashion even though we lack the means to drop $200 on a simple cotton top. If boutique owners want to steal our business away from the mall, they need to seek out more affordable but still stylish lines. High prices are not the only way to distinguish a specialty shop.
• Memo to shopping centers: Get some new stores. We're bored. Bored with seeing the same chain stores everywhere. Bored with not knowing if we're in Woodbury or Maple Grove A A- and not caring. Bored, bored, bored.
• While it would seem to go without saying, this clearly needs to be said once again: Get off the phone, stop chitchatting with co-workers, remain within eyesight of the cash register. Acknowledge us and offer assistance, but don't hover. And we, in turn, will be appreciative and less grumpy.
• And stop claiming this is the last chance to save. We know there will be another sale tomorrow.

A post in Tamara Gielen's B2BMailMarketing weblog linked me to A Simplified Approach to Lifecycle Marketing, an article outlining Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey's thoughts on lifecycle marketing:

Despite the fact that JupiterResearch data indicates lifecycle email marketing campaigns generate as much as nine times greater results than other types, few email marketers are taking advantage of this customer-oriented strategy based on the idea of delivering the right message at the right time.

Many marketers are confused about where to begin and are concerned about the additional work required to implement this truly one-to-one strategy. But during a recent presentation to Atlanta-area marketers, Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey detailed a simplified approach to a developing lifecycle marketing program.

He recommended marketers begin by thinking about recipients in three distinct ways – Interested Prospects, Engaged Customers and Lapsed Customers.

Interested Prospects are those email recipients who have expressed some desire for communication; Engaged Customers are actively involved with the brand and expect to receive communications and, potentially, promotions from you. Lapsed Customers are those who have stopped opening and clicking your emails or who no longer make purchases.

"Understanding the mindset and needs of these three groups and acting on them with tailored campaigns can dramatically strengthen returns on investment," Nussey said.

“Unsophisticated email campaigns treat every person the same, regardless of their interest level and lifecycle stage. Dividing your list into three simple lists like this can be a good first step to creating more targeted and relevant messages,” Nussey explained.

Nussey added that marketers should have unique goals that align with the customers’ mindsets for each lifecycle stage. For example, goals for Interested. Prospects might include moving them to opt-in to receive regular messages from you, visit your Web site, make an online purchase or visit a retail location.

Goals for Engaged Customers could include maintaining or increasing purchase levels, strengthening loyalty, encouraging recommendations to friends and the delivery of efficient customer service. For Lapsed Customers, appropriate goals would include gaining an understanding of their concerns, attempts to re-engage them with the brand and prevent them from switching allegiance to another company.

“By approaching your list in these fairly straight-forward segments, you can create specific campaigns that target each group more effectively and with better results than would be the case if you communicated to all with the same messages,” Nussey said.

Campaign elements appropriate for Interested Recipients might include:

• Welcome messages
• An educational campaign
• Lead warming activities
• Promotions for first purchase

Messaging elements to Engaged Customers can encompass:

• Renewal notices
• Shopping cart abandon notices
• Service alerts
• Receipts
• Reminders of upcoming events
• Special promotions for top customers
• Targeting based on Web site page visits

Tactics to re-engage Lapsed Customers include:

• Sending surveys to identify reasons for lack of engagement
• Offering incentives to re-visit the Web site
• Delivering promotions to encourage purchases

Nussey recognized that many marketers think time-based, one-to-one marketing is difficult because only a few email service providers fully support these types of sophisticated email marketing programs without the need for custom programming. Additionally, new metrics are required to measure the types of ongoing campaigns that are part of a lifecycle program. He urged marketers to begin today to implement basic lifecycle data into email marketing campaigns.

“The point is to begin the effort,” Nussey said. “The more you deliver relevant, targeted messages to prospects and customers, the better your results
will be.”

Here are several excerpts from a press release that references a recent study on sales recognition best practices:

Motivating sales people requires a mix of 60% tangible, 40% intangible incentives, according to data from research and consulting firm Best Practices, LLC.  

Intangible rewards - that are clearly important to motivation - include special recognition by management at team meetings, praise in private and mails from direct managers. By contrast, tangible rewards are such items that can be touched or consumed such as gift certificates, trophies and plaques, and cash and dinner for two. A summary of the report "Best Practices in Sales Recognition Programs," can be found here.

The most frequently used tangible rewards are gift certificates, plaques and cash awards, followed by dinner for two. When asked if there was a ceiling on cash payouts, more than half (54%) of surveyed companies said there was.

This research (available as a fee download) profiles 84 companies across industries on the prevalence of intangible and tangible rewards as well as:

• Tax implication of programs
• Communication of programs, including website support
• Presence of formal measurement of program
• Lessons learned

"In this research, respondents strongly stated that a link exists between the motivation of staff, a system of rewards using tangible and intangible recognition and increased performance," said Jon Easter, director of Best Practices, LLC's Business Excellence Board.

A post on Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends website directed me to - Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups:

“If you build it, they will come.” That might have worked for Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams, but if you’ve built a good site and are expecting people to just show up, you’ll be waiting a very long time. The days of setting up shop and automatically getting traffic just by being online are over.

Today, if you want to have success on the web you need a unique angle and a reputable brand so that visitors have something to remember you by.

Branding distinguishes you from your competition, and having a unique identity is especially important on the Internet, because buying from a competitor’s site instead of yours is just a click away. But despite its importance, surprisingly, most webmasters have either never heard of branding, or just choose to ignore it.

If you have heard of branding, then you’ve probably heard two things: it takes a long time to see results, and it’s expensive. While that is definitely true about traditional branding, Web 2.0 branding is flipping the traditional model on its head. By using offline and online DIY (do it yourself) methods and some guerilla marketing techniques, you can build, announce, and control your brand without having to spend loads of money.

Check out and bookmark this post to get all of the details on the 99 tips that should help you on your way.

Here is both a thoughtful and truthful commentary from Gerry McGovern, Technology - Does It Make Managers Lazy?:

It's hard to resist the easy option. Buy this customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you will efficiently and cost-effectively be able to manage your customer relationships. Buy this content management software, and you will be able to efficiently and cost-effectively manage your content.

Software does not manage. People manage. Software is a tool that can help you manage better, but it is not a manager. It is not strategic. Before you can manage customer relationships, you have to have relationships with your customers.

A person recently told me that their CRM software was great for sending lots to email offers and other marketing material to their customers. To them, this was what CRM was all about: cost-effectively deluging (spamming) their customers with marketing and sales pitches.

It amazes me the amount of organizations out there that still believe that to create a better intranet or public website, all they need to do is choose the right content management software. These organizations are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content. They'll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they'll wonder where it all went wrong.

I've yet to meet an organization that has successfully implemented personalization either for their intranet or their public website. This is not because the concept of personalization is wrong. Properly implemented, it is a very sophisticated and powerful way to give customers what they want.

There are many reasons it fails miserably, however. One of them is that organizations feel that all they need to do is install this fancy software, turn it on, and, hey presto, a wonderful website emerges. No need to worry about the quality of the content. No need to worry about how well it is structured and organized. The magic software looks after all that.

I once spoke with a consultant who told me about working with the British military. Years ago, if you were becoming an officer, you were sent on a course about managing your office. Part of the course involved learning how to manage your filing cabinet.

Then computers came along and the course was scrapped. Think about it. A computer has at least 100 "filing cabinets". You need training in managing content far more if you have a computer. But you don't get it because of this irrational exuberance about what technology can do.

Modern organizations are not professionally managing their content. Senior management often abdicate responsibility. They think that the Web is a technology challenge that they can hand over to IT.

Content management will become one of the key management skills of the 21st century. That's because we live in a content-driven world.

Technology can support strategy. It can support managers as they do their jobs. But technology is not a strategy, and it is certainly not management.

Amen! For other interesting news and commentary, check out the WebProNews site.

Here is a summary of an article by Elizabeth Millard, 10 Tips To Help New Reps Increase Sales with CRM:

Automating the sales process is one of the most important functions of a CRM system. In fact, much of today's CRM software has its origins back in the mid-'80s and early '90s, not as "customer relationship management" software, but instead as "sales automation" software.

Although much has changed over the past 2 decades, the goal of sales automation software remains the same: make it easy to help sales reps help themselves, and their customers, to increase sales. CRM software is designed to accomplish this goal in two ways: by automating redundant parts of the sales process, which saves time, and by putting all the necessary information right at the fingertips of the sales team.

Part of the challenge for a sales manager is getting new reps up to speed so they can get the maximum benefit out of their company's CRM system. There are still many salespeople who have never used CRM software. And, even if someone has used CRM before, the implementation is usually quite different from one company to the next.

Of course, after new reps have been trained on the basics of using a CRM system, it's time to help them hit the ground running with proven methods to increase sales. We asked some of the industry's leading CRM gurus for advice and came up with these ten tips to help you leverage the power of CRM to boost sales and keep on selling.

1. Get a complete view of customers and prospects
2. Give service personnel more CRM power
3. Build in more automation
4. Go back to the training room
5. Bring together marketing and sales
6. Create incentives for customer data input
7. Consider a different interface
8. Create customer success stories
9. Use a digital notepad that ties into the system
10. Keep an eye out for emerging technology

For much more on each of these 10 tips, be sure to check out the complete source article.

Here are several excerpts from a very interesting article: CRM 2.0: a loyalty marketing benefit of Web 2.0? (free registration required):

The concept of customer-centricity is evolving, and changes in the business and social world are already forcing businesses to change the way they approach management and marketing strategies, says Vladimir Dimitroff of UK-based Prism Consulting, who suggests that perhaps the advent of 'Web 2.0' technologies should naturally lead to the reinvention of CRM systems: 'CRM 2.0', in fact.

What began as awareness of age-old business principles, brought to modern-day marketing with critical help from technology, has now reached a stage where the technology-empowered, connected world is calling for new approaches in marketing and most other management disciplines.

The story so far:
The notion of customer focus dates from ancient times when the small businessman, unknowingly, practiced CRM in a most natural manner. In modern days, concepts like relationship marketing emerged in the early 80s but it was only in the mid-90s when technology propelled these practices into the mainstream and CRM became a recognised (and, for a while, much hyped) business discipline.

Since then, CRM has evolved considerably, if gradually. The software industry rapidly embraced it and made CRM a class of technology solutions, misleading many to believe that "CRM can be bought and installed".

Changes for the Customer:
'Customer' in CRM 1.0 meant it was critical to recognise the importance of customers for any business, and the fact that they are individuals, not a grey anonymous mass with 'typical' preferences (statistical averages) and 'common denominator' needs. The fundamental differences between 'the market' and the customers who inhabit it are yet to be understood by many business managers, including marketers and even academics. But today seeing them as individuals is not enough - they are intricately interconnected with each other, and with the business.

Changes for the Relationship:
It was originally important to recognise that relationships are two-way. In the pre-CRM model of 'broadcast' relationships (one-to-many) it was often said that the customer has a relationship with the brand. But that was not enough. CRM 1.0 did much to change this, not least with sales-oriented database technology. Today we recognise that not only our business has relationships with each customer, but they also are related to each other in multiple and complex ways.

Loyalty was (and remains) the ultimate mantra of customer-centric business. Almost separate from CRM, there is an entire 'loyalty industry', not to mention scholars and entire academic schools devoted to it. They keep proving that loyal customers are more profitable, while retention protects a market share that should translate into shareholder value. But in today's world of choices hardly any business can command the total devotion and unconditional loyalty of each customer.

Split loyalties:
There is a new breed of promiscuity, or 'split loyalty' whereby most customers persistently satisfy parts of their needs from 2 or more alternative suppliers.

Changes for the Management:
For the management of customers, CRM 1.0 dictated that they should be individually identified, their differences understood, and each one (or group of similar customers) treated differently from other customers or groups. This brought the discipline of customer segmentation - one cannot overstate the importance of understanding how this is different from market segmentation. Whereas in segmenting markets we distinguish between groups but are not aware of individual members, in customer segmentation each individual customer is known to belong to a particular segment - and, furthermore, is known to exhibit a set of attributes (with a very individual accuracy, usually a score) that qualifies him as belonging to a segment.

Good CRM dictates that this differentiated view is used not only for marketing and service levels, but in every end-to-end customer process, in planning and managing the operations and financial returns of the company. CRM 2.0 recognises the complexity and dynamism of customer attributes (even the same customer A may exhibit a different 'score' when interacting with his related customer B from the one displayed with related customer C). The streamlined dimensions of strategic segmentation (usually a value/needs matrix) become a multidimensional maze that, to make things even more complicated, pulsates in all directions as dimensions change with each interaction. To operate successfully in a networked environment, companies are learning and adopting micro-segmentation - and linking it to dynamic decisioning in their systems. The discipline of social network analysis (SNA) is also evolving and some amazing progress is happening as we speak, as always helped by technology.

With CRM 2.0 every stakeholder has become an intermediary - to continue the trend of coining 'clever' wording, I might call it poly-intermediation or multi-intermediation. In a viral or WoM (word-of-mouth) campaign a company has as many intermediaries as it has been able to reach through those all-important connected influencers.

Web 2.0 dies without CRM 2.0...
Dimitroff believes that the much-hyped Web 2.0 is the enabling platform but that it cannot be a successful model in itself unless it also embraces CRM 2.0 principles. Understanding this will make all the difference in the imminent shrinking of the 'Web 2.0 industry' at the tail of the hype cycle (perhaps not a dot-com-like implosion, but some correction is definitely to be expected soon).

In a press release about a recent acquisition of a UGC web site, a marketing executive declared "We enter the social networks arena because it's a powerful way to get our message across". But communities don't really want powerful messages. Instead, marketers should be inside the networks to listen, not to shout... and, just occasionally, to whisper in the right ears.

Dimitroff's advice to would-be CRM 2.0 practitioners is to keep building the remaining parts of CRM 1.0. But while they build, there's nothing to stop them from adopting low-cost (and low-risk) CRM 2.0 methods and techniques.

For much more detail, check out the complete source article.