One of the requirements of a true Social CRM system is the ability to do social lead generation.  While traditional lead generation can take a variety of forms  (marketing campaigns, purchasing lists, etc.), Social lead generation involves utilizing social networks to get better targeted leads.  This can take many forms:

• Targeted Facebook ads
• Searching for users who trend in certain relevant Twitter hashtags to gain profile data
• Automatically finding discussion forum threads that match specific keyword criteria

These are just a few.  What do you see as the lead generation techniques of Social CRM?  Post a comment or email me at crmbytes at gmail dot com.  I’ll expound on some of the best answers in a future post.

The more often I travel to different companies as part of my normal 9 to 5 responsibilities, the more amazed that I am that most businesses do not understand who their customers are.  When I ask the questions “who is your customer”, most people give answers that reflect their own biases or anecdotal knowledge about their customers, but very rarely any real insight.  The truth is, most companies have a vast array of data about their customers that could be used to make decisions on, but that data is often disorganized and usually goes untapped. It is extremely valuable for a management team to be able to segment their data and determine exactly what types of people (or businesses) are buying their products or services.  Factors such as industry, income range, personal demographics, geographic location, company size, average spend, churn rate, and other data points that every company has can be critical in making marketing and business development decisions.  Building a business intelligence system around this area of customer demographics is a critical first step to knowing your customer.

Beyond the data points that a company already has (but may not be utilizing), capturing more data about customers is key for moving ahead of the pack.  Profiling your customer’s interests and needs and coupling that with behaviors is a key component of marketing, sales, and understanding your own business.  The  key to successful business growth is gaining new customers and selling more to existing customers.  The key to doing that effectively is knowing who your customers are and which customers are the most lucrative, and targeting like people with similar messages.

How much do you know your customers?  Does your company have the means to analyze your customer data for purposes of profiling and decision making?  Is the knowledge of your customers based on hard data or intuition?  What would you do to improve the knowledge of your customers?

Discuss.

Last month, I talked about how the corporate website strategy was an essential element of CRM implementation because it is a major touch point of interaction between a company and its customers.  Today, I came across a post that triggered another important component to a company’s CRM implementation; that of the company IVR.

As CRM moves towards CEM (Customer Experience Management), all possible areas of customer interaction with a company need to be considered, and a company’s IVR is chief among those.  The post I read this morning talks about using Caller ID as an IVR ‘cookie’, similar to the way we use web cookies to track customer visits to the website (the post talks about a specific piece of software, Angel.com, of which I have not used in the past, so I provide no review, endorsement, or criticism of Angel.com).  Capturing a customer’s caller ID and linking it to their contact record in the CRM system can allow IVR interfaces to be created that are personalized to the caller, based on products purchased, interests, lead scores, etc.

The Caller ID, while not a foolproof method for tracking inbound calls (but then again, neither are web cookies) provides a good mechanism to identify the caller without asking for any identification, and can present a far better user experience than an endless phone tree.  It is this full-circle touch point effort that is at the future of CRM, whether it be in communicating with customers using corporate assets such as a website or IVR, direct touch points such as email marketing, or expanding beyond corporate assets and initiatives to the social universe.

According to a new report by Booz & Co., the next wave in marketing will be customer-preference driven targeted marketing, also known as “profiling”:

In a world overrun with marketing messages, the next wave of marketing technology will cut through the clutter, building automated marketing campaigns that address customers’ wants and needs individually. The result: greater customer intimacy, improved loyalty, and higher revenues. Moving quickly will gain real competitive advantage for organizations that start planning for the future, according to a new report by Booz & Company.

…

“Next-generation campaign systems will give marketers the ability to integrate data into their calculations from all touch points. Marketers can then design flexible, real-time “inbound” campaigns that listen actively and respond to customer behavior and preferences,” stated Chahine. This type of system maintains an ongoing conversation with customers, reacting to every customer action and learning more through each contact.

Customer Profiling and marketing based on that customer profilie is a topic that I long have been pushing, and have dealt with extensively in my series “Profiling the Customer“.  This is a trend that is on the outskirts now, but will start to hit with marketers in a big way in 2010 and beyond.

H/T: CRM Masterye-Journal

A Company’s website is not often looked at when implementing a CRM solution or CRM processes, but it represents a major facet of the relationship that a company has with its customers.  The website is the public face of every company, and represents a major entry point to customer communications and relationships.  Yet the corporate website is often seen as separate entities from CRM, or at most, a gateway into CRM touch points (e.g. lead forms, support portals, etc.).

Yet the corporate website represents a major opportunity for companies to build those all-important customer relationships, and to gather information and behavioral patterns about their customers.  How many companies, for example, prioritize their leads based on website activity?  How many track what areas of interest on the corporate website a lead has visited and use that to shape their sales strategy to that customer?  While it is not without its challenges, using website analytics to shape sales processes leads to more effective salespeople and in the end results in better qualified prospects and increased sales.  Several companies offer these types of solutions, whether independently or integrated with a CRM such as Salesforce.com, but these tend to be expensive offerings that end up being geared to the high-end market, leaving the SMBs behind.

In any conversation on the future of CRM, it is tempting to get caught up in the hype of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.  While the reaching out of the corporate ecosystem into the world of social media is a critical development path for CRM, the internal ecosystem of the website should not be ignored or left behind.  It is an element of CRM that remains relatively untouched, yet it is the most common interaction point for many leads and customers.

There is going to come a point (and we may already be seeing it) where there is no one-size-fits-all CRM solution.  The trend of horizontal CRM companies creating CRM applications that are applicable across industries is never going to provide companies with the best-fit of software to match CRM processes.  At the same time, CRM implementations that rely on the heavy use of customizations will deliver an end result that is a better fit for a company, but usually with an astronomically high price tag.  At some point, when does the CRM industry decide to go vertical?

Sure, the big players have some vertical solutions, which are simply slightly modified or preconfigured versions of their applications created for specific verticals.  There are few major CRM companies out there that have created a CRM solely targeted at a specific industry.  Rather, there are a multitude of small companies that have created their own vertical CRM applications, but they don’t have the force of the marketing of a Salesforce.com or a Microsoft.  These companies are usually focus on a single vertical, and have some expertise in that vertical, but don’t have the marketing and sales machine to make the product the CRM product for their industry.

Therin lies the perennial problem.  To verticalize, one has to focus on a niche, and to focus on a niche in a horizontal industry means focusing on a small customer base.  Yet at some point, verticalization must happen as companies strive towards greater process efficiencies and look for software that matches their own industry and internal process.  The company that can capitalize on that, and do it across several industries will make a huge splash.

IVRs are an important part of any company’s CRM implementation.  IVRs (when implemented correctly) are great for sales and customer service, routing calls to the appropriate individuals and gathering information to facilitate faster and better service.  But rarely is it considered to use an inbound IVR for marketing purposes.  Kelly Starzec at the IVR Blog talks about utilizing an IVR as a marketing strategy.  She outlines the fact that customers who call into an IVR are a captive audience, marketing through an IVR is a passive form of marketing, and it is a relatively inexpensive way to market special offers and other such things.  Starzec recommends utilizing IVR technology for:

• Promotions
• Upselling of upgrades/accessories/new services
• Promoting Events
• Selling/Redeeming Gift Cards

IVRs can be created specifically for these purposes, or existing IVRs can be used to market while the customer is on-hold.  Either way, taking a customer touch point and turning it into a marketing campaign is a good strategy.  It is important to make the most of any interaction that a company has with their customer, without seeming overbearing.  The IVR is just one other tool that can be used in this manner.

Social CRM is all of the buzz right now, but an equal opportunity for CRM lies in the merging of two recent technology trends, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing.  While numerous success stories exist for both SOA and cloud computing, no one has taken the concepts and realized them to their fullest potential in the realm of CRM.  The key ingredient that is missing in most SOA and cloud computing CRM implementations is flexibility.

As much as CRM processes are easily defined, very few companies end up using out-of-the-box functionality for any CRM without customizations.  Usually, this takes the form of add-ons (Salesforce.com has done a good job in this regard with its Force platform) or custom programming.  Yet neither of these solutions is complete or ideal.  Add-ons are still rather rigid in their function, and don’t offer the end user the flexibility to tailor the software to their workflow processes and unique data elements.  Custom programming and integration, while often achieving the goal of implementing a company’s process into the software, is often cost-prohibitive and introduces risk of future compatibility.

The answer lies in a metadata-based CRM platform, building on the strengths of SOA and utilizing a cloud infrastructure to deliver CRM services to customers that can be easily customized and are flexible enough for the end user.  Such a platform would allow a user to take out-of-the-box CRM functionality and modify it to their heart’s content, integrating it to legacy systems across the enterprise and drawing on data from multiple stores.  The end game should be a user platform that offers out-of-the-box functionality, but allows an end-user to customize it to their heart’s content.  Programmers should only need to be engaged for real complex business logic requirements that go well beyond the norm.  A configurable PaaS (platform as a service) CRM solution will lower the cost of CRM, allow for flexibility and scalability in growth and changing of processes, and allow businesses to focus on what they do best, without having to worry about fitting their process into a canned CRM package.

The sales process from lead generation to opportunity management has always been a difficult one to enforce, as sales reps are not people who tend to be process-oriented.  Thus, many reps do not bother to do more with a CRM system than to use it as a digital Rolodex – schedule activities, write notes about meetings, and maybe once in a while, update a status.  Getting a rep to fill out opportunity information and supply probabilities is like pulling teeth.  In many organizations, the practice falls into disuse after an initial enthusiastic surge.  In others, the rep will fill in the information immediately before a sales meeting when those numbers are due.  Thus, the opportunity data becomes either meaningless or inflated.  Sales numbers rarely match opportunity expectations, and the whole CRM process from the Sales point of view becomes suspect.

Making the opportunity process flow more organic is one way to tackle this problem.  Rather than having reps fill in opportunity data, the opportunity data and weightings should be based on objective criteria on what the Rep actually fills in.  Since activities are a highly-used portion of the CRM system, it makes a lot of sense to use activities to drive opportunities.

Using this approach, activities should contain an enforced categorization to identify the stage of the sales process that a user is in.  They should also contain a rating system, in which the rep will give his or her personal feeling on the outcome of the activity just completed.  The opportunity is then generated as the aggregate result of the rep’s ratings over various stages of the sales cycle, with different weights being applied to different stages.  Over time, the weightings can be tweaked based on the experience of the organization (or the rep in general with a rep confidence rating), giving the sales manager and upper management a good forecast of the sales pipeline.  Although not perfect for all organizations and certainly not the only viable opportunity management solution, an organic approach should be considered by every sales organization when implementing a new CRM system.

Twitter has a problem.  Over the past week, it has been highly unavailable.  It is reaching a point where Twitter is not able to scale up to the demand that is out there.  With Twitter growing by leaps and bounds in terms of users and daily tweets, it will eventually reach a point of critical mass.  As it becomes a major means of communications, especially for the enterprise, downtime is going to become a major consideration.  Twitter as structured today is not equipped to handle it.

I’ve always felt that Twitter would need to distribute its model more.  Twitter needs to become less of a service and more of a protocol or an application, and this could be a way as well for Twitter to actually start making revenue.  Creating a Twitter Server product (think a Twitter Exchange type server) would help alleviate some of the load, allow IT organizations to secure and manage how their organization interacts with Twitter, and provide a source of revenue for Twitter.  It would also begin to distribute the load and provide failover beyond Twitter’s current capability.

Of course, Twitter could eventually sell to a higher-end organization such as Google or Microsoft which would give it the ability to scale on existing infrastructures.  However it decides to look at it, Twitter needs to figure out how to scale to avoid the constant overloads and frequent downtime it is now experiencing.

I came across an article today on how many people are not making the most of Email Marketing.  This struck me as true and very accurate.  The typical email marketer creates good content, and blasts it off to everyone in their list.  While the article touches on targeted content, triggers, and other topics of note, the one that struck me is the lack of attention to ROI.  This is because most email marketers do not get beyond the opens and clickthroughs to determine how effective email marketing efforts are in converting sales.

True, Email Marketing is simply a means of lead generation for most companies.  Unless a company is an online retailer, it is difficult to determine ROI conversion rates without some planning and some good software.  To evolve and become a strong, robust part of a company’s marketing strategy, email marketing must be tied to the full circle of lead generation.  This can be done using a variety of methods:

• Coupon Codes: For email marketing that involves brick-and-mortar stores, a coupon code is essential to see where the customer came from.  A carryover from Direct Mail, coupon codes are a simple way of tracking traditional retail sales or phone orders from an email marketing effort.
• Web Analytics: Integration of email marketing and web analytics is key.  Clickthroughs only tell half of the story.  If I know a particular user clicked through, but that user then bought another product, then the click through is somewhat meaningless.  An email marketing/web analytics integration will track a user’s initial click from an email into the website and track what pages the user visits, not only immediately after the click through, but on any return visits in a specified time frame.  This can help track interest and, in the case of e-commerce sites, actual purchases, even if the customer makes different purchases than what the marketing effort was geared towards.
• Lots of A/B Testing: A/B testing of differing sets of criteria (subject lines, time of day, content types, day of week, etc.).  The key is to analyze the results and base future marketing decisions on them.
• A Good CRM System: A good CRM system ties it all together and helps the results of marketing efforts work for the sales team.  When a user clicks through and navigates to certain target areas, that information should be readily available to the sales rep so that a follow-up call can be made.  Additionally, both Sales and Marketing should have a single view of the success of their marketing efforts, from a revenue, customer, and campaign perspective.

Tying email marketing to a larger CRM picture is not an easy task.  In fact, it often gets neglected or short changed in CRM implementations.  Yet the benefit that can be derived from a good email marketing intelligence platform is well worth the planning, the effort, and the expense.

I cannot stress enough the importance of detailed, thorough, and complete documentation when it comes to CRM implementation projects (or any project, for that matter).  A project I was recently involved with on a periphery basis went through a significant amount of pain because of the disconnect between sales and the implementation team in regards to the lack of really good documentation.  Sales promised the customer the world, and when the implementation team went to deploy, the customer kept asking about features promised by sales but not known by implementation.  When going back to the project documents for clarity, much of what was there was ambiguous and open to interpretation, leaving room for these claims of “well, we talked about it, so I assumed it would be in there.”

Good, thorough documentation is essential.  It should be obvious to everyone, but so often it is not.  I’ve seen too many consultants and implementation teams attempt to take shortcuts on the documentation in the hopes of moving the project along, because of unrealistically imposed deadlines and artificial timetables.  In what seems like a shortcut at the time, the lack of good documentation is too often responsible for huge budget overruns and large slips in the schedule.

As important as creating good documentation upfront is sticking to the documentation as the project unfolds.  In another project, the initial documentation was solid, but the project manager did not adhere to a good change control process.  Changes were made throughout the project because they were “minor tweaks” or to make the customer happy, without going through change control or modifying the documentation.  This went on for several months, until at a project review the whole thing blew up.  People turned to the documentation for clarity, and found that the application delivered bore only a passing resemblance to the documented solution.  Since there was no paper trail, a detailed gap analysis had to be done, and a discussion on how to move forward ensued which cost the implementation company a lot of money in changes in the end, all because the initial documents were not adhered to and no change control was in-place.

It may seem like the biggest waste of time, and unnecessary, but in the end, in any implementation, it’s all about the documentation.

Salesforce.com has recently put an emphasis on a new paradigm, knowledge as a service, which relies heavily on social CRM, and has positioned its corporate vision towards that end.  Yet, as has become commonplace focus is on brand-related solutions that are fit for the enterprise, but does nothing to touch on sCRM for the SMB market.  In the article, Tim Barker, Senior Director of EMEA Product Marketing at Salesforce.com correctly talks about the importance of social networks for engaging customers:

We live in a world where in a very short time a service like Facebook has amassed 300 million people as a community. This is where people will talk about products and services. Firms need to get it out of their heads that it’s not just about marketing to these people but responding to their questions and providing services.

The examples he uses, however, are primarily related to mining social networks for references to a brand (as in the case of support incidences, product development, etc.).

“Crocks use social media to test feedback on footwear products, Starbucks used the technology to amass over 15,000 ideas for coffee products and Dell uses Twitter to not only sell computers but has created its own IdeaStorm network to gather feedback and develop new products.

“Dell, Crocks and Starbucks appreciate the power of their brands and deployed a rigorous process that enables user feedback but allows them to make use of their community of customers to innovate and negotiate.”

Barker says the way Salesforce.com envisages social media going is that sites like Facebook and Twitter will join a growing number of channels that will sit in on CRM systems and queries and mentions can be routed around the team in the same way calls are today.

“You could have a service team that will have the CRM technology routinely search for references to their brand. Firms could be clever and have a standard library of 140 character responses to a set of problems.

Barker is correct, but he misses the mark for all of the SMBs that do not have the brand-recognition that a Starbucks, a Dell, or a Crocks have.  Salesforce.com itself needs to keep that in mind, as it has traditionally favored the SMB more than the enterprise-level business.  Social CRM for SMBs has its own unique set of needs.  SMBs need to focus on different areas than the enterprise when it comes to sCRM including:

• Getting to know and understand their customers through social profiling
• Search for threads and chatter related to the company’s product or service class, rather than specific brand
• Respond to conversation threads indicating an end-user need, and subtlety directing those end-users to the company to solve the need
• Providing industry expertise and building a following and reputation based on that expertise

At first glance, Salesforce.com is missing the mark by ignoring these.  If Salesforce.com (or any CRM vendor) wants to harness the power of sCRM for the SMB market, they need to keep these and other SMB-targeted uses in mind. Brand search and aggregation will not provide much value for the SMB, and any implementation that misses their unique needs will be a niche implementation at best.

Ginger Conlon at 1to1 Media recently touched upon the coming wave of Mobile e-Commerce. It is a logical next step in a world that is becoming increasingly mobile, and a mobile world where the technology is making leaps forward in the area of applications delivered to mobile devices, specifically SmartPhones.  The next generation of e-Commerce will allow for users to easily and quickly browse products and place orders on-the-go.  Conlon points to a report by Gartner Research VP Gene Alvarez, who lists five points to keep in mind in the area of mobile e-Commerce:

• Customers want to choose how your organization interactions with them and informs them about products, promotions, and the like.
• A company’s mobile e-commerce capabilities should not be isolated from other mobile phone capabilities, like SMS, nor should they be isolated from other interaction points.
• Mobile users will want content that is in context with what they’re doing.
• Maintaining context is paramount, but enterprises need to consider industry regulations.
• Companies have the potential to see significant results by capitalizing on GPS location-based services

Mobile e-Commerce has not taken off as of yet because even today, navigating the mobile web is difficult.  Even pages that are WAP-formatted tend to be minimalistic and not provide a robust user interface.  Enter the App concept popularized by Apple’s iPhone and adapted by every major SmartPhone manufacturer, and you have a recipe for e-Commerce success.

The Chipotle Restaurant chain provides a good example of the future of mobile e-Commerce.  In their newly released App for the iPhone, users are given a robust and intuitive user interface to customize and order their burritos.  The app also uses GPS capabilities to locate the nearest restaurant, and place the order at that location.

The app provides a benchmark for how eCommerce apps can and should be designed.  Mobile applications are part of the future of CRM and providing customers with the needed tools to interact and buy on-the-go will help to provide that ultimate customer experience, and provide a customer retention advantage to any companies with enough foresight to deploy it.

This is part 4 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the role and methods of profiling customers and prospects.  In part 3, we discussed how to utilize profile data to send targeted content to your customer.  Yet the creating of your customer profile is never finished.  The targeted content sent needs to trigger follow-ups and provide for a refinement of the profile data, so that content that is even more targeted to the customer will be successful.

Triggers are one way to create refinement.  As a piece of dynamic content is viewed and acted upon, follow-up actions can automatically be triggered based on the recipient’s unique response.  Ideally, the triggers would go across marketing channels, and provide more valuable content to the customer as a result of their action.  With triggers, a phone call from a rep or an SMS text message can be sent as the result of the recipient’s action within an email.  Triggers can be chained together, allowing multiple paths to guide the recipient towards making a purchase, or at the very least, providing some profile refinement.

The key to a good profile is refining it.  As customers change, so too do their needs and interests.  The customer who bought from you five years ago, or even five days ago is not the same customer that exists today.  That is why the profile methods discussed earlier in this series need to be continually used together with triggers and dynamic content to gather more information about the customer’s current interests and needs.

The profile is never finished.  It continues to grow and change, be refined and molded, much in the way that people are.  By gathering good profiles on your customers and prospects, information can be directed towards that recipient that will more likely drive them to a sale.  The art of selling is knowing your customer, and profiling provides a major tool in that process.

This concludes the major body of the five-part series “Profiling the Customer.”  Part 5 will take a different tack, and focus on some newer and advanced concepts of profiling in relation to Social Profiling and customer targeting.