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If a business considers its entire market (i.e., the unique values it business brings to a transaction that earns and keeps customers) – it quickly become apparent they have to go beyond CRM and the sales force, and start thinking long term.

By definition, the sales force sells and then leaves - until there is something else to sell. For example, they sell razors and leave the production of the razor blades, the customer service, and razor blade user support to the rest of the team. Every business knows that the repeated value of the razor blade is what creates long term prosperity for the firm - the lifetime value of the customer and the firm – they want people to keep buying your razor blades. This means creating a connection with customers that isn't just a sales based relationship. Creating a connection with a market deeper than selling, is going beyond managing leads – it actually creates qualified sales leads. How? Slowly, surely, and over time as companies and customers connect and build a relationship.

People actually want to connect. People search, use social networks, save and sort information, speak, select and stick only if they go through the entire cycle themselves – we call this the "self discovery" market. Google is a very helpful tool for people to connect – it helps people sort information through search and PPC ads, and save information with bookmarks, social spaces, email, and other information management systems.

However, not everyone is searching and saving at the exact time they want to purchase something. This is where a typical sales cycle starts to fall apart. Sales people and the companies they work for don’t want, or more likely can’t afford to wait for a year to get a sale or commission.  The problem (especially in a “buyers market”) then becomes, if a business can’t get a buyer at the exact time the leads are searching the lead is worthless, contact is lost, and the company moves on. Not a good strategy for building a business or a solid set of connections.  A potential customer might want to buy a house next year, after they get married, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to start looking for information on loans, mortgages and markets now.

Therefore, a business has a need for a consistent process of market participation and conversation marketing.  A successful business will want to provide information for as long as it takes for the leads to mature. When a business does this, it's building a deeper connection and creating that qualified group of connections in a market space. However, would it be too time consuming to provide that level of service to every customer that comes in the door with a vague request for information? Not necessarily.

What businesses need for is a marketing robot. Robots are not pushy and they are not emotional, they are informative and repetitive.  They can handle high volumes of people, can watch and learn and understand new things and create the right "space" for buyers and sellers without leaving the connection behind because the timing is wrong.  Robots can help create a conversation that can be revisited at any time. No sales force, marketing team or single person can do that - no matter how good they are - nor will they if they are compensated like most sales people - in commission. Effectively, this is how search engines started and still exist; however, a search engine is a one way cycle and is manipulated through "optimization" and a code set that decides what is relevant.

For a successful connection, humans should decide what is relevant to them, and then find that information.  Nobody ever feels like Google helps them make an informed decision – it just gives them information they specifically requested and leaves them to make the decisions themselves.

This is why conversation marketing and social networking is taking off so rapidly.  People trust and talk to other people.  People start by searching, but then they start narrowing down what they were thinking about and begin asking real people.  In short, they make a connection and follow it through.   In reality there is nothing about Google that makes anyone stick, other than sheer size of the search market. Once a lead comes through Google, a business still has to start that conversation!

That is where a robot can help for a clever business.  When people search and don’t get information or a meaningful connection, they will search again. So if a business can catch those searchers the first time, providing information to real people and in answering questions, it will be associated with the most valuable information about its market, and it will start to have engaged conversations with searchers.
That is unbeatable - if a business can get in the conversation, and staring helping to drive the conversation, it becomes a focal point, and more and more people will join in. Real people.   Interested people.  People that are buyers.  A robot helps because it grows and is patiently waiting and capturing and responding.  It doesn't lose interest or "move on" like a salesperson will.  It will cultivate and till the fields of prospects and create conversations and referrals and a community of people interested in a product or service.  

There are hundreds of millions of people on the internet.  A business only needs a few hundred or a few thousand of those people to decide that it is the expert, and the destination for solid, real useful information to be wildly successful, highly ranked on Google, and drive more success from natural brand advocates and community members than it ever could from PPC advertising or paid search.

So how can a business create its robot? How can it start generating real conversations and connections?
Contact us. We can help.

Imagine a business where a lead comes in, is entered into the CRM system and then… just sits there.

This lead, let’s call her Ms. Smith, didn’t come in through traditional channels, so she was routed through an employee who didn’t really know how to use the CRM system;  the wrong ranking was assigned to Ms. Smith, so nobody knew she was a hot lead, ready to buy, and worst yet, no salesperson was assigned. Long story short, Ms. Smith sat there, unattended until she phoned back again.  Is this an unlikely nightmare situation? You may be thinking to yourself unattended leads… in my system? It’s more likely than you think.

For a successful marketing or sales enterprise the focus shouldn’t just be on getting leads and entering into the CRM system. If that’s all a company focuses on, it will end up with a lot of cases like Ms. Smith. Proper lead management should be iQ3:

Quantity: exposure, volume of leads, and then;

Quality: making sure you know what they want, so you can talk about a product or program that is of interest to them, and then;

Qualified: leads that can and want to write a check for the product, service, solution, etc, etc that they are looking for.

However, once a company gets iQ3 leads, they can’t just sit there like Ms. Smith. They need to be managed, and there must be a process in place. CMAEON developed the patented Biped® Process to help our clients not only acquire leads, but connect to them, engage with them in a targeted conversation, covert them, and then measure how effective the whole process was.

Marketing and sales can be hard, time consuming and confusing. Adding more layers of data entry and systems that only do half the job won’t help any company become successful. What does help  a business bring in revenue is the ability to streamline the process  - a checklist that automatically helps them complete the steps required to turn a great lead into an even better sale. The Biped® Process is that checklist and process.
Interested? Let’s talk.

Photo: Alan Cleaver, Flickr

We have learned that getting people to "know about each other" is a difficult and full time job, and this is most likely the most difficult product to deliver for any business, no matter what size.  "Knowing" about each other involves many stakeholders - marketers, business people, sales people, and financial people and, of course, interested and qualified searchers that become buyers.

We have learned that not all businesses will make good business decisions, or are willing to follow a process, to stay in business.  These have been the toughest lessons, because these businesses are looking for an EZ process, and have nearly always failed.

We have learned that many people in the business world, inside many giant companies, have given up.  . We have seen firms that have provided their staff Just Ordinary Boring Stuff to do …those people have been dissatisfied and so have lost all enthusiasm for their contribution.  They are, needless to say, dis-connected in their work - perhaps only connected to a paycheck.  

We have learned that companies can grow their business - and outgrow their capital and capability to fund new opportunities.  This is not a sustainable model.  The challenge remains, how, when we are committed to innovation and change - and improving our revenue and business models to reach broader markets, can we evolve as entrepreneurs, rather than crush our dream under the weight of reality?   The key is being Connected to the measures of success.

We have learned in the toughest of times, when the world compromised the core mission of providing open information, innovation and connections with the best, most innovative business information technology in the world, our world failed.  We saw relationships with businesses crumble; consumers stop consuming, jobs lost, banking systems broken, homes lost, countries bankrupt.  When the world lost its connection its corporate soul, our culture, our way of doing business simply stopped.  We are now learning how to pick up our tools and start again.

As humans, in general, we are not afraid of change, in fact we embrace it.  Today is our time more than ever.  And that is sustainable - because change is always a renewable resource that can be relied upon - change is a mandate in the world.

This blog talks a lot about the Connected Market Space – a marketplace state we can get to when accurate and relevant information flows between all parties, enabling everyone to efficiently access to the information they want and need.  Today, we have created some of the capability to create the Connected Market Space with the way technology is evolving and how we use it.

However, we have also realized that not all markets or marketplace endeavors are so noble as to efficiently deliver accurate information to us.  Often, accurate information is the most difficult thing to acquire because there is too much information - mostly about things we don’t want or need to know to make our decisions.

That said, today, there are emerging filters for true voices and targeted, personalized information models emerging daily.  Things we can easily adopt and opt in and out of – these are the gateways to getting truly connected. Remember – you’re in the Connected Market Space if:

• Everyone knows more about each other
• Everyone trusts each other
• Everyone can carry on a conversation
• Everyone can complete a transaction safely
• Everyone has accurate information

In past couple of weeks, this blog has talked a lot about how CRM can go bad. If your business has a CRM system that focuses only on features, and not actually connecting you to your customers, you have bad CRM.  It’s likely wasting your time and money and failing to achieve its objectives.
So what is good CRM? We invented CRM3: a system that connects, completes and continues the relationships; handles requests, revisits and relates with customers; and manages, markets and messages for you. Why? CRM3 is a powerful tool for businesses to help them find their missing connections.
So ask yourself:

Do we have the three C’s covered?

• Are you connecting to your market on their terms, not yours?
• Are you completing a dialogue - real time and delivering information - on their terms, not yours?
• Are you continuing the relationship - real time, giving them service and products and answers - on their terms, not yours?

All three R's covered?

• Are you answering requests real time, whether you are talking or not - on their terms not yours?
• Are you revisiting clients after you've provided the requested information?
• Are you relating to their concerns, opportunities and needs - theirs, not yours?

And all three M's covered?

• Are you managing this process?
• Are you marketing that you have a process and using it?
• And are you measuring your effectiveness across all of your communications (advertising, adWords, web sites, real lead capture, customer and lead interactions, social networks and the good ol' sales force tools - telephones and email)?

If you can’t answer yes to all these questions, then you are not really in the game at all.  In order to join the Connected Market Space as it is today, you’ll need the right tools to manage your leads and turn them into loyal customers. That’s what we do at the Connected Market Space. Still want to know how? Ask us.

In today’s world there is almost no need for journalists, and no need for ink on paper.  This is not to say ink and paper will go away - they won't.  They are great comforts, like junk food, or mom's cooking.  No matter how bad it is for us, - there is something satisfying about a burger, a big fat piece of home-made chocolate cake.   We'll eat it, just in moderation.   And then we'll go exercise, or eat better for the rest of the week.

Today, the equivalent in information is the internet, allowing us to surpass ink and paper, and the old methods that controlled the flow of information.   Even if you run an ad in a beautiful magazine, or a place a newspaper announcement about a foreclosure of a real estate project, your information, and all it will touch, will end up with a web search.   Information "off-line", drives more presence on-line due to the "conversation marketing" of today.  This conversation is known as Twitter, Facebook, linked in and Blogging.   It’s the organic spread of information; person to person, through multiple channels – unrestricted and free.

We live in a re-shaped information age.  It is a self-discovery market; things that we think about will lead us online.  Something we see in passing or hear in passing, on the web or off, will lead us to a discovery on the internet. If it is on our mind, we can now track down and find almost any information we want, and better yet, we all do this now as second nature.  Awareness of information is at the most raw level of our consciousness today.   Have you ever bought a car, or thought about buying a car, and noticed, all of a sudden, how many are on the road?   Did they produce more of that model car because you decided that was the one you were interested in?  Of course not.  Awareness took care of your recognition of the cars, their colors and numbers.  They were always there before.   The difference is you had entered the self-discovery paradigm - a place where you were completely oblivious to the existence of information, until it became relevant to you.   

The self-discovery paradigm and the conversation marketing of today have created a “word of mouth for the web” that redistributes power from the media titans and put it in the hands of the people.  This has not only begun to occur, it has accelerated as an unstoppable wave of human connections.  A paradigm shift of people who form the core of business understanding has occurred: intuitive entrepreneurs and business people who understand the new “word of mouth” system know they must have access to this rapid transmission of information because an information distribution shift has taken hold.

How can we manage ourselves in this new world?  How can we use that knowledge and power that we all have now so we might gain in this process?  How can we get connected, stay connected and enter our Connected Market Space? The Connected Market Space is a bubble of information, word of mouth and self discovery that inevitably will encircle our lives, our businesses and our brain waves. That is what being Connected means.  Being responsibly Connected – creating a space were accurate information flows between all parties informing all decisions - rests in our hands as individuals and organizations.

Today, the internet resembles a city suffering from "urban sprawl" - a sprawl that continues to clutter the view of searchers and surfers.  It is a traffic pattern that is gridlocked - blocking the reach for accurate and real information.  In the Connected Market Space companies and people will both create and contain the sprawl.  It is clear to me that we will see connections through communities that evolve into vertical sky-scrappers of technologically efficient structures, information and delivery systems within industry sectors.  The thirst for a single point of contact: one that can filter, report and provide true and accurate communication, information, and enable transactions, overcome the uncertainty, the crowds, the complexity of the "results" of this sprawl of information - will begin to provide trusted, connected communities.  It will be like a strong neighborhood, served by local businesses in a vertically connected global world.  My team and I believe every important decision that affects lives and livelihoods, deserves a Connected Market Space with an organic Triple Bottom Line for people, presence and profits on all sides of the transaction - the buyers, the sellers and the facilitators.

Read any white paper or marketing brochure for a CRM system and it will have an extensive list of features. Contact management? Check! Customer Tracking? Yup! Project Management? OK! Report generation? Got it! Email? Sure, why not! The list goes on and on.

However, what many people don’t understand when they’re looking for a CRM solution is that the features are irrelevant. The thing everyone should be looking at is how they want to turn their leads into connections, connected relationships that “manage” to turn into long term and valuable customers.  Show me a CRM that helps your customers relate to you, and you to them – surprise, that feature doesn’t exist in today’s CRM software.  It simply focuses on what the business does with leads.   Creating a connection isn’t just an “insiders” view, it’s external – it’s where your customers and potential customers are steering the ship.

The problem is many business get CRM systems that are not designed to facilitate communication based on the unique set of concerns, needs and what people are searching for or “social networking” about.  CRM is just a package of features designed to automate the “sales force” – which is great, if you’re all about pushing and making sales with a team of people.  But when you’re an entrepreneur, a small business, that has to depend on trust and connections that last with your customers, you need to really resonate with your market – in short, you need to be “connected” for REAL.   It’s not just about what you do inside your business, it’s about how you bring what you do with that unique quality to connect with the unique qualities of your customers and leads.

The thing is… if customers really wanted an automated sales force, or pushy sales people, they would just buy right from a web site, or publish their phone number for every CRM to capture, auto dial and have Joe Schmooze on the other end “sell them”.   Leads and customers don’t want that approach any more.  They want to have a connection they can trust, questions they can search about and conversations they can have in social networks that help other people answer their questions.  If you’re not connecting your company like this, you’re not connecting with your market or your customers.  Automating your sales force, powering them (or yourself) with more features and tools can do more damage than good.  And it can be costly to buy that “feature rich” horsepower.

A successful connected business knows it’s their core processes that generate new business and sales.  They use that in a way that they can build trust and relationships with their discerning leads and new prospects.  And they bring their unique abilities and voice of their company and team into the market – in a way their leads and customers can relate to them.

If a CRM sales brochure says that automation and tools for you or your sales force are the keys to growing your business – run away!  You can automate the data, you can automate processes, and you can automate reports; but to truly connect and grow your business, keep your customers, it’s the voice, the connected relationship, that wins the trust and then the sale.

The idea is “high tech – high touch” – most CRM systems nail the high tech, but have no way to handle the high touch your company needs to connect in your market ahead of the competition.

That’s why we invented CRM3 –Management, Market (message) and Measure – or:

1.   Manage your processes – know what makes your company unique, successful and expand on that
2.   Message WITH, not AT your customers
3.   Measure the effectiveness and satisfaction of those interactions (are your emails opening, are your links clicked, are your lists growing, and are your sales growing up upsales rising?) – are you responding 1 to 1 with REAL information rather than a SPAM news letter that you “think” will be interesting to your customers?  You should be able to do that with your technology.

If a business is focusing on automating their sales force, they’re not focusing on their customers.  They are focusing inside, instead of outside – where all the new business is.   Engaging your prospects and customers in a conversation is just like having a personal conversation.  Talking at them will get your company about as far as telling your teen age daughter not to see her boyfriend (take it from me, it just doesn’t work).    When you start listening to your customers and seeking to understand their needs, you’ve connected in the market.

A one dimensional CRM solution, that focuses solely on features and high tech solutions will never help a business win in today’s market that is connected, interactive and networked; customers self discover, communicate and create their own information – so start listening before you sell.  You’ll be amazed at what you hear to drive the decisions of which company customers will buy from.   You need tools to communicate and connect properly – to give your prospects and customers the information they want.

Don’t settle for CRM, follow the Connected Relationship: Market, Manage, Message CRM3 process. You’ll leverage your business’ unique assets, beyond a sales force, and grow like never before in your Connected Market Space.

For better or for worse, it has been proven over and over again in the last two years that everything and everyone in the world is connected.

Of course, we are all connected in the online ecosystem, plugged into each other with social networking sites, search engines and blogs. The unprecedented scale at which we freely share information about ourselves has given rise to a new concern – are we are too connected? Do we really want people to know all about everything we’re doing all the time? We are connected economically, as we all learned too well during the economic meltdown. Seemingly unimportant defaulting mortgages in the US began piling up, and all at once, people began to realize the bad debt had crept into the whole system like a cancer - weakening the entire global economy; causing job losses from Detroit to Denmark.  The environment connects us all – the volcano in Iceland reminded us of that too – one tiny place disrupted the whole world – stopping people, goods and money from making the journeys we’ve come to rely on for our survival.

Almost everyone now recognizes that the world is now, and forever Connected in an economic, environmental and social ecosystem.  Then again, many of the corporations, regulators and businesses of the world, small and large… but mostly large, already knew this.  Some of them abused the ecosystem for wealth and gain at the expense of everyone else. These companies and individuals – the Goldman Sachs, the Bernie Madoffs of the world - have been decidedly internally, individually motivated.  They used the forces of regulations, legal manipulations and governments to create their profits -while the rest of the world was the unaware participant – duped into helping, and then left to clean up the mess.

To be blunt, this stinks! Nobody likes to be tricked, but the recent chaos has a bright side – people now understand that we have to overcome a crisis.  We understand, at our roots, we have to build a solution.  We have to reclaim our connected ecosystem and make it our own. We have to use the interconnected nature of the world and turn it into a tool to help all of us, not just a select few.  We have shape the connected ecosystem into a Connected Market Space.

A business today, in any sector, exists for the purpose of rapid response – transmitting candid, accurate information to all sides - not just inside the organization.  This is more commonly known as the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit, or the "three pillars".  The triple bottom line is about being truly, a custodian of this planet - a business seeking to profit, should be finding positive connections and fulfilling a purpose.  If you are in any kind of business you will affect other people – so the responsible and smart thing to do is to connect to the world in a positive way.

It’s not hard create a Connected Market Space and use the ecosystem for good. The Connected Market Space is, at its meaning, the connection of any enterprise, to any market, with accurate, open and honest information.  How do you know you’re really connected? It’s not just about advertising and using Twitter – it’s about making meaningful connections that make the world a better, more useful place. When is a business using its power for good? A business in the Connected Market Space demonstrates that: Clients and business know more about each other

1. Clients and business can trust  each other
2. Each party has accurate information
3. Everyone can  carry on a conversation
4. Everyone can complete a transaction safely

When you’re connected responsibly, positively and fulfill a purpose, no matter what you do, you’re using the power of the Connected Market Space.

Everyone today knows that CRM solutions save money and make moving information between employees, customer and clients much easier. Between 1999 and 2005, it seemed everyone was jumping on the CRM bandwagon – and with good reason – who doesn’t want to streamline their data capture and make more money?

However, more than 10 years into CRM, some interesting statistics start to emerge:

• "55% - 75% of all CRM installs failed to achieve results or even go live..." (source: HBR 2001)
• "70% of large scale CRM projects - costing more than $50mm do not achieve objectives ..." (source: Gartners Study, 2005)
• "One in every 5 users reported CRM not only failed to deliver profitable growth ... but damaged long-standing customer relationships" (source: J- Banis Annual Survey, 2001)

Is this really true? A member of the CMAEON staff shared a story with me about CRM software. She had just started with a large, well established natural resources company, which was using Peoplesoft to manage its mandatory safety training. One of the first things she had to do was learn how to use the system:
“So, when you take your first aid classes, you’ll have to enter your records into Peoplestupid.”
“People… stupid?”
“Well, it’s called PeopleSoft, but it doesn’t work very well.”

What happened? How did a piece of software designed to make processes better end up with such a bad reputation internally. With CRM, it’s really a question of intentions: people are not managed, and neither are customers. What you should be managing are your processes.

In other words, YOUR business processes that build YOUR relationships should talk YOUR talk and walk YOUR walk. If your CRM is only focused on features that capture information, ignoring what you do with it, the technology you use, or what your employees and clients like, chances are it’s not going to work for you.  When a company implements a CRM system, it should work with the company, not change the company to work with the CRM system. If the focus is adapting the system to how you walk, and how you talk, then you can start streamlining processes to you can do MORE of the RIGHT stuff better.