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One of the most popular CRM solutions in the world will tell you to automate your sales force, ditch the software and get your reps selling instead of administrating.  Sounds good, right? Except for one small hitch… what if you’re the sales force? What if you don’t have reps, managers and executives to automate?

A small business with only a few sales people (or only a single sales person) probably isn’t so bogged down that adapting a traditional CRM solution that reduces paperwork and greases the information wheels will really do anything for them.   Most small businesses run lean – the sales department isn’t usually so disconnected from the logistics department that CRM solutions will make them more efficient – sales and logistics are probably sitting next to each other. They might even be the same person.

What a small business needs to do isn’t automate their non-existent sales force; they need to create something that functions as an automated sales force!  There are many things that someone in sales has to do every day:  nurture leads, send information, follow up on sales calls, and remind people of sales, promotions, deals… the list goes on. If a small business could automate those tasks, sending information, follow ups, and incentives automatically, the time consuming grunt work of selling would give them more of their time back. Time they could spend making deals.  A small business doesn’t need software or solutions, it needs a robot.

That’s where CRM and small businesses disconnect – traditional CRM can make those processes more efficient, but it doesn’t do them for you.

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.

Are you inclined to take blind leaps of faith when making important business decisions? You would think most companies wouldn’t do that in a million years, but the answers are surprising.

When choosing CRM solutions, many companies do make leaps of faith.  Every day a business decides on a CRM system without identifying their key products and services, analyzing their market, or thinking about how to best reach their customers.

Businesses like this think automating their sales force will automatically create qualified sales leads.  Making blind leaps like this aren’t the mark of a successful business, but most businesses aren’t successful when they implement CRM.

Over 55% of CRM installs fail to achieve results or even go live (HBR 2001), because most businesses get caught in the technology tangle; implementing solutions that don’t solve problems but instead create new ones. If the new technology doesn’t talk to the all the old technology, and doesn’t connect to what it should be connecting to, this “automated marketing solution” is probably failing to deliver growth.

That’s why CMAEON has created the BIPED® process –good business solutions are not just about lead generation. BIPED® is about analyzing connections, gathering the content that makes a business unique, creating a single place to keep that information, connecting existing business processes and bringing everything together to create a tool that and speaks to customers in the way the customers want to hear.

The result is beyond CRM – BIPED® is a system that automates lead management and automatically creates qualified sales leads because it adapts itself to your system and how you work, not the other way around.

So take charge of your business and stop making leaps of faith. Run your business the way that’s best for you, not according to a CRM system.

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

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.

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.