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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.

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.

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.