CRM was supposed to help businesses better understand their customers and increase efficiency. Yet most companies are not getting the return they expected. Why the purchase of software or hardware (which can sometimes cost millions to the company) that enable a company to capture informations and details about individual customers that can be used for target marketing, called by some people “an expensive way to learn what otherwise might be learned by chatting with customers for five minutes”?

from Why CRM doesn’t work « David vs. Goliath

Excellent. Someone else that gets the point!

Coincidentally, I’m currently working with a business that is about to implement a ‘CRM’ system. It turns out, like too many businesses and people, and in all fairness the whole industry, they don’t really understand what CRM is.

In many cases, CRM is implemented on a promise, on the promise and expectation of what it did for another business. In truth, the thing that actually made the difference was the businesses approach to it’s customer, as is pointed out in the post.

All too often, unfortunately this point is missed completely. Who’s going to point out that it’s the strategy that makes this work? The software company pitching for the contract? Conflict of interest. The Sales Manager? Too close to the problem.

CRM can work extremely well and deliver fantastic results. But unless it fits your strategy, rather than your your strategy fitting around it, it’s just going to add more work with little return.

I can help

Is this Philanthropy, or a clever marketing ploy? Think about it. If you’re old enough to remember the early days of Microsoft, you’ll remember that it implemented a similar strategy. In fact, most software companies still do.

This strategy works in a number of ways:

1. The educational sector is pretty communal, there’s lots of sharing of ideas and word of mouth, so plenty of organic growth.
2. It’s a very large, well defined sector that will create a large user base very quickly.
3. Most importantly, what do we trust most as users? We trust what we know. As human beings, we don’t typically like change. When we’re getting educated, we use the tools we’re presented with because we don’t know anything else. When we leave education, we want to use those same tools that we’re comfortable with.

This strategy, often called ‘seeding’, produces exceptional results in the medium to long term, but you need a lot of funding to survive the investment period (like Google, for example).

I prefer to call it, a ‘candy sale’. Here, try this. Isn’t it great? Now, you want to give it back, or buy it?