Big CRM on a Small Budget

On this blog we’ve talked about a number of great tips to get the most out of customer management, from the importance of managing customer relationships in a recession to adding personalized value with CRM.  But what many of our posts assume, is that you’re already working with some sort of CRM suite (hopefully, Concursive).

Today’s post is targeted more towards those who haven’t yet

One of the biggest misconceptions about CRM suites is that you need either a big company, or big budget to make best use of customer relationship software.  This is entirely not the case.

InsideCRM had a post a few weeks back on Marketing on a Startup Budget, containing 101 websites to help cost effectively promote a small company.  Seeing as how this article is hosted on the InsideCRM blog, I think it goes without saying that one of the obviously essential tips for marketing on a small budget is good CRM software.

With a small company you might not have as many contacts or sales leads to manage but this only means it is more important than ever to properly manage each one. Keeping track of sales and marketing promotions on any budget is a consuming process, smaller budgets are just as critical to manage as large ones.

Further, with the rise in popularity of open source software, there is now a plethora of affordable CRM solutions that never existed before.  Through a large development community constantly contributing to the code, software can be built much more efficiently and cost-effectively.  This savings is passed on to the customer, who also doesn’t have to pay a premium expensive proprietary software licenses.  Open source CRM delivers the functionality of much more expensive solutions at a much lower total cost of ownership that smaller businesses can afford.

Ideally, I see good CRM software as a tool to help you get and grow customers.  Growing your user base is a significant task for all companies, but for a startup, or small-growing company, it’s more important than ever.

Michael Harvey

Happy Birthday Open Solutions Alliance! Let's all celebrate....

The Open Solutions Alliance recently celebrated its first anniversary. It's been a busy year and as a group we've seen ongoing market traction and expansion.

With every year that passes, the market for open source evolves and matures. There are many market drivers (too many for me to list in a single blog post), but one of the most basic is the benefits that users of all kinds gain from open solutions. Open technology and an open philosophy combined with the cost-effectiveness and simplicity required by SMEs and the collaboration functionality to meet the needs of the enterprise user, mean that open source solutions are rapidly gaining ground at both ends of the market.

Here at Concursive, our customer base has not only grown in size year over year, it's also changed radically in terms of the types of customers we deal with. One of our latest customers, which we are preparing to announce next week, is a financial services company that conducted a year-long evaluation of several key vendors in the CRM and sales lead management markets before deciding that Concursive’s ConcourseSuite 5.0 was the best solution.

This reflects the market opportunity for open source, not only for the vendors, but also for business users everywhere. It's an anniversary for everyone to celebrate - here's to the next year for the OSA and for open source advocates everywhere!

Michael Harvey

Building a Community Around Customers

John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, one of the sites we listed on the blog roll last week, wrote an interesting piece on customer focus during a recession.  Similar to the post I wrote recently, John points out the importance of strengthening customer relationships to push through a recession.

One of the key points John addresses is how to “build community around your current customers,” and this is an aspect we’ve focused on through the evolution of ConcourseSuite.  Being able to not only target prospects and existing customers but also bring them closer to the company helps build stronger relationships. These relationships, in turn, lead to improved sales and opportunities to learn from your best contacts. Concursive enables businesses to reach out to customers with capabilities such as targeted messaging and surveys, but also incorporates tools to help foster tighter relationships with customers and other key groups businesses interact with every day.

Lastly, I think it's worthwhile to point out that we both came to similar conclusions: the silver lining of a recession is that it makes you reevaluate your marketing and sales processes and forces you to improve your overall business practices and better connect with your customers.  From Concursive’s perspective, these are core principles that should drive the use of CRM in any economic climate.

Jeff

Updated Blog Roll for Some Weekend CRM Reading

In the office this week we were discussing some of our favorite websites and we decided to update our blog roll to include some of them to share them with you.  I do my best to keep up with them as much as possible, but the ones we're adding now are especially relevant and very informative to the readers of this site.  We think you'll find the focus of these blogs very relevant to your top priority - your customers as well as the technology aspects you utilize for business. 

• First and foremost is the OSA blog covering stories from members of the Open Solutions Alliance.  Occasionally,   you may see a few of our posts pop up there as well
• CRM expert Paul Greenberg writes the PCGreenBlog which is just as funny as it is informative on customer management topics
• Customer Think is a blog written by Graham Hill, a Customer Value Management specialist who covers some of the best customer related topics
• In the TMC Net blog First Coffee David Sims discusses all the current news surrounding CRM
• The Duct Tape Marketing blog is a great place to read up on all sorts of marketing, customer, or small business related topics
• Matt Asay's Open Road on CNet is one of the best open source software related blogs on the web
• The Social Customer Manifesto by Christopher Carfi is a smart blog that covers topics that include both technology and CRM
• And finally the InsideCRM Blog- one of the main sources for CRM news and opinions online

If you enjoy and benefit from our posts and you have a little extra time, try reading a few of these other blogs too.  Chances are your time is limited, but trust me:  if you have a few moments to spare reading through some of these blogs regularly will definitely give you ideas on how to improve relationships with your company’s greatest assets - its customers.

Michael

Managing Customer Relationships in a Recession

I recently came across an article titled “Using CRM to Win in a Recession” from CustomerThink.com.  The article has a list of tips relating the importance of focusing on CRM during a down economy. The list makes some strong points but I have a few thoughts of my own to add.

Regardless of economic conditions, the fact remains that improving the customer experience is an important competitive differentiator between your company and its rivals.  In this day and age, improving the customer experience means both understanding your customers' needs and giving them the tools to interact with you on their terms. During a recession, it is more important than ever to effectively improve these aspects of the customer experience. A good CRM system is essential for such an effort. In this case, CRM should be defined broadly to include tools that allow customers to engage with you and for you to engage with customers, not just tools that allow you to track customer behavior.

In addition, a recession demands that your activities become even more efficient and targeted. By using a CRM system to identify low impact efforts and eliminate them, you will free up more time and resources for higher impact activities focused on higher value customers.  Further, by optimizing your front-office processes and workflow, you will be able to get more productivity from your current staff during a time when your competitors are forced to reduce their workforces.

Another key component of good CRM practices during a recession is leveraging improved customer insight.  When the economy starts to fall and customer spending decreases, it is more important than ever to maintain the best relationships possible with each of them - whether you have 50 customers or 50,000.  A good CRM system can help you track and use information to identify customers who are likely to defect before they do so or to segment out the highest value customers that you absolutely must keep under any circumstances.

Finally, I think it’s important to note that whether the US economy is about to enter an official recession or not, CRM should always be utilized to increase profitability.  Most wouldn't recommend waiting for a downturn in the economy to start improving relationships with your customers. However, if you have been putting off a CRM initiative, the possibility of a recession should serve as a reminder of the importance of being able to identify and cultivate those customers who will keep your business profitable.

Jeff Hershey

Concursive in The Wall Street Journal

If you picked up a copy of The Wall Street Journal today, or checked online, you might have come across an article featuring Concursive employee, Chris Pearsall.

You can read the full article here, which discusses Chris’s move from manufacturing at Ford Motors to product management at Concursive. This is probably not your typical career move, nor is Chris your typical person.  Indeed, the move from the automotive plant to a software company might be near impossible for some people, but Chris brought vast amounts of drive and dedication to his role as a summer intern which propelled him into this full time position as a product manager. His determination helped him successfully manage a “career do-over”.

We believe in the Concursive corporate culture and are all very happy to have Chris on board as part of our team.

Michael

Adding Personalized Value with CRM Software

In a recent piece for Destination CRM on the benefits of personalization within marketing, Marshall Lager wrote that “personalization provides marketing communications with the means to deliver real value to customers”. Lager cites recent research suggesting that although CMOs understand this potential value of personalized marketing a majority are having troubles putting it into practice.

As the CMO for a CRM software company, this article seemed especially relevant to discuss. At Concursive, it has always been a focus of ours to make software that will help maximize the value of relationships - starting from the beginning of a sales cycle. For our software, personalization is a goal in every stage, especially when marketing to new leads.

This is the approach we had with ConcourseSuite 5.0: to increase value in the sales cycle, our tool aids in capturing information from multiple sources, including websites/contact forms, and drop it right into the Leads Management module. Then using the integrated Marketing module, we can create groups based on granular filtering of various criteria and message in a variety of formats.

We’ve also worked to make it easy to build complex email campaigns that generate specific messages based on certain responses, timelines or behavior patterns - i.e. using intelligence and rules to automate the personalization.

The tool also provides for the delivery of surveys to ensure feedback is being captured and used to refine messaging, etc. the next time around - closing the loop and ensuring each cycle is better than the last.

To put it simply: ConcourseSuite helps take out the difficult organization and cumbersome time required to personalize each lead and deliver real value to every potential customer. The more personal interactions you have with customers, the more customers will feel actively involved in the message you are communicating and the greater connection they will feel with your organization. Once you can make that valuable connection with your customers, your customers will become more valuable to you by being more loyal, buying more products and spreading word of mouth.

Concursive joins the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA)

Today Concursive is proud to announce that it has become a part of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA). ZONA is an alliance committed to several key areas which we have been continually dedicated to, including interoperability, standardization, best practices and the creation of value-added tools. In November 2006, many of these same reasons fueled our drive to become a founding member of the Open Solutions Alliance, a group dedicated to those very ideals in open source software.

ZONA is an alliance for the network monitoring and management community. How does Concursive, best known as a CRM vendor fit in? In addition to traditional CRM capabilities, our software, ConcourseSuite, also provides enterprise class help desk capabilities. (In fact, companies like The Weather Channel use our system to manage their internal IT help desk operations.) When something goes wrong in a network, in addition to setting off alarms and people's pagers and providing diagnostic information, and so forth, it is often helpful to open a trouble-ticket, for example. ConcourseSuite provides a method for creating such tickets automatically, and creating a workflow for resolving the issue. We also provide asset inventory tracking so that information about particular devices in a network--routers, switches, servers, etc.--can be maintained within the same system that is used for troubleshooting those assets.

The ZipTie open source project’s goal is to simplify network inventory and configuration management, and ZipForge is a collaborative effort where users can download and develop innovations in network management. In any area where we can participate in increasing interoperability, developing standards, and producing disruptive technologies, we look to do so. We are excited to be on the cutting-edge in this field through ZONA, and look forward to collaborating with the other members that joined this week, as well as the existing community.

Michael

Social networking and CRM: Are you engaging with your customers correctly?

As social networking becomes more commonplace, it is steadily creeping into the business environment. Companies have their own Facebook networks, MySpace groups, and use LinkedIn and Plaxo for recruiting and business networking. However, linking together social networks and managing business relationships is still a work in progress.

Previously, we talked about how to better serve customers in our blog by segmenting them better, and building relationships. Today I wanted to explore how to handle this in a new environment created by current technology trends. In a recent article, the O’Reilly Radar called “Release 2.0,” by Jimmy Guterman (here’s a link to his blog post on it) he describes the increasing need for a “universal inbox” to bring together all of a person’s separate lives, including aspects like email, contacts and personal and professional social networking profiles.

The future of CRM is in bringing together all of these seemingly disparate areas and giving users tools to separate and control their data as much or as little as they would like to. Concursive recognizes this trend and its importance to the customer. Web 2.0 and social media features such as blogs, wikis and RSS make CRM more collaborative and more in tune with business growth. The end goal would be to simplify users lives professionally, to make it easier for a company to get and grow customers by building closer relationships with customers and interested parties and to fuel as many one-to-one relationships as possible; in other words, to both turn friends into sales and sales into friends.

Other recent articles in support of using social media and Web 2.0 tools in business are Paul Greenberg’s piece “Everything is Social” in destinationCRM, as well as “Web 2.0: Just say yes” by Sandra Gittlen in Computerworld Australia.

Jeff Hershey

Microsoft Opens Up--Maybe the Open Solutions Alliance is onto something after all

In hindsight, it almost feels inevitable that after countless anti-trust lawsuits and reticence towards third-party developers, Microsoft has opened up its major APIs. Following the likes of Google, a company that strongly encourages community development on its products, Microsoft's move seems a bit overdue but ultimately quite logical.

More and more software focus is turning away from desktop computing towards web applications and services. The SaaS phenomenon is one example, as is the increasingly visible open source movement.

Now that Microsoft has opened up its API developers will be able to work on applications that can be more closely integrated with MS Office and Exchange Server, not to mention the ability to work with the Windows OS not just work on the Windows OS. We recognize that Windows is the most popular OS, and that's why we created an Outlook plugin (PDF warning) to make it easy to coordinate contacts, appointments and messages between ConcourseSuite and Outlook. With the newly opened API, we hope to further our integration efforts. For the record, though, ConcourseSuite has been running atop Windows and SQL Server for 6 years.

Citing similar reasoning for Microsoft's announcement, Matt Aslett of the 451 Group wrote, "It's an acknowledgment that in today's world, many more flowers bloom when platform companies make their APIs completely open for developers to write to." As a founding member of the Open Solutions Alliance, Concursive has always followed this theory and been dedicated to cooperative development for increased interoperability.

Not everyone is entirely convinced of Microsoft's motives; the Linux-Watch blog posted this piece citing numerous flaws in this story, along with the WSJ blog which hints at the opening up as a way to appease the EU before the potential Yahoo! acquisition.

But I agree with Linus Torvalds, that this announcement is far from perfect, but it's a "step in the right direction" for open software. Then again, how "open" do you consider 30,000 pages of documentation…

Connecting Franchises: The Extended Enterprise

In conjunction with a recent piece of Concursive news, today I wanted to talk about franchise operations to discuss the importance CRM solutions can make in connecting such "extended enterprise." It is no secret that a franchise company's brand and reputation among its customers can often be measured in the sum, strength, and consistency of messaging throughout its stores.
Yet relying on each individual franchise to implement a solution consistently is probably unrealistic.

Without consistent messaging, sales, and data management, a single franchise may can be isolated from other franchise locations as well as its corporate headquarters. But with proper connection to the larger corporate hub, any franchise can be as strong as the company it represents. It is important, by the very nature of a franchise operation, to provide a standard set of tools across the network for customer relationship management, sales, and marketing. So what's the solution? Connecting the extended enterprise and tackling multiple issues in one fell swoop.

Allowing the corporate entity to host an on-demand deployment that provides each franchisee an independent system delivers an effective solution of consistency, and ease of deployment for the franchisees. Creating an easy to use system through the extended enterprise means high adoption which means valuable information gets put into the system resulting in overall benefits for the corporate headquarters. This same adoption of the extended enterprise also benefits the franchisees since it allows each location to benchmark their location against other franchise operators in a standardized way.

As I alluded to earlier, AlphaGraphics, a customer of ours with over 260+ independently owned franchise locations, was looking to solve one main problem of consistency throughout the business.

By implementing our easy to use ConcourseSuite 5.0, AlphaGraphics has guaranteed a high adoption rate amongst franchises. Franchise operations which function independently from each other need to project a consistent brand image to its customers in each market where the company is located. What could be more important to an enterprise than a sales and marketing tool that allows the consistent management of independent franchises and a standardized online presence.

Michael

Introducing a New Blog Contributor

I want to take time today to introduce my colleague, Jeff Hershey, VP of Business Development at Concursive, who will be posting here regularly beginning next week.

Jeff joined us last fall after a successful run as VP of Business Development for a tech company in Pennsylvania. As you will see in our updated “About the Authors” section, Jeff has broad experience with both technical and non-technical companies of all sizes. His background will help expand the topic range on this blog; he will be posting some of his views/opinions on the importance of customer relationships, growing your customer base, and other general thoughts on relationship management.

He has already proven to be a great addition to the Concursive team and I am delighted to have him join forces with me on this blog.

Michael

Use CRM to Identify Customers for Better Service, Not Zero Service

David Sims ran an insightful article in TMCnet a few weeks ago, discussing why "Firing customers is a bad idea". Sims cites a study from the Wharton school that disproves the common, and in my opinion incorrect, philosophy of shedding your less valuable customers to increase profitability.

Many of the business-minded CRM professionals will argue that low spending customers take up too much time and effort to make up for the smaller percentage of profit they bring in, in comparison to the high spending customers, which take up the same amount of resources but return much more. The argument is that getting rid of the less profitable customers provides more time and resources for the more profitable ones.

Although I understand the basis for this concept, it has never completely worked in my mind. Instead of changing your customer base, why not change the way you work with your customers? Reallocating resources to more effectively manage all of your relationships will help improve profitability with high value customers, without sacrificing all of the lower value customers.

Sims brings up the point that CRM technology can be utilized to analyze and segment your customer base to determine which type of customers are which. In the old model this function could be used to shed the unwanted customers, but I agree with the Wharton study, that segmenting your customers can have a much more beneficial purpose: targeted and specialized relationship management.

Once you are able to identify the high-end customers from the low-end, you can tailor your sales and support more directly to each, enabling growth of both segments towards greater profitability.

There are two obvious reasons that you may not want to sacrifice your lower value customers: first, ridding yourself of any customers gives your competitors an opportunity to pick them up. If a customer needs your service and you won't provide it for them, they will easily switch to your competitors. Second, any good business relies heavily on word-of-mouth to fuel sales. What are these lower value customers going to be saying about your company if, instead of adjusting your service, you give them the axe?

The way I see it, CRM software should be used to get and grow customers, not classify and shed them.

Want to grow your business? Think beyond the sale

The other day I was speaking to a small business owner. They told me that using Concourse Suite was helping them manage sales leads, and I was asking them about the steps beyond the sale and how they were using the CRM and other capabilities, and what processes they had introduced.

"Beyond the sale? We're just looking to grow," was the response. I was stunned.

I'm not undermining the importance of the sale. Nothing happens until someone sells something, that's business. But good businesses look beyond the sale and to a longer-term relationship. Relationships should be a top concern for any business that wants to grow. It doesn't matter if you have 10 employees or 10,000.

It's about knowing your customers. After you've sold them something, get working on the relationship. Talk to them, ask them what they like about your product or service, and what brought them to you. Get feedback. Listen.

Here are several great questions for small business owners to ask themselves, courtesy of a great post at Duct Tape Marketing from earlier this week, which is all about making sure you are attracting the right type of customer.

Relationships are key: when a company opens a two-way conversation, they learn a great deal not just about that customer but also about their own company. We call this 'Get and Grow'.

Technology plays its role in this strategy. It ensures that you have the right processes, allowing the consistent tracking of what customers have bought, all contact they have had with the company and any actions required. It's all about knowledge: knowing who your customers are and how/when they want to be reached - but tracking these things on Post-Its, spreadsheets and desktops is not the way to share this vital knowledge.

If you're not thinking beyond the sale, you're not thinking abut long-term business - no matter how much you sell.

Sun Shines $1B on Open Source Database MySQL

Huge news in the Open Source world today: Sun Microsystems announced that it will spend $1B to acquire the Open Source database MySQL. MySQL is the back-end of the LAMP stack (Linux OS, Apache server, MySQL database, and PHP programming language), on which many web applications are based, not to mention web giants like Facebook and Google. The press release can be read here, which contains the following paragraph:

"This broad penetration coupled with MySQL's strength in Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), enterprise, telecom and the OEM embedded market make it an important fit for Sun. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems."

There are two big themes that I took away from this quote. First is that Sun will be able to pick up a large, pre-existing customer base through MySQL's broad deployment (which was made even more broad late last week when Virgin Mobile announced its SMS database would be based on MySQL). One of the biggest benefits of Open Source software is that it can spread very quickly to gain a large hold of the market. The second note I see in this article is that Open Source is getting the publicity it deserves for being flexible and easy to use.

To me, this announcement also indicates that open source is going upscale. This deal represents the largest acquisition of an open source company to date and continues a trend that increased in scope throughout 2007 with the Zimbra acquisition by Yahoo!. It seems that big companies are seeing Open Source as a completely viable option and I think that we should anticipate more Open Source applications gaining the interest of a broader marketplace. I'll be intently watching to see how this shapes the open source landscape in 2008.

Increased Security through Open Source

On Friday I wrote about the debate going on around Open Source software bugs. Let me restate: bugs in software are not related to the fact that the source code is freely available. In fact, open source software has fewer bugs due to the constant scrutinization and programming skills of its development community.

On the topic of security this article in ZDNet Asia, uses an Open Source adoption study from IDC as its reference point and states that: "Security was the top reason for deploying open source technology". This alternative view just shows how different the press can approach one facet of technology. The article cites an IDC analyst, Prianka Srinivasan, who talks about how Open Source is seen by its advocates as providing more secure software than closed source alternatives.

The article also talks about how companies are taking an interest in open source versions of CRM, and so they should be. The combination of innovation, security and the ability to connect with customers, partners and stakeholders across the extended enterprise is something that any business should at least explore.

Closed Minds on Open Source

There's a buzz around the internet right now regarding an article recently posted on Information Week titled "Open Source Code Contains Security Holes". If you couldn't tell from the title, this is a piece about the potential bugs in open source applications. If you couldn't guess from the title: I'm not exactly supportive of the author's standpoint.

Software inherently has bugs. It's a fact of life and I am appalled that the article makes no mention of the bug rate found in closed source software for comparison, instead hinting that open source has some fundamental problem. Bugs are found and fixed more quickly in an open source application because of the public scrutiny of the code and the community involvement in the fixing of any potential bugs.

For example: when a bug is found in software from your average Redmond-based software behemoth, nothing really happens until enough users report errors, at which point a "critical update" will be issued. One of the great aspects to open source code is that there is a community of developers keeping an eye out for any potential problems which they are keen to resolve as soon as they are discovered.

To read a recap on this topic, head over to the Enterprise Open Source blog.

I discussed this with our CTO, Tom Manos. Tom brought up the recent, and equally inaccurate, release from McAfee warning investors about the dangers of "ambiguous" open source licenses. Tom pointed out that McAfee is obviously not open source, but has similar functionality to many cheaper, or even free, open source alternatives, making its argument entirely self-serving.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We're on the brink of a time when the towel will be thrown in for fight over open source ‘versus' closed source. The audience isn't looking for one to win over another, they just want cost-effective, feature rich applications that will help them drive their businesses.

All we need now is an open mind.

Seeing the future clearly - Crystal ball gazing and open source transparency

There's nothing like some good press to start the year off. This week Reuters has highlighted the work of the Open Solutions Alliance in its story "Open-Source Chief Executives Make 2008 Predictions". This article picks up a quote from our CEO, David Richards, about international differences in open source, stating that in 2008 Asia will likely see a rapid open source adoption.

In the article Palamida's Mark Tolliver also echoes one of the concepts behind the OSA, stating, "Watch for consolidation among open source organizations as a way to strengthen their offerings and development efforts as well as acquisitions of open source market leaders by large commercial vendors who have a desire to expand their market reach and revenue stream". You can read the full Reuters article here.

On the topic of the OSA, Enterprise Open Source magazine has featured a Concursive presentation I gave at the SOA World Conference entitled "The Customer is Listening: What are we saying" in which I review what companies are really looking from technology solutions and how some companies can confuse the issues with open source smoke and mirrors. I think that in 2008 open source will continue its rise in popularity to at point where people will stop questioning if something is open source or not, they'll only question if it works.

You can view the video and read the article on the Enterprise OpenSource Magazine site.

CRM in 2007 and an Outlook on 2008

Happy New Year!

I returned from the holidays to a number of fun news stories summarizing 2007 IT events (check out #13), the past year in CRM innovations (see #2), and making predictions for 2008. Most notable was the story CIO Insider ran a few days ago: How to Do CRM Online: Three Big Ideas for 2008

I think this article brings up a few key points that align well with a number of our goals at Concursive: know our customers, listen to our customers, and protect our customers. As 2008 develops we will continue to put focus on each.