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…