MikeMuhney.com

As Co-Inventor of ACT!, the product that created the category of Contact Managers and that is attributed with being the catalyst that created the CRM industry, I take a closer (translate - more practical and “Useful Use”) view toward changing technologies and how they relate to furthering effective business relationships. In fact, it is what the cornerstone should be of all CRM and Contact Management (CRM/CM) solutions on the market today. As we have learned by now, no product can be all things to all people in functionality, but needs to be flexible to each user in order to be meaningful - an interesting condition for software developers and product marketing managers to realize. In my opinion, most of the time they don’t, even if they think they do. Just talk to a Siebel user, or a Microsoft CRM user, in fact, just about any user of any of these types of products to understand that they do very often miss the mark. And then here comes along the social media train, raising the question of what to expect its’ impact to be on CRM/CM products that are already carrying more weight than many users want to bear.

Surely you, like me, continue to find incredibly poorly designed, inconvenient, and sloppy examples of software products that overlook how to not only be useful, but practical, for the customer. Here is an example that I find in numerous products or website entry forms that I encounter (and this is just a simple one): you are asked to enter your phone number, which conforms to the American 3-number/3-number/4-number format, each having their own entry box. So, if you are like me, you type in your entire phone number, expecting each box to know when it is full and to automatically move to the next box to continue to display your phone number as you are typing it in, conforming to their presumed formula. But what happens? Your entire phone number is displayed in the first 3-number box and you have an error message! So, you have to undo/delete it, carefully hit the tab key to continue to each of the next two boxes, unnecessarily having to enter more keystrokes than is necessary. If we (meaning the developers and product marketing managers) haven’t gotten THAT right yet, what can we expect from the momentum that has begun to the general population with social media sites like LinkedIn(R), Facebook(R), and Twitter(R) to name a few and how we can extract, or more pointedly define what to extract that is pertinent, from them? The risk of getting it wrong here, as it relates to CRM/CM product integration and usefulness, is higher than it is lower due to the greater complexity of inherent unstructured content in each of these types of sites.

I think at this stage therefore that it is more sizzle than sex. Is it a start? Yes, to be sure, and one has to start somewhere. But is it nothing more than just having another “checkbox” item in the competitive comparison chart so as to not be eliminated? I think so. This has nothing to do then with the end-user, nor for the enhancement of the user experience. I do, however, believe that there is an inherent gold mine of useful business intelligence here for the taking, and therefore invites more serious effort on the part of software developers to get to it fast for the sake of what the purpose of CRM/CM products are intended to be for their users. We cannot forgo the efforts of marketing to “find” prospects that are then fed back to the sales effort. But it is still a Push function with meager results. What is sexy about social media is that it offers a (even better) passive Pull function of bits of info freely provided by the social media users to further educate and enlighten me on elements of interest, or importance, to them that I may have a solution for.

When I started my career with IBM back in the mainframe era, and had to go through, and pass, IBM’s intensive sales school before I was assigned my sales territory, there was a cornucopia of sales techniques taught that served me well, and which even had impact on how I designed ACT!. One of them was called “What’s On The Walls” and how it could prove to penetrate the natural barriers of getting a prospect to open up in the process of developing trust. This technique was simply this: in the days of cold-calling, when you actually went to the company to introduce yourself, your company, and your solution to uncover, and create, a qualified prospect, we were taught to pay particular attention to those items displayed in the lobby (pictures, magazines, etc.) and even more so those items displayed in the person’s office when invited to come in and talk more with the targeted person (family pictures, pictures of their boats, adventures they had taken, etc.). And why was this important and what did it have to do with the selling process? Again, simple. If selling’s number one requirement is to listen, then you had to get people to talk. And what do we all like to talk about more than anything else? Ourselves, and those things that we have displayed around us that represent our interests. So, by getting the prospects to talk, I was loosening up their resistance to me, and what I had to offer, and the mysteries of how one develops and earn trust, necessary to any sale, were more easily unlocked. Fast forward to today, where social media passively provides me an opportunity to observe what’s on those walls.

Social media cannot be dismissed as it relates to the value that it may provide CRM/CM users to sell more, and sell better, therefore adhering to the earlier stated cornerstone of what CRM/CM products should be - a method devised to produce, and benefit from, more effective business relationships. The need, therefore, to take it from the realm of sizzle to the pleasurable state of sex is totally dependent on the software developers and product managers and product marketing managers to make it so. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, and who gets it right. I won’t hold my breath for now.