The Blog

  • January 20, 2010
  • The sustainability decade

    As long as we’re talking about sustainability we should try to tease apart just what that term means for CRM.  To me, sustainability is about business processes that are repeatable and, more to the point, processes that both sides readily engage in.  But in addition to the processes being repeatable — the easier part — the customers must have a stake in wanting to repeat them, which is way different from readily engaging the first time.

    Now, I realize that the definition I have just provided has some basic flaws.  First, it is utopian — it implies that a sustainable business process can run by itself, like a perpetual motion machine.  No business process is sustainable by that definition; they all need new blood, fresh recruits to work.  In fact, the simple capitalist requirement that an economy grow must be satisfied.  So the sustainable business process must provision for new customers coming in and older customers leaving, for whatever reasons.  In the sustainability era we also need to be very good at recruiting.

    We are a long way down the trail on sustainability in some of our business processes but often the trail changes from four-lane highway to dirt road.  We have highways within departments — sales, marketing service — but the pavement is more rugged when we go between those departments even today, many years into the CRM experiment.  That’s fine with me, I am interested in progress over a longer term and there’s plenty if you look for it.

    So, for example, we well understand the desirability of a sustainable or repeatable sales process but not so much the importance of sustainable service processes, in many situations.  Old thought habits die hard and service is still seen as a money-losing proposition.  Too often we compete on price and hence there are insufficient profits to enable first-rate service and support processes.  But if you take another cut at the problem, for an existing customer, service and support are often the on ramp for repeatable sales.  In the sustainability era, service quality (not just the experience) will be the product so efforts to enhance service will be well rewarded.

    While we’re at it, marketing is too often viewed as a money-losing proposition on performance enhancing drugs.  It’s marketing’s job to spend money after all and too many of us can cite John Wannamaker’s — or was it Marshall Field’s? — famous dictum that half of his marketing budget was wasted but, alas, he didn’t know which half.  However, as an aside, why are we still relying on some nineteenth century encomium to influence our twenty-first century marketing thinking?  In medicine, law, the sciences and many other areas, the nineteenth century is a footnote with a few nuggets we point to as the progenitors of the knowledge we now have.

    Nonetheless, marketing in the twenty-first century is also an on ramp for sales, but also for research that will drive current and future product development, messages, and of course sales.  Indeed, in a sustainability era, no group will have its core function rearranged more than marketing.  Sales will have to cope with smaller margins, travel restrictions and the demand to be more accurate in forecasting with resulting cascades of other demands.  Service and support, as we have seen with the introduction of social media into those processes, will be relieved of some of the volume that makes it so hard to do well.

    On the other hand, making other processes more sustainable will require much more data and information.  Marketing is ideally suited to data gathering, at least in cases where the right tools are brought in.  As marketing becomes more of a research hub it will become more accurate and reliable, finally retiring Wannamaker and/or Field.

    Doing that will require concerted effort and a good dose of social media.  To do that we need to explicitly focus on the differences between inbound and outbound social media and work out the business processes that harmonize the two.  We are only at the stage where all social media is cool and the point where we can be selective and apply the right medium to the right business problem is still in the future.  When we get all the way there — in force — we will be well on our way to sustainability.

    Plenty of people like to quote a line that was attributed to Bill Gates and many other people that we over estimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten.  With that as a guide, welcome to the decade of sustainability.

    Published: 14 years ago


    Discussion

    • January 27th, 2010 at 2:21 pm    

      Denis,

      Sorry for all the posts today. I’m catching up on your blog after being without my regular computer for two weeks.

      Your comments about marketing of course resonate with me. Salesforce.com and other CRM apps provide a wonderful tool for proving once and for all the ROI of demand-generation marketing campaigns. We’ve been able to measure how much pipeline and how much closed business a dollar of marketing generates for years now. Salesforce.com’s own business is probably 2/3 SMB from a revenue perspective, and 80-90% from a number of customers basis, and almost all of those deals started as inbound leads driven to their website by marketing programs. Why are we still debating this?

      I think the reason is that we have to overcome the 20th century encomium that marketing is a waste of money that doesn’t drive revenue. Until we can change those ROM-based beliefs in executive meetings and board rooms (or those people move on to other occupations), we who believe in marketing as a strategic revenue-generator will continue to have to fight this battle.

      Cary

    Speak Up

    You must be logged in to post a comment.