The Top CRM 25 Influencers of 2007
I was thinking that I would file my 2008 forecast blog and that would be it for the year. It was based on the wishful thinking that nothing much happens this deep into December and the need to focus on digging out from three decent snow storms in the last week. I was wrong.
The folks over at InsideCRM have not turned out the lights for the year and instead have graced us over the last week with two lists, the Top 20 blogs in CRM in 2007 and The Top 25 Influencers in CRM in 2007. Fair disclosure — I was named to both lists but this isn’t exactly a blog to brag about my good fortune (though that’s nice too).
What interested me most was the influencers list because the editors, led by Chris Bucholtz (does he have a cousin who pitched a no-no for the Red Sox?) really dug down below the surface to identify some important people who might not usually get a great deal of attention for their efforts.
Of course Marc Benioff led the list and I thought that was well deserved recognition of his pioneering efforts on so many levels. BUT Ed Abbo came in second. Ed’s the former CTO at Siebel and chief of the technology side of all things CRM at Oracle. Ed kept a lot of balls in the air by keeping all the disparate CRM products in line. One small criticism, I would have included Anthony Lye, SVP of CRM in the list, maybe even at the cost of replacing Larry Ellison.
The analysts and third party influencers were clustered in the middle with people like Paul Greenberg headlining that section. I have called him the dean of our group and nothing would make me change my mind about that. Paul is all over CRM like a junkyard dog, like white on rice, like a cheap suit — you get the idea, Paul knows everyone and nothing happens in CRM without Paul’s knowledge.
Congrats also go to Sheryl Kingstone one of the longest serving analysts in our space and Brent Leary — CRM Essentials LLC Co-Founder and Partner. I can’t name everyone, it wouldn’t be right. To get the full scoop click here and you will be directed to InsideCRM.
Happy Holidays!
2008 Forecast
Gazing into a crystal ball is a children’s game at best, adults should avoid it yet here I am again making some predictions for next year. Let me go way out on a limb and say that the US will win some gold medals at the Summer Olympics and while we’re at it, there will be a presidential election and an extra day added to February. There, now I have something I can proudly point to at the end of the year to show how prescient I am.
Now for the hard stuff — here’s what I think will be important in CRM and what I expect in our little corner of the world in the year ahead.
1. We are at a point in the business cycle and in the life cycle of the four decade old technology boom when I expect that customers are getting a little fatigued for multiple reasons. That means it will take increasingly more work to achieve the economic results we want. Translated, that is the driving force for a resurgence in marketing which I believe is being manifest by the boom in Sales 2.0. As I have noted before, Sales 2.0 is really about taking a different tact with marketing and consequently I am forecasting that marketing will grow in importance even as Sales 2.0 continues to gain traction. Next year will be a good time to be a software company specializing in marketing so long as your customers have some budget. The most successful companies will glom onto Sales 2.0.
2. I have also previously noted the importance of governance, risk and compliance and for the same reasons noted above I think GRC will be a growing issue in the executive suite. GRC is already an $8+ billion market according to John Hagerty of AMR and in the coming years its revenues could easily overshadow those of CRM. This will continue to manifest itself in CRM in products that do a better job of documenting parts of business processes through business rules, workflow and auditing. A good example of an area that I think will gain in importance in the year ahead is CPQ or configuration, pricing and quotation. These systems are used in sales to do things like segregate the duties of selling and discounting as well as to provide auditability in some aspects of complex sales processes. By many measures, CPQ is still a young market though some consolidation is occurring. Another example is sales performance management and sales compensation management. These applications run together and there is definite impact on CRM as well as the finance side of the organization.
3. Authenticity will replace the idea of customer experience — interestingly, Joe Pine has been one of the leaders in both of those idea areas and authenticity is the newest. Briefly, in Pine’s own words, “[Authenticity is about a company] being true to itself, and being what it says it is to others.” Pine’s last idea, the customer experience, remains valid but we seem to have forgotten that an experience is something that is uniquely staged for a customer to provide a transformation in the customer’s life. Today, experience is simply about what happens in an encounter, good or bad, and often that experience is inauthentic in one or more ways. So out with the old (experience) and in with the new (authenticity).
4. The idea of platforms will continue to gain momentum and with that the definition of a platform will suffer the same dilution and loss of focus as customer experience has over the last five years though platform has a long way to go before that happens. We’ve seen salesforce.com introduce the concept of a development platform and we will see other companies introduce less grandiose versions of their own platforms. Already, I have seen Microsoft describe its CRM as an ideal development platform for almost any business application and SAP and Oracle all have played riffs on this theme too. Also look for platform to stand for a smaller piece of CRM reality such as “marketing platform” or “BI platform” etc. Those terms are already with us but they are thought of in lower case and are used as descriptors. Soon I think we’ll see them approach the importance of Brand Names and the word “Platform” will be written with a capital letter.
5. In line with the platform’s growing importance, I think we will see a new emphasis on the business process; in fact I see them going hand in hand. The platform will be positioned by its vendor as a solution for whatever end-to-end business process it supports. So rather than sales or marketing we might hear more about the lead to cash process again. I think this could be an important shift and a way for even point solution vendors to participate in the consolidation game without being absorbed by a competitor or sidelined into irrelevancy.
6. SaaS will continue on its merry way and events like NetSuite’s Dutch auction IPO will shine more light on it. At the same time though, the popularity and success will bring dilution and a certain amount of confusion as large vendors like Oracle and SAP try to put their own spin on what SaaS means. Look for continued discussion of “hybrid” solutions in which vendors attempt to provide a customized solution that inevitably includes on-premise as well as on-demand technology to better fit an individual customer’s needs. Also look for a renewed assault on multi-tenant architecture. Much of this will boil down to vendors selling what they can produce and making a case for it (a.k.a. making lemonade from your lemons). What it means is that if a vendor can’t easily deploy a multi-tenant architecture it will sell garden variety single tenant with a new skin while telling you the difference isn’t important. That’s where the confusion and dilution will come in.
7. Lastly, watch out for unintended consequences of Sales 2.0 and all things social networking related. I think there will be a tendency to capture a lot of data and treat it as the gospel truth but the down side of capturing data from social applications is that the whole approach is not scientific. The approach can give you valuable qualitative information but it is not the same as posing a question and expecting a thoughtful response. There is great potential to over-do social networking and Web 2.0 and if un-managed I think we could see some neat bloopers.
That’s all I can think of for now and I hope that I will be around in a year to eat my words when none of this turns out . I am most grateful for all of you who read this column, comment on it to me and on your blogs as well as to those of you who re-circulate it in other blogs. Thanks for reading and for your good ideas and Happy Holidays!
On Manny! On David! On Jonathan! On Mike! Go Red Sox!
A Top Blogger? Top 20?
Wow! That feels pretty good! I feel special — and I didn’t even know anybody read this thing (though I had some suspicions). What am I blabbing about? Apparently the folks at InsideCRM decided this was one of the more important blogs of the year and we now have this cool *.jpg to prove it. Click here to check out the other 19 and the comments from the editors. Congrats to all the other bloggers and thanks to Paul Greenberg (the winner, natch!) who convinced me that I should do this.
Too many thank-yous to all of you who read this thing from week to week. Honestly, that has to be the hard work because writing the blog is fairly easy. I really like doing this — and now I have proof that someone reaads it…I’m gonna ask for a raise! No, wait that won’t work…
Year end round up
Every year I write two columns that are a little different (really, just two). The first, which is this one, is my attempt at quality control and I use it as much for sport as to assess how I did a year ago in predicting the events of the year now ending. You might think I would learn from this but the second column goes ahead and makes the same mistakes I made a year earlier — trying to predict the year ahead. Here goes.
In reviewing last year’s prognostications I have to say that I (blush) was pretty much on target in discussing the economy, the housing bubble, energy prices and interest rates. At the time I wrote:
“In general, I think the US economy is in for some rough sledding and I hope I am wrong. The housing bubble is showing signs of bursting, interest rates are stable but fuel prices are on the rise again after a pre-election soft landing and the dollar is pretty weak against the Euro. Consumer confidence has been in negative territory for a while.
Not bad I guess if you like being right about bad news. Of course, being right and being timely are two different things — we are only now encountering some of the rough sledding I had expected. There is a great deal of latency in the economy and much of the negative effects I feared are still potentially in the future.
I also said I thought it would be a good year for on-demand companies to “export” their services. By that I meant that a weak dollar and low costs for on-demand would be a natural for helping on-demand vendors expand overseas. It looks like that is happening though I didn’t look up any hard numbers. The indicator I use is the number of foreign languages that popular on-demand software is being offered in and that number is significant. Even Microsoft, a relatively late entry in this market tells me that they are offering lots of languages for their products.
One of my favorite prognostications shows just how dangerous it is to prognosticate for even though I got the big picture right I missed a good detail. Last year I wrote:
“I think smaller companies with innovative on-demand ideas will find traction in this environment….The CRM areas that I would target include what is called sales effectiveness but which is really a market basket of companies that need better definition. Also, marketing and social networking companies will, I think, find receptive audiences.
I think that was all more or less spot on though the detail that I never saw was that all this effectiveness and networking would begin to coalesce into what we’ve been calling Sales 2.0 ever since David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com, and friends convened the first Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco in September. I think I should get half credit (at least!) for that one.
My last prediction in that column now looks like a duh! moment. I said, “So the strategy I would pursue in 2007 is to remain nimble and opportunistic — innovative solutions that help to lower costs should find a decent reception and opportunistic buyers might be able to score some deals.” I think that even a company on life-support would find the value in any kind of solution that helped lower costs. I give myself no points at all for that chestnut.
On another angle, I had the opportunity to go to the Kentucky Derby in 2007 and that was quite a trip. If anything you’d think it would have been a great chance to test my abilities as a forecaster. The short story is that I put ten dollars to win on the nose of the eventual winner, Street Sense, but I also had a few tickets on some other horses I thought were pretty good too. To be painfully honest the only reason I had any money on Street Sense was that I stood in the betting line behind some Bourbon fans from a local university.
Through the alcohol haze one of them convinced me that Street Sense was one of a very few horses in the race who had raced in sloppy conditions and it was that kind of day. So that’s how I got onboard the winner.
For the day I was down only a few bucks once you factor in the cost of my wife’s dress, the jacket, shoes, purse — and that hat! All in all it was a great road trip especially since I was also with pal Paul Greenberg.
Bottom line though, it was a pretty accurate test of my ability as a prognosticator.
Sales 2.0 and marketing too
Sales 2.0 is a big deal both because it is causing us all to take a new look at selling — along with all of the social networking ideas and technology that is changing our work habits — as well as for what it says about marketing.
To be frank, Sales 2.0 is actually more about marketing than selling but the reality is that marketing solutions don’t sell as well as sales solutions and consequently we have the situation before us. I long ago gave up on trying to convince anyone about the value of marketing because the people who buy marketing really want sales and the surest way to sell marketing is to call it sales.
These days I tell my marketing oriented clients to get as close to sales as they can to ensure that they close deals. I have even gone so far as to draw a crude bull’s eye target on a white board, the exact center is labeled “selling” and the next ring is where you want to be if you are not a bona fide SFA product and a third or outer ring is no man’s land — conventional marketing and companies squarely positioned there have a tough row to hoe.
How did it get this way? Is it a good thing? First things first.
Marketing is seasonal, like planting and so is harvesting or selling. Our Bronze Age ancestors discovered that the trick to an annual harvest is annual planting. While we might like the harvest idea the planting idea is a tougher thing to get your head around. If you recall the story of the Little Red Hen, most of us would rather harvest than plant. Actually, the story shows that we’d rather enjoy the fruits of the harvest and leave the planting, cultivating, harvesting, processing, and baking to someone else, just ask a five year-old for the details.
Truth be told many of the people who want closeable leads, deals won, and upward trending graphs don’t want to be concerned with the details of attraction, nurturing and hand off as a distinct process. (They have quotas and tee times dammit!) Too often that results in, “Just gimme the list, I can close anything!” However, as Jim Dickie and Barry Trailor observe in their masterful annual sales report, only about 59% of commissioned sales people made quota last year. Yes, indeed.
Here’s the thing about marketing — sometimes you need a little and sometimes you need a lot. You need a little when a market and the category it represents is young, the market is fragmented and the world has to have that thing of yours NOW. You need more marketing when markets get tired — they already have the wizbang in question and they don’t have a compelling need to get another, spiffier version. Yesterday’s iPod is just fine thank you very much.
So marketing it is but not too much, we already (smugly) know that half our marketing budget is wasted so we want that number to remain small. Ironically, we make no distinction between money spent on the wrong programs and money wasted by incompetence. We could look for ways to improve that 50/50 ratio but we don’t seem to get to that point very often. That’s why I say that smart selling is a lot like marketing and great marketing bridges the gap with sales.
If you look at Sales 2.0 right now that’s what is going on. There are a lot of solutions that a prudent person might allege to be marketing. The social networking concepts we use to identify likely prospects and the Web 2.0 technologies we use to go after them all smack of marketing — Peppers and Rogers’ 1:1 marketing to be precise.
In a neat trick though, we let the sales team use those tools and therefore claim that, hey, this is selling, a new kind of selling with a shiny 2.0 in the title. Well, maybe it is and maybe it’s a difference without a distinction. Sales 2.0 is, at the end of the day, about incorporating 1:1 marketing into selling (finally!). It’s about using tools and techniques that either were not available when 1:1 marketing was first proposed or that were in their infancy — think about where the Internet was circa 1993.
Al Gore did what?
The next thing you know we might be using words and phrases like “learning relationship” in selling — that’s when you’ll know the trip from sales to marketing is complete. And you know that saying about fifty-percent of the marketing budget being wasted? Perhaps at some point in the near future sales will invite marketing professionals in to help out and maybe that number will begin to budge.
Anyone ready for some planting?
