Me: Do you use CRM?

CxO: Yes, we do use CRM

Me: What does that mean?

CxO: Well… we recently purchase a Siebel license.. We use Salesforce….We use …you get the point

Me: Are people using it?

CxO: Everyone in the sales team has been given an account

Clearly CRM means different things to different people. A large percentage of people feel that CRM is about the tool. If I purchase a tool, my customer management problems are solved. Right? Wrong.

A study conducted by the Gartner Group reports that of the CRM software licenses purchased in 2002, a whopping 42 percent is unused—at an estimated waste of $1 billion to $1.26 billion to companies that purchased the software.

A CRM tool is only a step, not even the first, in solving your customer management problem.

CRM is about managing your customer relationship
in a way that the customer perceives and
values it, which in turn benefits the business.

Much of it has to do with the DNA and the culture of the organization vis-a-vis its attitude towards its customers. If the organization feels that a customer exists only for signing the check, then any amount of technology will not solve your customer management problems.

CRM starts with the culture of the business. It starts with how the business values its customers. If this vital element is in place, then

defining the service levels for customer relationship management, the business objectives and the metric are the next step.

Sensitizing and educating the customer facing organizations – sales, marketing, support, the person at the front desk – in delivering the desired service levels is the next step. The tool or the technology comes only after this.

The tool is the enabler – it helps us address the customer management issue, but it is not the solution in itself.

So next time you hear someone talk about CRM, it is time to ask, “How does the customer benefit?“

• Set up four folders in your Documents folder – Inbox, Actions, Incubate and Archive. Make Inbox your default download folder for all applications. Move the scattered files on your desktop to the Inbox folder.
• Twice a day process the files in the Inbox folder so that it is empty at the end of the day. Move the files that you can start working on immediately into the Actions folder. Use the Incubate folder for those files that you can’t deal with right now.
• Work on the Actions folder and when done, move them to the Archive folder. If you are ready to deal with a file in the Incubate folder move it to the Actions folder.
• Once a month backup the contents of your Archive folder.

Try it and let us know how it works for you.

With the virulence of a jilted lover I ran back into the arms of that rule-lined temptress Microsoft Excel. I’ll admit I flirted with ACT, had a drunken evening with GoldMine and actually paid $29.95 for Iambic‘s SalesWarrior on my Palm powered Kyocera phone (circa 2000). Yet I always returned to Excel. By the time Salesforce.com began its meteoric rise, I had become a bureaucrat. So I watched from the sidelines – a C-level executive who no longer used anything other than Excel.

Starting again on our own, and boot-strapping Zebu meant I was back to donning the sales hat, working the phone, pressing palms and mailing my heart out. So we were back to looking for CRM software! Of course with the world having moved on, we never bothered looking for a PC client, and decided to go Web 2.0 – the bulk of my evaluation time was spent with HighRise, ZohoCRM and BatchBook. While I briefly spent time playing with PipelineDeals and Oprius, I was already too far along, with the others, for these to ever be serious contenders.

For those of you looking for the Quick & Dirty summary version here it is:

BatchBook – we picked this finally because of

• its simplicity – unbelievable simplicity
• the fiendish power of superTags
• its incredible support

and while we have become paying customers of BatchBook now, when we started its pricing (which began with a free offer for three users) tipped us over!

For those of you who want more, check out the presentation that was made internally to share why BatchBook.

HighRise We began with unabashed admiration for 37Signals. We found ourselves reading, watching and discussing DHH & JF.

• we started as (paying) BaseCamp users and struggled with use of separate tool for contacts
• we also stumbled initially because their free version did not support three users(our team size then)
• they’ve arguably led the simplicity (less is more) movement;  But we kept running into things, we wished were there in HighRise, and did not get the feeling of being listened to.
• pricing was a niggling more than BatchBook, but was not a deal killer

One of the mysteries I never figured out was, I got going using HighRise, but could not never get the other members of our team rolling – maybe ‘coz they were moonlighting then or for some other reason. But by the time we got to evaluating BatchBook, my partners got active and BB edged out HR! Once we got rolling with BatchBook, while we did find many things missing in BatchBook as well,  that we’d have liked to have, superTags almost always gave us workarounds.

ZohoCRM Personally, I have been a big advocate of Zoho (Projects, Writer & Sheet)

• ZohoCRM is almost the antithesis of BatchBook or HighRise – every feature imaginable is available
• Even a highly motivated user, as I think of myself, needs a one or more unit college course to use it
• alas – the near poetry of Zoho Writer or more recently Folders is totally lacking in the ZohoCRM UI design – the sheer complexity resulted in loss of ease of use and the UI left much to be desired. Seems like someone not yet steeped in the ways of early Zoho products designed it. Deal killer!

This might explain why, despite Zoho’s 3 user free license, I could not get any of my partners to use Zoho CRM.

Now that we have been ardent, paying customers of BatchBook, key areas we are hoping to influence include:

[a] more extensive reports (of anything v anything in the database, ala Quicken, my all time favorite)
[b] better sales deals/opportunity tracking without losing the ease of use, nor contorting too much with superTags
[c] even stronger API support, so that  can extend reports and synch with other apps.