CRM: Why now? Strategy may dictate it.

“Clarity of purpose, clarity of understanding” – Zen proverb.

As an effective business leader and manager, you work to keep your organization on track by trying to answer…

a. Who are you?

b. Why are you here?

c. Where are you going?[1]

The primary thing in your mind is to “clarify and communicate Identity, Purpose & Long-Range Intention.”[2] My vantage as an advisor & teacher allows me to look at the world from a multi-disciplinarian’s point of view. Educated to be a scholar and teacher, I wound up in business. Thankfully, I discovered Agribusiness and CRM.

Why CRM and Why now?

My friend and chief project manager reminded me that:

“… there is no time like the present to focus on effective and measurable CRM.”

Now, to broaden my background, I spent much of the last 4 years in banking, so I know firsthand the fragility of the global economy and the importance of cultivating loyalty with our core customers: one of the central tenets of Customer Relationship Management. As I was reminded:

“the current economic conditions absolutely necessitate that you never take your customers for granted and that you know with certainty if your marketing and sales investments are really working.”

Chrysalis Marketing knows CRM and we offer a holistic, thoughtful, and measured approach to implementing strategy, to delighting, and to keeping your customers. We have strong opinions on how to keep them delighted, as well as how to find, acquire, and retain other customers who look like your most loyal and profitable customers. We believe we have a proven, albeit methodical, approach: a roadmap to successful Customer Relationship, and Customer Experience, Management. It is an outshoot of our passion as agribusiness professionals, to put forth and share our passion with you.

Passion, for the student of life, is a fascinating emotion. My passion in business is about creating customer-based, customer-focused business models, in the business-to-business world. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is hard-wired in my DNA. Trained as a critical thinker and recruited into the performance management industry in the mid-80’s, I also have a deep background in Customer Management Centers (usually termed “call centers” – but they can be so much more!) and was a distributor. Now, it often happens that individuals find it difficult to take disparate experiences and build upon them. I’ve been blessed, however. And, “it” all came together for me when I first sold marketing services (research, training, incentives, marketing communications, etc.) into agribusiness, while simultaneously Rapp and Collins offered their first work on database marketing. Those confluence of events coalesced as a business “epiphany”.

This light-bulb that went on helped me realize that data, i.e., simple informational facts, were beginning to be affordable (as the cost of computerized memory & storage plummeted) and that companies could use that data, if they translated it into actionable knowledge, to create a bond with their customers. Thus began databased marketing, followed by what the industry pundits termed “integrated, direct, databased marketing”. Those key trends laid the foundation for Customer Relationship Management and, what we now term, Customer Experience Management.

In most simple terms, CRM is business strategy: a set of decisions that a company needs to cultivate “customer intimacy” as a disciplined, core competency. And it is one that proactively manages the customer lifecycle. CRM uses people, processes, and data, translated into “actionable knowledge” in order to manage these 4 ever-repeating stages of a business’ customer lifecycle and experience management, viz.;

1. Customer acquisition

2. Customer assimilation/nurturing & retention

3. Customer defection and purposeful release

4. Customer “win-back”[3]

Put another way: as business leaders we share certain common challenges as we formalize our strategic direction, viz.:

1. how to build a relevant business model that delivers value

2. how to manage our business in a flat-world, driven in near-real time

3. how to deal effectively in deploying our limited resources: people, time, money, and data

4. how to build loyalty across our “value chain”

Loyalty of the right, core customers forms the basis of well-functioning CRM efforts and the touchstone of our organic growth strategy.

Let me stop for a moment to consider these points in a little more detail. Creating a business model that delivers relevance and value to our targeted customers traditionally ensured that we would succeed. Business Designs, however, grow old and stale. Over the last 15 years, as marketing management grew closer to becoming a scientific discipline, we have learned that customers will leave if, as their needs and ever-evolving definitions of value change, the Business Design fails to provide relevance and value.[4]

The next 2 points, the “flat-world” in Internet-defined time and the limited resources of our companies, should be self-evident, but I think we often overlook the huge implications of both. Issues such as immediacy, transparency, and how we invest our limited resources require deliberate attention to detail – are we sometimes failing to pay close attention enough? Finally, the term “value chain “refers to all those “entities” from product inception, creation, design, etc. to market-coverage.

In sum we can look at the implications for our business strategy. Strategy, per Porter is about “choice; or, more bluntly, per Slywotzky, “selection” is the single most important decision any company can make: selection of things such as:

a. why we are in business

b. who are our targeted customers

c. how will we make money, etc

In today’s financially troubled world, our imperative in agribusiness is to make a decision, to select to use CRM as our governing strategy, allowing for 2 admonitions, viz.:

1. As sellers, we avoid the two most common errors:

a. Wasting time-consuming and price-inflation relationship programs on transaction buyers, or

b. Approaching relationship buyers with transaction-oriented strategies.”[5]

We know that the various functional areas in each of our firms must be aligned better and must cooperate fully, while coordinating all customer-focused activity. As such, our “core leadership Challenge is: coordinating marketing, sales”, product development, operations, service, etc.[6] In practice, those companies that first transform themselves so that this structural and process modification has been done internally. and who then take this same alignment out to the marketplace, when dealing with their channel and end-user communities, have been highly effective and created effective, successful CRM efforts.[7]

So how will this newsletter provide value to you?

As a writer, I am driven by my passion, my experience in business and daily life, and a hope that what I have to say will assist and stimulate my readers.

Our intention for this blog, this ongoing series of attempts to communicate, is to satisfy many levels for our community of participants. Our hope is to:

· present, debate, and synthesize the key business strategies and concepts pertaining to CRM strategy, business design, implementation and practice- inspecting carefully the dynamics across our “value chain”- the producers and growers who are our customers and our channel partners;

· open a new forum in agribusiness, which welcomes dialogue and/or debate concerning the issues of customer definition and selection, sales, marketing & service; channel management, and what we believe is a healthy tension with our channel partners, needed in our distribution-enhanced B2B world;

· offer counsel and guidance

· suggest a “new covenant” across that “value chain”

· suggest how both our metaphorical description of the “game of agribusiness” needs to change , and to suggest just how to “change the game”

· demonstrate a roadmap, constructed under an actionable framework, on how to build a successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, producing a business model (design) that is customer-based and customer focused

We will inspect the key issues of agribusiness. We intend to provide focus and direction of the key management ideas, concepts, strategies, and issues, which have to be accomplished by, with, and through people, processes, and data transformed into actionable knowledge.

For Chrysalis Marketing, our business is to provide value to you in Agribusiness. Our bailiwick includes CRM strategy development and execution, channel management, sales, and marketing, service and call centers; event management, and customer insight. We look forward to hearing from you over the next years.

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[1] Cf., Pg. 27,Executing Your Strategy: how to break it down & get it done, Harvard Press, 2007: story of border guard’s questions to young boy traveling from East to West Germany in the 1960’s.

[2] Ibid, pg. 27: what the authors call “Ideation.”

[3] Cf., Customer Win-back, Jill Griffin & Michael Lowenstein, Jossey-Bass, 2001. In her book, Jill was kind enough to feature the type of customer buying behavior analysis we first proposed in the late ‘90’s while working with Vic Hunter of Hunter Business Group.

[4] Cf., The contributions of Adrian Slywotzky, beginning with Value Migration, are inestimable.

[5] Concurrent Marketing, Frank Cespedes, Harvard Press, 1995.

[6] Ibid., : i.e., the imposition of a “concurrent marketing” framework

[7] Adapted from Cespedes presentation to The Marketing Science Institute 18 months previous.