A 2010 Strategy Roadmap for CRM, prt. 1

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2010 Strategy Roadmap for CRM, part 1.

Strategy is choice. Choice tied directly to Mission, Vision, Values, and Purpose. Choice, Selection, Focus and Differentiation are critical components to any successful strategy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), is a strategy based on customer focus, on customer knowledge, and on delighting the customer. CRM is real-time, actionable, customer knowledge management. The best CRM approaches are holistic, involving all facets of your business and demonstrating accountability for results. CRM becomes a guiding philosophy and framework for doing business and includes:

• differentiating and optimizing the customer experience
• building customer knowledge to provide value to both the customer and your business
• taking a portfolio management approach to customers –investing in direct proportion to the expected return from each customer, while realizing that not every customer is worth keeping!
• delivering “value “ as defined by the customer - at each point in the customer’s lifecycle and with all of your customer contacts

The single most important set of decisions any business-to-business enterprise can make are those involving selection - of the products and services you will provide, of the customers for whom you will provide them, and of the channels through which you will market them, of the strategy to differentiate your offerings from your competitors.

Sadly, “something like 90% of companies fail to execute strategies effectively.” Often, the failure to realize a strategy success results from taking your eye off the ball. (In other words, something came up and we paid more attention to that blip than to the strategy). Successful strategy execution will/should allow your business to create a sustainable competitive advantage, to optimize its market-coverage models, to optimize its customer portfolio, to anticipate the shifting nature of value, and to realize loyal customers.

One primary constraint to successful execution of your strategy is that virtually every organization has limited resources: time, people, and resources. Choice, focus, and selection are critical. With today’s business intelligence tools, your firm can easily achieve Optimization of the marketplace coverage models - sales, customer service, marketing and channels. The models and tools of the eCRM practitioner provide almost a dot-to-dot like template with which to assure coverage optimization and hence optimal use of the firm’s limited resources.

A second realization we must still embrace is that no company can be all things to all people. Your customers represent a portfolio of assets that must be proactively managed in order to maximize shareholder and stakeholder value. As strategists we believe that our best customer investment and market strategy would be to invest our limited resources in direct proportion to the expected return on investment

Again, choice, selection, focus, and purpose must serve as constant monitors. While CRM “implementations” still fail – at disappointing level - to achieve what executives expect, It’s no longer a secret, the evidence is compelling and is well documented, both at the academic level and in practice. A strategy of Enterprise-wide Customer Relationship Management – when successfully implemented , whether in the clouds or on-premise- can achieve impressive results.

The most easily measurable results include:

· Increased sales Effectiveness and Efficiency

· Increased Customer/Employee Satisfaction

· Decreased cost-to-serve

In fact, there are 8 benefits. The EIGHT BENEFITS of successful CRM implementations are well documented. With a well-executed strategic CRM program, you can experience and measure:

1. Increased sales
2. Increased profitability
3. Greater product penetration
4. Growth in customer satisfaction and loyalty
5. Increased employee satisfaction
6. Decreased cost-to-serve
7. Increased retention of the existing customer base during times of economic uncertainty.
8. Increased likelihood of new customer acquisition

These maxims are independent of the enabling technology. Successful strategy implementation has more to do with aligning people, processes, and information (yes, data) to the mission/vision/values/ & purpose of the business, to the strategy, than with what software package or cloud-computing platform chosen.