In the last few months I've become very aware that the old paradigm of CRM is changing, in a very big way.
The monstrous growth of Social Networking has created a force that can't be ignored. You can't just store a bunch of data on customers and then send them email blasts inviting them to your boring website that hasn't changed in 2 years.
The prospects and customers are out there communicating with each other, and perhaps your competitors on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, blogs and wherever. The internet has become an instant realtime network, for shopping, comparing, asking questions, getting answers, reading reviews and more.
There are hundreds of millions of people on line everyday, all day tweeting and texting and communicating. So if we sit at our desks or in our cars and aren't in this tidal wave of communication, we are missing something...BIG!
I'm not sure that we can quantify what that something is right now, but it's big. These social channels represent a mind boggling tidal wave of data. Topics, questions, info and a lot of mundane "I'm having my third latte", "I'm bored" and "yada yada" crash by, but folks are picking out the topics they are interested in. Then they follow those topics or the people or companies that send them. Then a relationship created by the customer begins to form and at that point it needs to be tracked and subtly monetized. If the prospect likes the info or relationship they may buy what you are offering. They may follow, they may "share", they may review. It happens with a click and that click spreads to one or 10,000 other devices (computers, phones, mobile devices, ipads, etc.) just like that.
If you haven't been paying attention to this paradigm shift, it should either be making you very excited or very nervous.
So how do you adapt to the new social world? How do you get your business or ideas or value proposition in front of the audience?
Do what I've done. Get company pages at FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Plaxo. Start a blog at Blogger or WordPress. All this stuff is free. You will be pretty amazed at the number of "friends" and followers you can accumulate.
After you get a feel for the social sites, tell your customers that you are there. Put links on your web page and email signatures.
In the near future, we'll be sharing info on SCRM and a program called Nimble, which tracks the social interactions of your contacts. But for now, if this is new, take off your shoes and socks and dip a toe in.
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Good points. The trick is going to be how to easily gather relevant info off the social networks and incorporate the useful stuff into your sales process, via your CRM tool. The trend will clearly be CRM products that intelligently link with social networking products, and vice versa, so sales reps can use this knowledge to help with their sales cycle and deliver customers the right solutions to their problems. However, before worrying about how the technology will help, businesses first need to figure out how this fits into their sales process (assuming they even have one) and then use CRM technology to deploy it.
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