CRM is 30 and Salespersons still hate it
We are now almost fourty years after the first CRM tools were introduced, initially as helpers for the sales force, but then with an ever increasing scope. We have seen ‘CRM’ systems start as point solutions that morphed into suites – and back to what is called ‘best-of-breed’ to witness the rebirth of the suite. We have seen CRM as a strategy, as a tool. There has been social CRM, and more recently we have seen customer engagement management (CEM), even customer experience management (CXM). Regardless of the name and scope, the goal has always been to help businesses and their representatives on one side and customers on the other side to build lasting and profitable relationships. Amazingly, many users, especially salespersons, still hate CRM. Why? And how can this be overcome? A little history of CRM In the early days we have seen activity management tools, contact management tools, and account management tools, the latter as a kind of shared electronic rolodex. One of the important tools at this time was Goldmine, that successfully combined activity-, account- and contact management for teams, as a first of a kind. Amazingly, founded in 1989, Goldmine is still around. Salespersons used some of these tools and hated the fact that they weren’t integrated. They had to use and live with many different tools, which improved some aspects of their lives – or not. As a consequence we have seen the emergence of sales force automation (SFA) tools that targeted at integrating and streamlining sales processes from lead to order and to establish a common repository of data that could get used...
From Personalization to Customer Experience
As it is the case for most of my colleagues I regularly get pitched by businesses about customer experience news that they want to talk about and that normally are pretty interesting. So, also a few days ago, when I got pitched by AR relations of a major European bank that wanted to talk about a new partnership and “what personalisation tech can offer in terms of a way to side-step legacy tech barriers to provide meaningful customer engagement that goes far beyond “Dear Joe” but that provides customers with what they need, when they need it”. The backdrop of this story is, of course, the advent and rise of fintechs like Revolut, N26, or Monzo. These are the ones that got named in the pitch and that are representatives of many more fintech companies that are disrupting traditional banking. We could add some more like Weltsparen, Transferwise, and other services that target at disrupting one or the other part of banking. And banking is surely an interesting sector of B2C as well as B2B business that is highly regulated, often very conservative, and burdened with legacy IT systems, to name but a few challenges facing banks. All these topics are making them an interesting target for nimble companies that, amongst others, are engaging with their customers in a highly personalised manner. This is very much in line with the research report by Epsilon that got quoted in the pitch. Consequently, personalisation is a very good start. However, there is more. The model of the quoted fintechs is not only to provide a high degree of personalisation. They are...
Nimble Goes Blue
The future of Nimble is blue – Azure blue. The News This is not about the colour of hope (which is blue, at least, if you are a German, like me), but about the long pending final migration of Nimble to Azure. The company announced on May 22 that it has successfully migrated its leading SaaS Social Sales application from Amazon Web Services to Azure. According to the press release this migration was accomplished in less than four weeks without impact on Nimble customers or, as the press release stated “without a hitch”. With this move Nimble can now “tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem to scale”. According to the press release the company reports that, Microsoft being “a global Nimble reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office 365, demand for the easy-to-use CRM for small workgroups is surging”. Then there are two further interesting pieces covered in the press release. For one: with this move Nimble also “accelerates the delivery of its upcoming 5.0 release using the Azure Platfrom as a Servce (…) and by integrating Common Data Services, Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow”. Nimble 5.0 shall deliver a “company wide team relationship manager that unifies contacts from siloed departments in sales, marketing, customer service, and accounting for Office 365 and G Suite users”. The release of Nimble 5.0 is targeted for June 2019. Second, Nimble emphasizes on the power of ecosystems by putting a spotlight on Nimble being the only ISV on Microsoft’s CSP Cloud Solution Provider marketplace that uses CSP to build a global distribution channel. Nimble does this by...