CRM Strategy - Watching a Client do it Right

I am very excited that I have found a client who has the experience to actually do CRM right. I think experience is a good teacher and those who are smart learn from their mistakes. I just am returning home from a visit with a media client on the West Coast. Their business has grown by acquisition and they have no centralized database of their 20,000 clients. Interestingly they have only 3 clients which do business with each of their 5 divisions. What a great opportunity to drive revenue through a cross-selling strategy. It sounds like an easy win – here’s why nothing worth having is ever easy. This client has products with their own brand managers/publishers. They were formed by groups of magazines and trade shows which were consolidated into corporate organizations with infrastructure and scale. The challenge is that each group/brand has operated autonomously under the corporate umbrella with few questions asked while the marketplace was buying. Now that this client is seeing their business cool off in many sectors – they are in a mad rush to protect as well as grow their revenue. Most of their clients are large organizations with large marketing budgets – and often they are capturing a small percentage of their wallet-share (as banks call it)

Instead of inviting me in for a product demonstration and asking how much it would cost to solve their problem, this client has embarked on a CRM Strategy engagement to help determine why they were even thinking about doing CRM and how to change the process and culture of the company so that the strategy might be adopted. As their senior IT leader put it – ‘we don’t do IT projects, we do business projects enabled by technology’. For this particular organization – it would be very easy for a system to be installed and all the data loaded within 3-6 months, however it would fail miserably due to the current culture of the organization. This organization is starting the process by talking about what matters and why it matters. Then they are making sure the right leaders are committed along the way and putting together an 18-24 month plan for the entire project to occur.

CRM or any business application deployment is about change and process re-engineering – NOT software. Luckily this client has executives battle hardened by projects gone awry with the balls to not do the project if the right folks are not on board. Too often an executive will misjudge support or assume once the money is spent and software rolled out – people will ‘get on board or get off the bus’. Often times it’s too late to garner support after deployment of a solution no one buys into. At that point and it’s the executive who is exited, not the folks he hoped to force to change. Change is about buy-in from the right folks and it takes time. It also forces an organization to challenge the very structure and foundation in which they do things for the future. Anything worth having is worth working for.