Big news that Joel Spolsky is ending his Joel on Software blog as announced in Inc. The money quote:
To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company.
It is true. It has to be bigger than yourself and it does take a lot of time to blog. A lot of people are disappointed. He has a company to run. His choice. The audience will move elsewhere. The video below is a re-post but relevant on the power of blogging. I find myself talking about my tiny little blog more than I ever thought I would. It is true that my traffic is tiny and likely irrelevant. I blog to build my brand and make me better. The blog forces you to think and stay relevant. It is mental pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups all in one.
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass.
Look at some of the advantages Kindle has:
Battery Life. Kindle can last up to 7 days without a charge. Seriously.
Content delivery. Kindle has it included. No extra charges or higher price tag.
Readability. Do you want to read a backlit screen all day?
Opening an App Store that people will care about.
The iPad is a very slick device, but it will not be the only one to change the tablet game. Apple App Store developers will start to run into some of the issues that cross-platform mobile developers are dealing with. Namely screen size and incompatible devices. Apple has been very smart with their device hardware and software release cycles. This will become more difficult as different devices begin to proliferate. The iPad will face way more competition than the iPod. Repeating success is, in fact, harder than initial success. Other players and other platforms (HP, Asus, Dell, Everyone on Microsoft or Android) are ready this time. My take is that the biggest losers will be the publishers. Their pricing models will now be more fully exposed to the buying public. That new knowledge will suppress their margins.
One of my rules is to always consider the front office and the back office needs and desires of any CRM project.
I recently came across a service process that generate a large volume of automated tickets. The process was over-engineered. Nearly all of these automated tickets were not true customer service issues. These were more like information notices. The sheer volume of these tickets obscured true customer service issues. The development team did not believe that it was an issue, but they did not have to live with the tickets. Compliance by customer service faltered. Agents took to their own ways of dealing with these tickets. Metrics were called into question. Standard stuff. Remember the usage and compliance needs to work the way that the users do — not the other way around.
Taking a look back on Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) from approximately a year ago and seeing what has changed for the enterprise. The SLA is nothing new and have existed in information technology for many, many years. I can tell you firsthand that SLA remains critical to the selling proposition. The questions on uptime, outages and compensation do not have easy answers. It would be nice to see an industry standard on what 99.999% actually means.
The SLA is now out in the open to all users of a cloud utility. There is still an lingering question of uptime. Two significant changes in the past year have been the introduction of new cloud services, like Windows Azure, and the mass adoption of Twitter to report uptime experience in real time.You still do not have a meter or gauge detailing realtime usage or uptime. Concerns still remain around what actually constitutes an outage? A period of time? As a client, how would you prove it? If there was an outage and the client could prove it, how does the client receive compensation? These questions can be answered in as many ways as there are cloud or cloud application providers. It will be interesting to see how improvements to the cloud improve SLAs in 2010.
Amazon AWS announced Spot Instances of EC2 a few weeks back. I have been very interested in this concept. Auction pricing should be natural for the cloud computing utility model. They will be selling spare capacity from moment to moment. The cloud is attractive since servers often site idle. Sharing that resource makes sense. “Spots” are an extension of the concept to keep AWS at full utilization. Win for AWS and customers. I look forward to seeing how this play out during 2010!
The first priority of a CRM deployment should be to learn about existing customer data within the enterprise. It is obvious, but often overlooked. I often make it the top priority when scoping CRM services. Is all that customer data in all of the right hands? 99% of the time it is not. It needs to be in the hands of the people working with the customers. My approach is to get that data to them. Usually, this is an instant success which give a solid foundation for future successes.
Second priority is to understand cost per call. Before the deployment, I have to be able to calculate cost per call (the $ metric). This is true for a services or sales force automation deployment. By correlating the cost per call to improvement, I can calculate a cost per call improvement. This is ROI. Automate your internal processes so that you can pull everything you know about your customer into a single view for your rep (sales or service).
Keep these two priorities in mind and your CRM implementation will be on the road to success.
A “Know your customer” re-post. Have a great weekend.
“Know your customer” is the mantra.
When you know the customer, good things happen.
– Example, Client A increased user adoption to 70% of total call volume. ROI increase 25% in one quarter.
When you know your customer, you can spot trouble a mile away.
– Example, Client B re-organized and has a new executive sponsor. He has called the ROI model into question.
When you know your customer, the relationship goes beyond business.
– Example, Client C asks for advice on improving the ROI model and photography equipment for his vacation.
It made me think about the future of CRM. Salesforce.com over turned the market leaders and is now the market leader. What will disrupt Salesforce? Is it new technologies that rely less on the core product or those that extended it, such as sales enablement systems. One thing is certain, whoever does disrupt Salesforce will not intend to do so at first.
In a recent conversation, the topic turned to the future direction of CRM. Normally, I would wax philosophic on this but it is really pretty simple.
Marketing is taking over more and more of the traditional sales cycle. Sales will spend less time educating and more time selling qualified prospects. Marketing will own the wide part of the sales pipeline more than it ever has before. Prospects can gather a wealth of information by themselves and they will do it. Prospects will self-qualify more than ever before. Sales Enablement solutions are finally getting traction. Sales will adopt CRM because sales enablement will finally offer them value rather than “sales accounting”. Social CRM plays to the marketing side of CRM and early indications are that it will lead to bottom line results.
The enterprise can and will learn from early adopters. In the end it all comes down to the community of customers that your enterprise builds and nurtures. How do you grow prospects? How do you nurture them into customers? How do you show the love to those customers post-sale? These will be the macro-trends that CRM will see in the next few years.
All of these new services will be hosted software as a service solutions in the cloud and the challenges around integration will still be there. I look forward to checking this post 2-3 years from now and seeing how I did.