So what is a CRM Consultant?

I had a phone call from a lady yesterday wanting to know what background/qualifications she needed to become a ‘CRM Consultant’. Before I could give her any advice I thought I’d better clarify with her the various definitions of the term CRM consultant, since it means very different things in practice, though to my mind there are three broad groups:

The first are consultants that are focused on the customer experience. They help organizations improve customer satisfaction levels. This might have a CRM technology dimension, but their work can be totally independent of it.

The second area where the term CRM consultant is used frequently is within firms selling and implementing CRM technology. Confusingly the title can be used by a variety of different functions within the organization from telemarketers, to salespeople, to developers, to project managers.

The third, and rather small group, are the independent CRM consultants. Independent CRM consultants help organizations implement CRM technology but are vendor neutral – they don’t sell technology.

The advice on how to become a CRM consultant depends on which of the three camps you want to be in. In terms of independent CRM consultants though there’s no easy route. We look for people who are extensive experience of implementing CRM technology, but also have an excellent understanding of how businesses work, and can apply that understanding to a wide range of vertical markets. Good independent CRM consultants are like hens teeth, which is why we’ll always be a niche consultancy. But then we like it like that!

Big doesn't mean better....

One aspect of implementer/vendor selection to get right is to choose a vendor where the potential project is of sufficient size or profile that it’s going to attract the vendor’s attention and interest, while being within their technical capability to deliver and support it. You may feel your investment in CRM technology is a significant one, but if the potential supplier is used to a diet of multi-million pound projects, you may well experience a certain amount of frustration getting their attention.

The problem is that the sales-cycle is often the same regardless as to whether the project spend is £5,000 - £50,000 - £500,000 – or £5,000,000. Companies want information, presentations, proposals, and references, etc. regardless of how much they are spending. This is one of the reasons why I was cautious as to how successful SAP might prove to be courting the CRM mid-market. If you’re the sales guy with a multi-million sales target to achieve, you might accept a £50,000 order, but the last thing you want is to have to devote a great deal of energy to securing it. Conversely the £50,000 project might represent a massive investment for the company making it, which might just make or break the company. Not surprisingly they are likely to progress cautiously and not unreasonably demand considerable hand-holding.

While the temptation might be to gravitate to the companies who can claim to be the biggest in their field, if this means you get starved of the resources you need and get to play with their D team, then this can be a recipe for frustration and failure.

Diagnose, design and deliver...

I’m not too far into Jeff Thull’s ‘Mastering the Complex Sale’ but picked up several points which resonate with how we see the world. To quote Jeff:

‘Even if your customers could Diagnose their problems completely and Design optimal solutions, they may not have the ability to implement the solutions and Deliver the expected results to their organization.’

I think he absolutely hits the nail on the head. Taking CRM – the technology is so multi-faceted that most organizations fail to fully diagnose what problems the technology might potentially solve. They generally fail to design systems that are appropriate to addressing the identified problems, and even if they get the previous two right, delivery (implementation) of technology is still a major problem.

I’m not sure we will ultimately agree on the solution to the issue - I'll know in a chapter or two - but insightful reading anyway.

An unexpected commodity...

One of our customers recently won a particularly large contract for the self service systems they manufacture, and had a post project de-brief with the customer last week. They were surprised when their Commercial Director observed that in a commodity market place their service capability was a key differentiator. While they knew their service capability was strong – they had worked hard to make it so – that their hardware was viewed as a ‘commodity’ raised a few eye-brows.

Two observations relating to this exchange – one, that strong systems can generate benefits within the related operational area and can also be harnessed as part of the sales and marketing drive to create competitive advantage. In these guys case, the slickness with which they run their support and repair functions became a key part of how they positioned themselves in relation to the competitors.

Two – it matters not a jot that we might think our products are the greatest thing since sliced bread, it’s what the customer thinks that counts. We may have spent man-years creating product features that we be feel sets us a part, but if the client thinks what we produce is an undifferentiated commodity, it’s an undifferentiated commodity.

Ultimately I suspect way too many organizations over emphasize the bits of their operation that just aren’t that important to their customers, and neglect the bits that are. But perhaps the more interesting thought is that our customer took a service desk and a team of engineers, something that couldn’t be protected by patent, didn’t require a huge R&D budget, in essence an ordinary mundane function, and developed the systems and processes that turned it into a critical advantage. It makes you wonder how much potential we all have in doing the ordinary stuff exceedingly well.

SAP SME?

Volker Hildebrand’s article on the MyCustomer.com site encapsulates all that confuses me about SAP’s approach to the CRM market. Entitled ‘CRM market trends: what buyers need to know’, the article’s first identified trend is that the CRM market is consolidating. This knocked me back a bit because my take is that over the last four or five years we’ve seen a massive expansion in CRM vendors on the back of the Salesforce.com establishing a new front in the market based on a hosted offering. Do I believe the market will consolidate – yes; do I believe it’s consolidated – not yet. But when I thought about it for a while I realized from SAP’s enterprise perspective it had consolidated. Once upon a time its competitors were Siebel, Oracle, and Peoplesoft, now with Larry Ellison’s substantial appetite for acquisitions there’s just one – Oracle.

So, from my perspective working with mid-sized companies as we do, the market has expanded dramatically, from a SAP perspective working with global 2000 companies as they do there has been a consolidation in terms of the companies with which it normally competes. However this is all well and fine until you consider that SAP’s strategy is to crack the small and medium enterprise (SME) market, and my concern is that their mind-set is still rooted in the cold war era of SAP vs Oracle, not the competitive realities of the SME space. Which is a pity because there is a pent up demand for combined front office/back office solutions that remove the need to integrate a company’s core applications. My doubt is whether SAP can make the transition from the mega-budget enterprise market, to the considerably leaner SME space. When I read lines from Volker such as:

‘Enterprise services-oriented architecture is paving the way for firms to be able to leverage customer interaction channels as important sources of differentiation’

I figure we may not be talking the same language – and no I don’t have the slightest idea what this means in practice. My own interactions with SAP on the CRM front have been no more fruitful. Trying to obtain pricing for example tends to induce evasiveness that one might have expected if I’d asked to borrow chairman Hassno Platner’s yacht for the weekend.

The IT market is strewn with case studies of enterprise players who have tried to succeed in a broader market and failed. I guess when you are used to dining on caviar then fish and chips just doesn’t cut it. I would like SAP to succeed because at the right price there’s an unmet demand for what they do. If you were to ask me if they were likely to do so I’d say no. I think enterprise is part of their DNA, and I don’t think they understand the SME space is fundamentally different. I’d like to be proved wrong though – perhaps we can review in a year to see if I was.

Sold to you by a gentleman with spiky gelled hair…

I’ve had the phrase ‘sold to you by a gentleman with spiky gelled hair’ playing in the back of my mind for some while without being able to pin down where I read it. Perhaps it was the New Year’s celebrations that finally jolted my memory but I’ve tracked it back to an advert in the Economist for Raja Fashions. More fully the copy reads:

‘In other words, customers can now buy two bespoke, custom cut and hand-stitched suits, made from fine British or Italian cloth and measured by a master tailor for the price of one off-the-peg, chain store suit cut by a computer out of cheap fabric and sold to you by a gentleman with spiky gelled hair and who wouldn't know a side vent or a notch lapel from a PlayStation.’

I’m no copy connoisseur, but I know what I like. Something about the ‘sold to you by a gentleman with spiky gelled hair’ somehow sums up in my mind much of what is wrong with the CRM industry. Perhaps I can slide it into our marketing literature somewhere…

And once we shut up....

I caught myself ignoring my own advice just before Christmas. We’ve been helping a client improve their handling of customer support calls. This lead us to look at their stock management system, which we quickly found was not set up to help them achieve what they needed to achieve i.e. avoid stock outs of key maintenance parts without tying up huge amounts of capital in unnecessary stock. I guess living a blinkered life I’d figured that poorly set up systems were the exclusive domain of the CRM world, so it was refreshing to see it was a broader technology issue.

Anyway, having identified the problem we were working with the vendor to sort things out. Twenty minutes into the meeting I realized we’d spent the whole time telling the consultant how to set the system up properly. I suddenly realized how stupid an approach this was. I and the assembled project team had an accumulated experience of implementing precisely zero stock management systems, the consultant had by contrast implemented several hundred. Once we shut up and asked the consultant how he recommended setting it up, we made rapid progress. The moral of the story – if you are going to implement technology, work with experts who know how to do it in a way that gets results - and listen to them.