Content Is King, Long Live Your Intellectual Property!

They say that 80% of a company's intellectual property lies in the heads of it's employees.


The poem "There Is No Indispensable Man" carries true for an individual and an organisation, but the hole in the bucket of water will take time to go away in an organisation when a departing employees knowledge about your customers has not been captured in the CRM system.


Don't think of CRM as Customer Relationship Management, think of the acronym as Customer Relationship Matters and from a management ethos perspective think of CRM as Customer Relationships Matter.  From those two perspectives you will be able to determine how to manage your customer relationships.

In a competitive landscape, the long term key to competitive advantage is being able to add value to the relationship.  Price is a short term advantage, and many customers define the relationship with their supplier as a key differentiator over price alone.

The cost of managing customer relationships then is a key management metric, who are your profitable customers? What is costing us money? How responsive are we? and numerous other facets of a company's approach to its business that determines a customers perception of the value it gets from its suppliers.

In a CRM system then, you need to configure relevant fields to capture vital information about your customers and how you service them.  On account records you can add custom fields to track your customers social media communications (Salesforce.com have just made this native to their platform), giving you a real time feed on their activities.  News links also give you an insight to their public relations activities and news that has been written about the company.

Getting this level of information is a balancing act in making sure relevant information is input into the CRM system and validation can be a good way to achieve that, and not creating a CRM mill stone that demotivates users to the point that they avoid using the system.

Validation is a method by which fields are evaluated, and if they do not meet the validation criteria the user is prompted with an error message preventing them from saving the record until the field is updated.  By explaining the purpose of certain features and requirements in the system to users, adoption rates will not be affected and the value of the information will increase.

Make your CRM system user friendly, that acts as a productivity tool for individuals and a valuable business tool by which you can manage your business efficiently and effectively.
Get the balance right and you will be automatically guided by real-time information in making sound decisions to grow your business.

Look at your CRM system today and ask yourself how effectively you can manage your business with the information at hand.

To Google Apps Or Not To Google Apps? That Is The Question

It's free or very cost effective, say the analysts. Google Apps, that is.

So what is it, and who will use it?

Well, its a suite of productivity applications containing a word processor, spreadsheet, email and website (internal or simple types) applications. If you are not concerned about service levels or having a Gmail email address, then use it for free.

Many businesses (ours included!) are paying the nominal annual per user fee of $50 to get a service level and use their own domain name in the email service.

Email to me is ubiquitous, so long as I can download onto an email client and have web access, the rest of its functionality is fairly academic.

The other applications, I would suggest from personal experience, are more user sensitive. Most productivity applications have hundreds of great features, which we all use differently. We have become familiar with them, we know the short-cuts and they are second nature to us.

Organisations need to be aware that while products appear very similar, they are not the same. Move too quickly to achieve the substantial savings over the Microsoft Office software license, and any savings will be dwarfed by a more intangible but real cost of lost productivity and reduced staff morale.

To deploy Google Apps to a first time IT or productivity tool user, is not a problem. They don't know any different. But for established and experienced users, if there is no transition training or support given, it can be painful. Familiar features, may not behave in the same way and such like. Bang goes your user productivity and morale. (Think what it is like to change to a different model of car, they have the same features lights, indicators etc,. It's a while before you drive and handle the car by second nature).

So, if you want to take advantage of the substantial cost savings of Google Apps, then invest a little time with a user group to understand the differences. You can then identify any training needs or create knowledge tips to help smooth the transition.

Due diligence is not just a process that is used in mergers and acquisitions, it has a place in any aspect of change. The cost in lost productivity and staff morale is far greater than any cost in planning correctly for change.

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