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Simplicity - Its next for CRM

Interesting opinion post titled "Simplicity: What’s Next in Business Software" on SandHill.com by Anthony Deighton who is the SVP of Marketing at Qliktech. They are a leading provider of next generation BI solutions and one of the fastest growing BI software companies in the world over the last couple of years.

Completely agree with Anthony's message that "Simplicity" is the next big thing for business software and more so for legacy enterprise software vendors. As he very succinctly put it, its not like eating broccoli ;-) to stay healthy .. for some vendors its going to be a matter of survival. Having worked with Anthony in the past I can totally see where he is coming from and what he is prescribing.

I believe that simplicity has been the underlying theme for most SW disruptions. It was really tedious for users to type their commands on a green screen or DOS prompt and then Windows simplified it with visual icons, till Windows/desktop applications became so diverse in their user experience that in came the simple browser based apps where all applications could pretty much be intuitive cause there were a standard set of operations you could perform.

Bringing this message to the Enterprise CRM domain we've seen that a number of newer vendors have made inroads into traditional enterprise CRM land just by simplifying their application delivery and usability without providing much depth to the application. Its already happening and its being very well received by customers. Thats where SaaS/Ondemand had its roots as well. Enterprise customers who had issues with their delivery/deployment models embraced the much simpler on-demand model.

To me the bottomline here is that not only should software vendors pick up the "Simplicity" message but also stick to it.

Personality Not Included - Book Launch

Rohit Bhargava from Influential Marketing Blog is currently in the process of launching his book "Personality Not Included". He decided to approach his book launch in a very unique way and I believe its the new engagement model that will drive a lot of interactions in the 2.0 world. So here's what Rohit said and did;

A conversation does not start instantly with a big spike and then trail off. A really good conversation builds momentum steadily and eventually turns into something more powerful. So my aim today is not to create a short term spike, but to start a conversation about the central idea of the book - which is that personality matters, and continue it over the next few weeks and months. To jumpstart this conversation, I'm asking for your help - and offering you something in return.

My idea is simple: if you send me five questions that you want to know about the book or personality, I'll write you a response on Friday that you can publish on your blog. Let's call these virtual interviews (ie - interviews by email). You choose whether to post the interview on your blog or not after you get my responses, but I am essentially offering for ANY BLOGGER to send me interview questions and I will respond with answers that are NOT cut and pasted, but specific to your questions. I will send all my responses to you on Friday in the order that I get your questions, and I will link to all the posted interviews on Friday. On Monday, I'll be running a competition on my blog to let readers vote on the Best Interview. The winner will get a signed copy of my book and a gift certificate for $100 from Amazon.

Companies will be hard pressed to come up with such unique engagements through the web and more and more conversations move out there. For a relatively low investment and a unique idea smaller brands will be able to get viral and grab customer attention compared to $$ being poured into more traditional efforts.

Here's a link to the book and his virtual interview sessions that he had thru the web




Here are my 5 questions to him and his responses;

- What would you say was the single most important factor that inspired you to write this book
I think it was seeing that there was an ingredient of many successful brands that people were not really talking about ... namely, the importance of personality. The book takes some of hte most often talked about trends in business today, such as authenticity, social media and word of mouth marketing and brings them together. I thought there was a need for a book like this in the landscape of marketing and business books ... so I wanted to write it.

- In the tagline why do you say "Companies" lose their authenticity and "Brands" get them back. Can you elaborate? Do you mean companies that do not invest in their brands tend to lose their authenticity?
Good pickup. To a degree, the difference comes down to the central belief of branding ... which is that anyone can start a company, but you need to build a brand in order to have something that someone can believe in. I think that companies who don't focus on building a brand have a problem defining themselves as standing for something. If you don't stand for anything, you can't be authentic.

- Why did you pick Guy K for the foreword? Is this book mainly focused on technology, startups or entrepreneurship?
Guy is someone that I had admired for a long time and I was thrilled that he agreed to do the forward. He has built his reputation in technology and entrepreneurship, but if you have ever heard him speak you know that he has a brilliant mind for business. He was the perfect choice to do the foreword for PNI.

- What was the message or goal that you hoped to achieve with this book?
My main message is really simple: it's that personality matters. It matters because that is what gets your customers to believe in your brand rather than just buying once and leaving. More importantly, it is what gets them to tell others about you.

- Can you attest that you did not do any templating, cut or paste while answering my questions ;-)
Well, you'll be able to tell pretty easily - since I'm publishing the links to all the interviews I answered on my blog! But I can tell you definitely that I didn't for yours, because this is just the second interview ... so you're definitely 100% original content. ;-)

Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening

Very interesting video I saw on Youtube that does a quick drive by at an event for VPs/CIO's and gets their candid feedback on Enterprise 2.0.

While most of them were really witty, some of them seemed clueless. Tip of the hat to the VP/CIO from Altera and his comment. I think he actually gets it.

What is an Enterprise App in the 2.0 world?

Wanted to post this as a thought inspired by Vinnie Mirchandani's post "Another brick in the wall".

First off let me be clear that I dont have anything against Carsonified or Ravelry, I'm sure both are pretty good enterprises in their own right. My comment on Vinnie's blog might lead some to think otherwise so wanted to clarify.

However I wanted to post on the "how close are enterprise applications to this list" aspect. So here's a link to the list shown below.

Gmail - web mail
flickr - photo sharing
Twitter - micro-blogging platform
Facebook - social network
Ravelry - "knit and crochet" community
WordPress - blogging platform
Mint - web analytics
last-fm - music
Basecamp - project collaboration
livejournal - social network

So what is an enterprise application. Till recently enterprise applications conjured up images of ERP, HRMS, CRM, SCM etc. Those with a slightly broader view would often include things like office productivity, email, application, directory, integration servers and other software into this category as well. Some of these applications were sub-classified based on their channels as well so for example we had B2E, B2B, B2C and stuff like that, the B2C ones were mainly inward looking portals into enterprises.

So by that vague definition everything that was a non-enterprise application was placed in the consumer application bucket.

Here's what Wikipedia says about enterprise software and applications

Enterprise level software is software which provides business logic support
functionality for an organization, typically in commercial organizations, which
aims to improve the organization's productivity and efficiency.Services provided
by enterprise software are typically business-oriented tools such as online
shopping and online payment processing, interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, content management, etc.

But in my experience over the last decade and certainly over the last few years this line has started blurring significantly. Here's an example from the CRM side of things.

Would you consider eBay, Amazon, Gmail as consumer applications? Most of us would say yes to that I guess. What about user interaction channels on these sites like if you had issues with Amazon and you logged an issue with them on their site are you using Amazons consumer application or enterprise application for logging that ticket?

I'm starting to head to a place where any web application that's accessible to an entity outside an enterprise firewall (without VPN or tunneling) is a consumer application to me and vice-versa any application that's restricted in use behind an enterprise firewall is an enterprise application.

So the lines blurring for me now. There are no black and white enterprise or consumer applications cause they could quickly be repurposed.

Now maybe one could debate that it depends on the roots of that application or use the 80:20 rule and say 80% of the time application is used as a consumer application etc.

Anyways according to me the good news for enterprises is that they no longer need to be confined in their thinking that .. aw shucks wish I could use that in my enterprise but alas its a consumer app.

SaaS - Services as a Service .. now wait are you trying to confuse us here

Saw this interesting post When SaaS Means 'Services as a Service' posted on Intelligent Enterprise by David Lunthicum. At first glance this read like an attempt at confusion. However now that I looked at what StrikeIron does it actually makes sense. So in yesterdays world if you wanted to embed logic about currency conversion or validating a US postal address or symbol of a company listed on Nasdaq you would either try coding it yourself by maintaining some seed data or you try finding a public web service that meets the requirement.

What companies like StrikeIron are doing is they've become aggregators of services from partners like D&B, MapQuest etc and offer them through their own catalog. Now one might question the value of that and say why wouldnt I go directly to D&B and get access to their services and data. Well the spectrum is wide and there could be instances where the StrikeIron model works better. Lets say you're a small startup or a SMB kind of a company that needs access to some disparate services, would you invest in people and contracts and partnerships to reach out to each of these vendors get info on their offerrings and then maintain relationships. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you might go to StrikeIron and pick off of their catalog or services.

So SaaS with "Services as a Service" makes some sense. Now nearly half of Salesforce's traffic these days comes through web services, does that mean they are now transforming into a "Services as a Service" company?

By the way here's what StrikeIron says it does in a nutshell.

* CONNECT

* • Find Data Services
* • Browse Solutions
* • Cleanse & Enhance Data

* CREATE

* • Build Mashups in Excel
* • Create Business Solutions
* • Integrate into Salesforce.com

* COLLABORATE

* • New! Developer Community
* • Download Code and Clients
* • Access Free Data

Freeeconomics ... It changes everything

Recently ran into this article "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine.

Now while on the surface I dont buy what this article is trying to say, cause someone always has to pay and there is no free meal. There is a growing perception these days on the web that onlines services should essentially be free and if there is a cost associated to a service your best bet to fame is by offerring a free version of that same service.

I think whats going on today on the web is a great deflection economy where the consumer of the service is being funded by the vendor based on the revenue it might be getting from another consumer or advertiser. So the consumer is left with the perception that what they are consuming is essentially "Free". Now wasnt that going on already with ad based community magazines that were available for free. I guess todays online service providers have taken that model and optimized it to their benefit.

Here's the Taxanomy of free that Chris has listed.

Freemium
What's free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.
Advertising
What's free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.
Cross-subsidies
What's free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free
to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
Zero marginal cost
What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to
anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
Labor exchange
What's free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act
of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.
Gift economy
What's free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

Click "here for the complete article.

Platforms for building future CRM Apps or any Apps for that matter

Had a very interesting interaction last week with some bright folks at a .com company. Anyways felt like blogging after a long time cause had something really interesting to share based on some stuff I've been working on. Also have lazily ignored blogging over the last few weeks :-(

Anways to get on with it. Over the last few weeks I've been trying to play around with what might very well be platforms delivered through the cloud for building the next generation CRM Apps and maybe even "any" Apps in general. So here's the working list and as I go through them will have detailed posts on each as well.

As I go through the list, 3 strong trends that are emerging for me are;

- Delivery as a service
- Rich internet applications
- User focused application development

Here's the list I've been looking at and will post soon on each of these individually as well.

Force.com
Coghead
OpenLaszlo
Iceberg
ZohoCreator
Trackvia
WuFoo
LongJump
SugarCRM

Whether you're an individual, organization (large or small) or ISV looking for a new application or with existing applications, there is no way you can go decide to create or buy your own application today without looking at one of these platforms.

2008: A Year for Enterprise 2.0 or is it

Read this really interesting post titled "2008: A Year for Real Choices" by M.R. Rangaswami on SandHill.com. The post has some great insights for folks trying to gaze through the glass and see what lies ahead.

However the reason I wanted to bring it up here is the prediction for Enterprise 2.0. It couldnt have been summarized better. This year will either establish "2.0" as more than just a buzz word or announce its demise as we wrap up '08.

6. Enterprise 2.0 Will Take Shape – or Not The social network applications have been working on “consumerizing” the enterprise for the last couple years. 2008 will be the year in which we begin to see hard proof of how these technologies can revolutionize the enterprise – or we won’t. Enterprise 2.0 vendors must emerge from the sidelines and deliver strong proof that this trend is more than a buzzword or a fad in order to stay on CIOs’ radar.

Lets close the 2007 deal, SR, campaign, order ... and welcome the business of 2008

As they say, another good year behind us. Had to really resist the temptation of blogging about '08 predictions or '07 observations as my final post for the year.

Think '07 was a great year for CRM and one look at products from vendors like Oracle and SAP indicate that the next (2.0) generation is very much here and mainstream. So I would say buckle up as we are on for a ride in 2008.

Happy New Year everyone.

Top 20 Things Sales and Marketing folks should know

Ran into a couple of great compilations by Rohit Bhargava on his Influential Marketing Blog. Through these two posts what he has done is classified terminology that todays marketing folks should avoid using going forward or focus on in 2008. Now while I agree with most of what he describes in his posts, I have a slightly different take on these.

I would say that what he has provided are the Top 20 things that sales and marketing folks should be aware of in somewhat descending order. But make sure you familiarize yourself with these as it'll be increasingly difficult to market in 2008 without understanding what inbound links, engagement or impressions means in todays world.

The Top 10 Most Underappreciated Metrics To Track in 2008

1. Inbound Links (from influential sources)
2. Direct URL Access
3. RSS Subscribers
4. Email Link Referrals
5. Time Spent (engagement)
6. Organic Keyword Referrals
7. Email Longevity and Multiple Opens
8. Abandonment
9. Clickstream
10. Microsharing

The Top 10 Most Overused Metrics of 2007

1. Impressions
2. Technorati Authority
3. Comments
4. Trackbacks
5. Time Spent (searching)
6. Keyword Conversion Rate
7. Number of Pages
8. Email Open Rate
9. Popover Click Rate
10. Page Views

Biggest Business Challenges for 2008 - HBR

Harvard Business is building a crystal ball around responses from readers on the Biggest Management Challenges in 2008. Among some of the early responses;

Social Networking. “Companies must learn to effectively utilize social
networking tools both inside and outside the companies to keep up with what the
younger workers grew up with — fast and furious communication tools like
texting, facebook, My Space, You Tube, etc. that spread the word now. Not in the
next quarter, next month, next week or even next day, but NOW.”

Absolutely agree !! and thats where customers should be going with their CRM 2.0 initiatives as well.