June 24th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 4:42 am

Categories: CRM Strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Social Networks, Technology Reviews, Thought Leadership

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Boston, Conference, CRM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing, Paul Greenberg

I finally made it to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference with my record intact. That record would be that I have NEVER in 15 years of flying to Boston a hundred times, NEVER, repeat again, NEVER been on time both ways.  This one was resolved quickly because my flight to Boston was over an hour late on United.  I once thought I would get out on time about 10 years ago and 11 minutes before we were to board, a luggage belt in the terminal I was in caught on fire and we had to evacuate the terminal.  The gods spoke loud and clear and continue to, for some reason, yell at me for coming to Boston

But at least the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a reason to withstand the wrath of the gods. Before i get into some of the highlights and my take on at least the first day of the conference, I want to emphasize something that makes me sound like a fanboy. If there’s one conference you need to attend that ends with a 2.0 - this is the one, if you care about your business. If you’re a geek, I think you could make an argument for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference; if you’re a government employee or even government contractor, Government 2.0 is a good place to be; but if you are a business person and you want to understand what you have to do in the next year to 2 years….this.is.IT. Hell, I am a fanboy when it comes to this baby.  Come here next year. Even with the gods of Logan arrayed against you. If you’re fearful of the gods of Mt. Logan, they announced a second conference for San Francisco in November of this year, with a much less frightening airport.

Aggregate and Organize

I’m noticing a trend that might actually be worth making note of that I’ve just seen reinforced multiple times here at the conference. That would be the that the new enterprise, from particularly mid-market to largest enterprise, will realize the most value from strategies, systems and technologies that aggregate and organization information and/or systems.

Several years ago, composite applications were the rage - that application framework that allowed you to take your legacy systems, and combine the data from those systems in ways that made the legacy systems “new” applications. You were able pick the interface that you loved the most from among them to be your interface of choice for the composite application.  I did a longer piece on them back in 2005, if you’re interested.

As the social web began to move into place in 2006 and later, the companies that specialized in composite applications, like AboveAll, while genuinely foresighted, began to fail, because the tools of its successor and ultimately, its killer, became available and they were at least initially, cheap. That would be enterprise mashups - which not only allowed the enterprise to use the data for legacy applications, but also allows you to incorporate external data through RSS feeds. Plus the data, rather than tied together by a complex framework of APIs through a SOA architecture was vastly simplified.  Here’s two diagrams that at least metaphorically give you the picture. The first was the AboveAll architecture. The second is the enterprise mashup equivalent (source Mike2.0).

Well, the role of enterprise mashups and applications has changed and that is apparent from the Enterprise 2.0 conference. First, on the technology side, to understand this, we have to give props to the evolution and increasing maturity of service oriented architectures and RESTful architectures - and - really, web services in general. They are to the point where not only are they mature as frameworks and underpinnings for corporate technology backbones, but they are more easily (though, of course, nothing is that easy) integratable then ever before. Second, the standards for communication between systems have been, well, standardized. J2EE, XML, etc are so ordinarily accepted that interoperability among systems and even between disparate companies systems is now a doable thing. (hey, don’t get your pants jammed. This isn’t meant to be some technical treatise - just an explanation of what I’m seeing as a dominant trend at Enterprise 2.0 with a bit of background. So I’m going to use difficult technical terms, like “doable thing.”

On the business side, complexity, while an unavoidable part of a large company’s operations, is not seen as a desirable condition. As the amount of information available to companies in both structured and unstructured formats (made available through those external feeds and internal data systems like CRM systems) becames both increasingly large and necessary to decipher in ways that are valuable, the need to aggregate, organize, and thus simplify both the information and systems within the corporate firewall is becoming a corporate desire and necessity.  How information is processed and presented is perhaps the most important IT and cultural function of a company.  What you do with information is not trivial - it makes or breaks the company.

So taking the complexity out of both the processing and the presentation of information is what Enterprise 2.0 does. It giveth, because the ability of Enterprise 2.0 applications and thinking to get incredible amounts of information from behind and beyond the firewall is unparalleled in business history.  If its working right it taketh away, because it can strip the complexity and mask the processing and presentation effort so that the information is provided in a way that is incredibly valuable and rich. It becomes truly shareable knowledge, rather than just information that is technologically available to all.

This is what I saw as the underlying theme. What do you have to do to make sure that your employees have the knowledge they need to increase their productivity and to improve the culture of the company. What steps have to be taken to do this using the good old people, processes and technologies that have been such a dominant CRM theme for infinity plus a day and now are a dominant enterprise theme.

Example: the winner of the Oliver Marks-Stowe Boyd Award for Open Enterprise Innovation this year was Booz Allen Hamilton for their Hello system. Walton Smith, a senior associate of BAH, presented on the system, which is open to all employees (not contractors), without reservation. The core of the system are activity streams tied to profiles which resemble FriendFeed activity streams. What that means is that, as an employee, you can follow people that provide you with critical expertise via their activity streams, all available on a single page and tie in feeds that you need for information (aggregate). You can then tag the information and rank and rate the information (organize).

Example: I had the good fortune to interview Suresh Kuppusamy, the CEO, CTO and co-founder of Bluenog. Aside from the very salient he is a really nice human being, Bluenog which I hadn’t heard of until yesterday which is more my bad than their problem, does exactly what I’m talkin’ about - aggregate and organize. They have framework that was built on open source called ICE (at version 4.5) that ties enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI) and a portal through common, and secure services, so that a midmarket company can provide role-detemined information through the portal regardless of what system, internal or external the data is drawn from.  Columbia University is one of their customers. They use the Bluenog portal and single signon so that, as Suresh said, “they can push the right content to the right entities.” This means that management has a dashboard indicating how well they are doing with their KPIs, there are shared calendars, content from feeds like wikis or blogs or standard structured sources or internal data is all aggregated and organized (there are those words again) for each kind of person on a need to know basis. These guys have been so successful that they have been winners on the Red Herring 100 and the Infoweek 50 in their mere 3 years of existence.  Check out the diagram and then check them out. Smart.

Aggregate and organize.

Example:  This is a mashup of Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext and 2.0 ubermensch. It’s the combination of his discussion on a panel and an interview I did with him and his very bright VP of Professional Services, Mike Indinopulos. What Socialtext is doing from a technology standpoint has been and continues to be for me the ne plus ultra when it comes to aggregating and organizing information in ways genuinely create actionable knowledge - not just intelligence. They are moving the fastest in the world of wikis at least into the realm of CRM with their technological capability to expand into not just behind the firewall but at this stage a private outreach to customers for collaboration within the Socialtext framework.  They can do public interactions, but private is what a few of their more forward thinking customers are ready for.

What is even more interesting though is their (his and Mike’s) development of the Social Software Value Matrix which is almost (not quite) a maturity model for oganizational evolution when it comes to using the services that social software provides for early stage operational improvements to late stage businss model innovation. I won’t outline the whole thing but it basically organizes the information from a company and ultimately its customers across departments, silos and throughout customer and partner networks.  Aggregate the information and organize it. That underlays the entire matrix. What changes is the purpose its used for and the scope of the information gathering.  But it is an incredibly well thought out piece of work, increasingly my confidence in my choice of Socialtext as the SuperStah! for the chapter in CRM at the Speed of Light 4th edition that goes through wikis.  Even though they integrate far less with existing CRM systems than the folks at Atlassian, they get what has to be done when it comes to Social CRM.

There are countless other examples that I could provide for this such as some of how even Microsoft Sharepoint, the collaboration industry 800 pound gorilla is being used for aggregation and organization, but for now that’s enough.

Enterprise 2.0 so far has been an eyeopener because its telling me and around 1200-1300 others that there is not only a lot of cool and collaborative things going on but E2.0 is moving into mainstream thinking and soon into mainstream operations, systems, and best of all strategy. Plus this thing is REALLY well organized by the TechWeb folks.  No glitches at all.

However I do have a beef with the conference content.

Where’s Social CRM? Or CRM 2.0 if You Want To Call It That

I actually thought, maybe in a bit too self-absorbed a way, that Social CRM was going to be one of the key themes here. It isn’t.  I remember CRM being mentioned once by someone but it is not even a blip on the radar. Granted, this is an enterprise 2.0 conference so it could very well be firewall constrained but I would have liked to heard a speaker who was looking at Enterprise 2.0 from the standpoint of how it would engage customers directly into the collaborative value chain of the enterprise. However, at least in the 1 on 2 I had with Ross and Mike there was discussion of that and they do really get it. But I would suggest for the San Francisco conference later this year or next year’s conference they have some explicit discussion around Social CRM since the customer engagement is now a strategic imperative for business, rather than just customer management which, as a strategy needs to be relegated to, as a famous leftist once said, “the dustbins of history.”  You operations guys need not freak out. We still need traditional CRM for day to day business ops.

Rock On, Social CRM

Tonight I’m doing this Rockstars of Social CRM panel with Brent Leary, Michael Thomas and Frank Eliason, moderated by Chris Brogan and Marcel LeBrun at the Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston between 8-11pm. Has both live participating audience and a twebinar attached and will discuss what social CRM is. There’s also a party with Rockband 2 and karaoke which I am announcing now that I will NOT participate in since I have a some arthritis (sadly, not just an excuse) and I suck at it too. Check on the links that I have here to register for the live event (which may be closed) or for the Twebinar which is always open - like the bar.  There are in total over 500 registered participants already.

June 18th, 2009

Outcome Based Social Networks: Yet Another CRM at the Speed of Light Excerpt

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 6:03 am

Categories: CRM 2.0, CRM Strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks

Tags: Network, Outcome, YouTube Inc., CRM, Outcome Based Social Networks, Social Networking, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

I’m going to finish the book today. CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition will be done by the time that the day ends - though I suspect a lot sooner.  It’s going to be a 750 page tome - mostly print, some supplemented electronically, on CRM 2.0 - I hope a definitive work.  In honor of me being able to devote much more time and effort to this blog and the rest of my life than I’ve been able to in the last few weeks, even months, I’m doing one last chapter excerpt from the upcoming book, pre-edited.  Let me know what you think of the idea - This is on Outcome Based Social Networks. Again, this is unedited so it will be improved in final form.  I have to edit it once before I send in, as I always do and then I send it in to be edited by my copy editor.

Enjoy!! Read the rest of this entry »

June 11th, 2009

Guest Post: Steve Wylie on The Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 6:43 am

Categories: CRM 2.0, CRM Best Practices, CRM Strategy, Enterprise 2.0

Tags: Information Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Paul Greenberg

I’m heading over to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 22. If you’re interested in the social customer and how businesses should respond to them - and how workplace performance can be improved - this is the one conference you shouldn’t miss all year.  I mean that.  Go.  I’ll hook up with you if you’re there. Contact me via Twitter to set up some time.

I asked Steve Wylie, the GM and Conference Director for this knockout of a conference and all around good guy,  to write a guest post because I don’t think I’m persuasive enough and this guy has those needed mesmerizing powers to get you there - using rational thought as his hypnotic tool of choice.  He is also the editor of the Enterprise 2.0 Blog, which means he can write a pretty mean posting to begin with.   He’ll give you an idea of why an Enterprise 2.0 event is even more cogent than ever.

SF-based Steve is an events industry veteran, having handled some of the biggest conferences around including the Interop mega-events in Las Vegas and New York. He is an IT industry veteran too, as the former program director for InteropNet, which ran a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technology.

I’m always amazed at what it takes to run an event. I think event planning is a magnificent and difficult venture.  But Enterprise 2.0 is not just an event, but one with actual content - and plenty of networking. Oh, if you want to hang around with the rock stars of the social web, they hang there too.   Here’s where you can get more info on the conference.

I’d truly take advantage of this and make the effort to get there.

Take it away, Steve

The Next Phase of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

Paul kindly invited me to share my thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 market and provide some highlights for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  As the conference chair, I’ve got a fairly unique perspective on the state of Enterprise 2.0 and some ideas on where we’re headed.  We’re roughly three years along since Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee first described this new category of enterprise software and organizational strategy that he dubbed “Enterprise 2.0”.  Someone recently asked me what’s changed in the Enterprise 2.0 market from that point to present day.

For starters, we really didn’t have much of “a market” to speak of three years ago. At that first Enterprise 2.0 Conference we described a new vision for business applications that included some truly ground-breaking concepts.  Attendees were largely business users and managers, frustrated with the disparity between fast-paced, consumer technology innovation and the dated applications being supported by corporate IT.  At that first conference we were embarking on a radical journey to  turn these business applications and the corporate culture around them upside down.  We were ready to take on the world.

Fast forward three years and those early aspirations are now grounded in reality.  Momentum is building for what is now truly an Enterprise 2.0 “market” and we’re seeing many early signs of success. But while we’ve made tremendous progress in three years, Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications are still striving to reach more wide-spread, enterprise-scale adoption. There is an abundance of use cases around small or department-level successes but far fewer examples of large-scale deployments – examples of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications that form part of an organization-wide fabric for productivity and communication.  Why is that?

While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board.  Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers.  They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed.  They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT.  With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.

Three years later and I see that posture changing for many IT leaders. We’re entering a new era where forward-looking IT leaders embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a strategic advantage and as part of a cohesive, company-wide system.   This change is an important ingredient to the next phase of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

So what should you expect from this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference?  Expect to network with nearly 1500 people from over 40 countries.  Expect our most comprehensive program to date with deep coverage of new topics like Social Media and Cloud Computing.  Expect even more innovation from industry veterans and start-up vendors preparing for the next big thing.  And expect to hear some really compelling case studies and speakers from organizations like the Obama Campaign, the US Army, Booz Allen Hamilton, Volvo and Jet Blue, all ready to share their experiences on how Enterprise 2.0 is transforming business – changing the world.

June 4th, 2009

Excerpt #2: Customer Experience - Chap 21 from CRM @ The Speed of Light, 4th ed.

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 10:03 am

Categories: CRM 2.0, CRM Best Practices, CRM Strategy

Tags: Expectation, Interaction, Customer, Customer Experience, CRM, Strategy, Management, Paul Greenberg

I have to be straight with you. I’m entering the head down, grind it, drive to the goal line when it comes to CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition.  Which means that in other areas that I’m writing, I’m treading water. So there is a dual purpose to these excerpts. One is I’m treading water. The other is to give you a peek at what’s coming. Its going to be around 750 pages all in all - a definitive work, according to me at least, on CRM 2.0/Social CRM covering everything - some in depth, some touching on it.  In a way, it has a companion relationship to the 3rd edition which is far more technology focused than this edition, though there is a healthy dose of technology in the 4th edition. But if you want details on, say, how analytics works, get the 3rd edition. If you’re more interested in the business value and contemporary usage of analytics for customer insight, get this one.

In any case, I’ve got a new excerpt for you from another chapter.  Once again, its unedited and unexpurgated a.k.a. raw. Let me know what you think and what changes I might make. I’m stubborn. So convince me, please. All used input in the editing will be attributed.

The excerpt:

Why Customer Experience Mapping?

How many of your employees directly interact with your customers?  How many of your senior management ever interact with customers by anything but accident? How many of your customers have demands that you think are probably outside what the company can do or ever has done? How many of you use the incredible amount of intelligence that customers provide even in normal conversations? How many of you presume you know your customer? By the way, “presume” is a precisely chosen word.

The answers. Many. Almost none. Several, but what can you do? Not too many. All of us, especially marketing people.

Here’s how little you really know your customers.   EMarketer reported on a 2008 study done by QCI International:

1. 41% of the companies surveyed do not record customer contact channel preferences.
2. In more than 90% of companies, the staffs who are responsible for talking to customers could not articulate why customers should buy from them.
3. Only 13% of senior management has regular contact with customers.

Truthfully, we don’t know our customers all that well, despite their often easy willingness to be known. Put on your customer hat for a minute.  How many companies are you willing to say, “Damn. They seem to know just want I want!”  A few…maybe.  But what about this next statement, “They not only know what I want, but how I want it?”

Back in Chapter 4, I spoke a lot of American Girl.  I mentioned the varying options that they had that each cost something.  How each young girl dresses their doll, which services they choose (haircut, hot dog) and which associated media they see or buy, affects the revenue of Mattel.  It’s rarely a matter of price except as a consideration in a granular look at the customer experience.

The reason for all this variation is that each of us is self-interested. Note, I didn’t say selfish. Self-interested.  Mother Theresa was self-interested. Doing Good with a capital G was a way of satisfying her internal emotional “benchmarks.” Self-interest. Not selfish.  That individual interest can be a benefit to a company that understands what it is that drives that customer but a major headache when it doesn’t.  The biggest “FAIL” is when someone at the company presumes that they know what the customer’s self-interest is - and they don’t.  Believe me, they don’t.

There is a simple answer to that presumption failure though which I mentioned way back in Chapter 4. It’s worth repeating. ASK THE CUSTOMER WHAT IT IS THEY THINK AND WANT!

Mapping will be your first set of brushstrokes for your freshly painted customer portrait.

The Preparation

Customer mapping isn’t merely a questionnaire that you get to ask a customer - via Survey Monkey or your internal email system.  However preparation for customer mapping can be done using the traditional instruments for customer queries.

But it doesn’t start with that.

Before there is a single question even discussed there are several strategic CRM elements that have to be in place.

Consistent Perception of CRM Mission and Vision

I established the importance of the mission and vision statements last chapter.  NOTHING proceeds without a clear mission and vision statement that provides the customer-facing cues that the company needs to define how it will approach its interactions with the customers and what the future holds for that.  This is a prerequisite for any sort of customer experience mapping that you are preparing to do.

The full evolution and development of a strategy isn’t.

The reason that it isn’t is pretty straightforward.  If successful, the mapping will help you define the strategy - helping you execute on your mission. As time goes on and you redo the mapping - yes, redo - this isn’t a one-time-whew-we’re done- wipe across the forehead - it will provide you with the insight to tweak the elements of the strategy going forward. That means that your vision can be realized.

However, before you get to that, you have to make sure that the perception of the mission and vision are consistent across the company also.

What do I mean by that?

Let me get literary.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Titinius returns home to find Cassius of the lean and hungry look, dead.  He says, “Alas, thou has misconstrued every thing.” That is a state that you have to make sure that you avoid.

The only way to avoid that is to make sure that the mission and vision that are the fundamental statements for the CRM 2.0 strategy are not only clearly defined but clearly understood across the entire value chain.   By having that mission and vision clear, the direction that the strategy has to be pointed will be obvious to all concerned - and that doesn’t need the entire strategy done.

The entire value chain, includes the accounting department, your logistics organization, the warehouse managers, the human resources department and all others in the back of the company. The reason this encompasses the entire value chain is that with the increased customer demands and the heightened emotional sensitivity due to extreme economic fluctuations, among others, how every part of the company performs will have an impact on the customer experience.

For example, several years ago, a client of mine called up with an odd dilemma.  Their accounting department, a few years before the call, had developed a technique that they used in accounting entries that saved their rather large department around $40,000 per year.   However, they had added ecommerce to their portfolio of sales pipes. As a result, this accounting technique created an online “glitch” which made the customer purchasing whatever they did online enter some of the same data twice.  Never mind how it got there - it’s not germane to this.

They wanted to know what to do.

My recommendation, since it wasn’t technically fixable was to jettison the technique - despite its improved efficiency, because it was degrading the customer experience - and thus irritating customers, who expected their online shopping to be seamless and easy.

They did just that. Which is great, but the true moral of this story is to note how even the back office can affect a customer experience that is expected to be something it turns out not to be - in other words, there is a failure to meet expectations.

So what can you do to prevent that - and, hopefully, even exceed expectations?

The Traditional Approaches

There is nothing wrong with traditional approaches - though they work less and less.  When I say “traditional” approaches that includes focus groups, standard surveys, customer interviews that have directed questions and attempts at customer segmentation. Each of them has a strength or two, but there is an underlying flaw that they tend to have - the results tend to reflect the prejudices of the company - rather than the raw honesty of the individual customer. Even with analytics-driven customer segmentation for example, your result is the assessment of people who are similar to you but not of “you” as an individual. While “someone like him” might be your customer’s most trusted source, companies should remember that it isn’t a good demographic in the eyes of that same individual customer.    They may trust someone like them but they want you to know them personally.

To do that, you need to start by mapping the customer experience.

Now We Map

Mapping the customer experience is a granular process - and one that encompasses all channels that a customer uses to interact with you or vice versa.  If you are a retail store, it encompasses every interaction starting with the moment that the customer walks through the door and notices something to the moment that they leave the store and go home; to the time they call up customer service or the sales rep that has to do follow-up on the purchase.  It encompasses their web experience and how they interacted with you on the web - ranging from how comfortable the site was when they were navigating to the effect that the 11 seconds of latency that you uncovered in your customer interview affected that customer behavior or marred their experience - or not.

But as important as the specific interaction is the expectation of the result of that interaction the customer brings to the table - and what kind of importance the customer assigns to it.

I’m going to start by breaking out the fundamental elements.

Interactions

An interaction, for the purposes of the customer experience, is any time that a customer communicates with the company - regardless of the communications channel - and regardless of the whether it is a cyber-communication or a physical conversation.

Examples of good and bad interactions are in Table 21-2.

Communications Medium	Good Interaction	Bad Interaction
Retail Store	Clean, well lit, friendly service from a store representative, and well-stocked	All the other good but a surly store representative
Web-based	Easy to navigate, no latency when ordering	Ten second or more wait for order to complete when submit is clicked
Telephone Based	Immediate access to the right human being	Multiple IVR menus
Email	Rapid customer service turnaround in answering a support question	More than 24 hours wait time for answering a support question
Customer Service	Solving a problem - and adding a bonus as a “we’re sorry.”	Lack of knowledge or unsupportive CSR
Fax	Completion of a transaction	Unsolicited offer from a company you know

Table 21-2: Examples of good and bad interactions via different channels

These are simply examples. What I’m sure is that as you read them, you were able to attach a real life experience either specifically or that more generic, slightly ethereal feeling that you know what I mean, but you can’t pinpoint it specifically.

But “good” or “bad” can be attached to interactions only if there was an expectation of how that interaction was going to turn out. If it met or exceeded the expectation - voilà - good. If it fell below the expectation - oi vey - bad.

Expectations

Then what is a customer “expectation?” One definition (Olson and Dover, 1979) says, “Customer expectations are pretrial beliefs about a product that serve as standards or reference points against which product performance is judged.”  I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me.

There are at least six significant factors that customers incorporate when it comes to determining their expectations. What kind of result do I expect:

1. Given my past history with this company - especially my last interaction
2. Given what I’ve heard about this company - especially from my peers
3. Given what I expect of the industry this company is in (e.g. airlines)
4. Given what that kind of interaction, in my experience, typically results in.
5. Given ordinary standards of human behavior when it comes to interactions
6. Given anything that might have happened to me the day (or so) that I’m interacting with you that could affect how I’m thinking about things (random and uncontrollable)

Each of them, and, usually, all of them, has an effect on what the customer thinks the outcome is going to be.

Weight

But not all expected outcomes and their actual results are the same.  What makes understanding the customer’s thinking even more difficult is that each expectation and how well or poorly it is met has a different importance in the eye of the particular customer.

But you already know that, don’t you?

For example, I have to assume that most of you reading this have used review sites like Yelp to find a restaurant that you might want to eat at or Epinions to see about a camera or Amazon for the book reviews.   When you go to the review, you use the ratings - say, 1 to 5 stars to filter how you want to read the reviews.  Maybe you want to only read the bad reviews, not the good ones, so you can see how bad the negatives are on something that you really want to buy.  Or maybe you read all of them.  What I think most of you don’t do is to aggregate the stars and make your decisions based on the number of stars that a product has.  Instead, you actually read the reviews.  What you then do is to say, as you read them, “oh, that reviewer says the delivery was a bad issue, but that doesn’t matter to me, but they loved the look of the product, which matters to me a lot” OR “that reviewer says that they think the duck at the restaurant is too dry but that the tilapia is to die for.” If you like duck, you tend to not go, if you like fish you tend to go - because you are weighing what is important to you - and not.  But note something, “if” is a key word here.  Fish or duck?  That will determine something based on a review that might be 4/5 stars.

Want to check how you weigh further? Go back to the beginning of the chapter and read the descriptions from the review sites.  What’s important to you in each of the reviews? Was it what was important to one of the reviewers and not the other - or a compilation of both - or neither met your standard for importance?

You get the picture now?

This is a major facet of what can be uncovered when you do customer experience mapping.

May 29th, 2009

Excerpt: Marketing 2.0 From CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 7:12 am

Categories: CRM 2.0, CRM Best Practices, CRM Strategy, Forecasting, Industry Analysis, Marketing, Technology Reviews, Thought Leadership

Tags: Advertisement, Attention, CRM, New Competition, Engagement Rating, Marketers, Marketing Professional, Marketing Research, Marketing, Paul Greenberg

I’m going to try something out here. I am ready to cringe as the tomatoes and old iPods are thrown at me, or the praise is showered on me…oh, wait, that’s someone dumping buckets of tar over my head. I’m providing an advance excerpt of Chapter 13 of CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th Edition, my new book coming out with McGraw-Hill in late October 2009. The chapter name is “Sales & Marketing: The Customer is the Right Subject.” I’m down to writing the last three chapters as of today and should be done with a bullocks to the wall effort by mid June.

But I want feedback and discussion on the ideas that I’m putting forth. That said, there are some caveats.

1. This is completely raw. Unedited. Its a submitted chapter untouched by other than my human hands (and there is some question on whether or not I fit the category)
2. This is a small part of what is the largest chapter in the book on sales and marketing 2.0 so there is some context issues here - though don’t let that stop you.
3. This is a new area. But I think I’m right about the synthesizing of the material and the concepts I’m putting forth - though I’m not claiming tons of originality in the concepts. A couple of pounds maybe.

Have at me. Let me know what you think of the ideas, the writing, the works. For those of you unfamiliar with CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ll toot my own horn for a sec. It’s called the “Bible of the Industry” (though I insist on Old Testament because I’m Jewish). Its gone through 3 editions, sold quite a few copies, and is in 8 languages. This will be the 4th edition and it will be a combination of print (600 pages) and electronic content (another roughly 150 pages or so) and is a completely (from scratch) rewritten book. The foreword to this edition is written by Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com. It is due out in late October and is meant to be a reference for Social CRM/CRM 2.0 - I think the first of its kind. I hope the first of its kind. I pray the first of its kind. I am down on hands and knees the first of its kind.

In any case, that’s the background. Without further ado: the excerpt. PLEASE GIVE ME THE BENEFIT OF YOUR INSIGHTS AND ARGUMENTS. This chapter still can be edited and changed. If I use something you give me, you’ll get attribution in the book.

Have at it.

*******************************************************************************************************

Marketing uh, 2.0: New Mindset, New Tools

What I’m about to say may be obvious, but doing what I’m about to say just isn’t easy. In order for you to sell to someone, they have to care enough to know who you are, what you sell and see some reason to buy what you sell. They also have to see the reason that they should buy what you sell from you since they can probably get something similar from someone else.

That’s the essence of marketing - but to achieve that customer advocacy nirvana takes a lot . That “a lot” means a strategy, the use of tools and systems, and a completely new view of what marketing today is.

Listen Up! The New Competition is Attention

When you go to Whole Foods, you see heirloom tomatoes, regular red tomatoes, plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, locally grown tomatoes from a variety of different local farms, and organic versions of all of them. Which do you buy? Oh, you don’t shop at Whole Foods? Oh. Well, the point is that there are some twenty or thirty different varieties and types and sizes and farm-specific versions to choose from. If you’re confused about which to buy, you tend to the familiar. You buy regular or organic regular tomatoes. If you’re decorating a salad with something other than slices or chunks, you buy grape or cherry tomatoes. But if you’re making a sauce, you know it most likely calls for plum tomatoes - sometimes in another section of the store where you can get canned versions of the same. If you’re someone who supports local farmers as a principle - you get a locally grown version. If you’re decorating a salad you might buy heirloom tomatoes due to their riot of color.

In other words, your choices are specific to you and the person next to you buying the exact same tomatoes might be buying them for different reasons entirely.

Now, multiply that by some number that reflects the all the other vegetables calling out to you from the produce department - and then the fruits in the same area. If you’re not planning on buying tomatoes the rest of the produce might make you skip them entirely. There is so much to see and choose from, that the choices become bewildering.

The tendency when confronted with too much is inertia - to simply not make a choice. This creates a major problem for marketers, as we’ll see in just a moment.

The Attention “Economy”

If ten or eleven choices for tomatoes (or something) are blindingly difficult to decide about, imagine what it takes to do something when you’re being besieged by 3000 messages per day or roughly one million per year. That means via the Web, direct mail, on television, when you see a billboard or an ad in a store or in a newspaper or magazine and in a video game.

Think that you’re immune to it as a consumer? Here’s test that I do when I speak and the subject of capturing just the attention of someone comes up. I ask the crowd (and you can ask yourself):

1. How many of you get direct mail? (Of course, everyone raises his or her hands)
2. How many of you read all the direct mail you get? (Almost no one raises his or her hands)
3. How many just throw out most of or all of the ads? (Almost everyone raises his or her hands)

I have no doubt that the vast majority of you follow the crowd when it comes to answering those three questions. If you don’t, you win a prize. Let me know your address and I’ll put it in the mail. Just remember, don’t throw it out when you get it.

As marketing guru Seth Godin put it in an interview with William C. Taylor of Fast Company as far back as 1998:

“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You’d interrupt their TV program, and they’d listen to what you had to say. You’d put a billboard on the highway, and they’d look at it. That’s not true anymore. This year, the average consumer will see or hear 1 million marketing messages - that’s almost 3,000 per day. No human being can pay attention to 3,000 messages every day.”

This is called, as you might be able to guess, interruption marketing - your attention is captured because your routine activity is interrupted. But with 1 million messages a year, this doesn’t work the way it did in the 1960s. You do what I said above - you just zone out.

This isn’t just some construct that is there to move things in this book forward a bit. While you might think that your business competes with other companies who put out like products and provide like services, the stark reality is that you compete with every single message being thrown at your prospective customers. You can’t even start a smart legitimate marketing campaign aimed at lead generation without capturing the attention of your prospects first.

This is a recognized problem. Howard Handler, the Chief Marketing Officer of Virgin Mobile USA, in 2008, understood it: “To cut through with a message or a brand or a piece of content is more challenging than ever.”

The underlying idea in Handler’s comment is that because the amount of attention a consumer can give a product or service or company or idea is finite and increasingly more difficult due to both bad information like spam and rich information sources available everywhere, the competition for that attention is increasing and attention is becoming a commodity.

Customers are so tired of being bombarded (aren’t you?) with this constant barrage of messages that they simply zone out and don’t want to give companies that they might otherwise be interested in their time or consideration. What they actually want and are beginning to accomplish is control over what messages they consider “taking” and what brands they allow into their homes. Attention is given so little at this time that it’s been commoditized by its scarcity.

Evidence of this commoditization of attention is pretty easy to find. It shows in the compensation that is often given if you’ll just watch something. For example, when you watch a TV show that you’ve had queued in Hulu, the Web based service that’s either owned by NBC, Disney and News Corp. or aliens who look like Alec Baldwin and Dennis Leary, you will often get a choice of commercials that run at regular interludes through the web broadcast or seeing a single one minute commercial at the top of the show. For your attention to the commercial in the form that you want, you are being compensated by being allowed to watch the show for free. This is a very different model than Apple’s iTunes which sells the content commercial free for between $1.99 and $2.99 per episode. What the Hulu model is doing is buying your attention. They know your name through the registration on the site, but they recognize that having your name and you watching a commercial doesn’t mean that you’re a qualified lead. It means you gave them consideration. Period.

Compensation for attention is something that is not only being considered, but has to be considered. The rather old-fashioned idea of “pay them for their time” is becoming “pay them for their attention.” So there are companies who will give you free things e.g. cell phone minutes, ad free music, etc. if you view their ads for x time frame. There is a model for online revenue sharing that even Microsoft is looking into. There is a service called “Scoopt^TM Words” that operates as a “blogger agent” that will get companies to buy what bloggers are saying for commercial use and then split the revenue stream, which sounds kind of nice for bloggers, but not exactly in the spirit of the blogosphere.

The music industry has had an ongoing discussion which very well may go nowhere that is also around attention compensation but was driven by music piracy. The idea would be that rather than trying to prosecute or scare or harass someone who downloads a music file, usually MP3, illegally, give them the music in return for them viewing a 30 or 60 second ad. Once the ad has been completely viewed, they get the music.

While that may never go anywhere, it points to how serious the competition for attention really is.

There are nascent metrics to measure the attention too. They’re called engagement ratings and they’re primarily focused around TV at the moment. Not exactly a big surprise. They’re being used to figure out what programs to advertise on. Also not a big surprise - and sadly typical of the TV world - new metrics, old reasons.

Engagement ratings are the equivalent of “stickiness” on a website. It’s not just whether you have a large audience; it’s whether that audience is willing to continue to lavish its attention on you and your advertisers

Myers’ Emotional Connections© research in 2007 showed that Fox News Channel topped the “viewer engagement ratings” with positive engagement ratings in four categories by 80 percent of its viewers. But it dropped to 21^st place and 30 percent (for two categories) when it came to advertising engagement. What this can be interpreted to mean is that the audience was riveted to Bill O’Reilly and made a sandwich during the ads. I’d be the other way around.

Despite the particulars here, what’s important about the Myers work is that they’re doing some of the first research and measurement of level of attention and what it takes to gain that attention - which precedes even lead generation.

But attention-getting can go overboard and does especially when devotees of what is called the “attention economy” actually call attention capture the new currency - and they mean that literally. Meaning, somehow, providing attention will substitute for your national currency.

Lead generation from the marketing side comes when you have gained and kept the attention of your potential customers - but I wouldn’t go overboard with this either.

Hard Times for Tradition

Marketing never gets respect (We miss you, Rodney Dangerfield). Never ever. Never ever ever. Know why? Because marketing is viewed by the company as an expenditure that has immediate tangible return. Marketers are by the customer as a nuisance. They are viewed by people like me as a department that presumes for the customer and doesn’t really know what the customer is actually thinking, which to add to their problems, is often true.

It’s even truer now because the stakes are higher, the expectations and demands of the customer have increased and their hunger for being contacted in multiple ways - the ones of their own choosing - is greater than ever.

But that doesn’t negate the value of traditional marketing - especially when it’s used in combination with new marketing approaches. For example, the conversation rates in email marketing are still between 2 and 5 percent. Good numbers there. A study in May 2009 done by internet marketing small business legend, Hubspot, took a look at the effectiveness of traditional press releases as opposed to social media press releases found that the traditional media releases were considerably more effective in syndicating. The typical ratio was about 5:4 in favor of the traditional press release when it came to the number of places it was syndicated. The only time the ratio was favorable to the social media releases were with online properties. Not exactly a surprise. But what that indicates is that you shouldn’t stick with a single kind of release or a single approach. Do what makes sense for the location, channel and people you’re trying to reach. Social media marketing, search engine marketing and the like are becoming the centerpiece of many organizations marketing efforts.

If I had to speculate (or maybe pontificate is the right word here), marketing is up for the most comprehensive and dramatic overhaul of any of the three traditional pillars of CRM. Marketing professionals are aware of this and, those that aren’t panicking are remodeling the way they do what they do

I’m only here to help. I come to praise Caesar not to bury him.

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe this statement from someone with a lot of street cred on what constitutes successful contemporary marketing:

“Ultimately, successful marketing results,” Anil Dash, SixApart’s Chief Evangelist who you met in Chapter 10 says, “Lead to “people relating to brands as culture. They will be part of a cultural, emotional and entertainment bubble.”

You KNOW he’s right, don’t you? So remember, traditional isn’t dead, but the old marketing logic is.

May 26th, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #9: SAP, Sage, Serious, Merry, Eat, Drink, Bling

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 3:42 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Humor, Industry Analysis, Notable Stories, Technology Reviews

Tags: Beverage, SAP AG, Episode, Conference, CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software

CRM Playaz Episode #9

Welcome to CRM Playaz Episode #9.  Yeah, we’re still in business.  This episode, even with no C-Level Smackdown (#10 will have one. Guest is ready to rock) will warm the cockles of your heart - for those of you over 50, you might know what the heck that means. We talk about Sapphire - the SAP conference. We talk about Sage Insight - The Sage conference.  We’re even serious about it for awhile, which runs counter to our stated mission for the show - but who in the world cares?  We then do what’s important about the conferences and blab on the food, parties and the swag a.k.a. bling.  What ’til you hear what we ate, drank and got.  I’m sure you can’t wait.

As always the music plays and we are set free.

Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network

Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com

May 19th, 2009

Poll: Analyst Org. You Trust in Enterprise Software - Traditional & Social

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 4:00 am

Categories: Industry Analysis, Polls

Tags: Analyst, Social Networking, Enterprise Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Software, Paul Greenberg

This is a poll that can start settling some issues that seem to be of interest to many.  Some crowdsourcing is in order to find out in the world of technology, who are the analyst organizations or categories that you trust the most when it comes to a good, clean honest look at the enterprise technology industry. I get the question all the time and while there are some dependencies here - meaning you trust one group for one and another for another, all in all, it usually boils down to a company or a category.  So, for the sake of those wondering and to let the analysts know where they stand as a body, let’s do this one up big.  Tell me who you, for the most part, trust when it comes to reading their reports and listening to their discussions - especially around traditional and social enterprise software (CRM, ERP, social network platforms) and technologies associated with it, but also when it comes to the social customer. Whatever your interest, let it be heard loud and clear. What ever your choice, do me the favor and honor of putting your reasoning or your uncertainty in the Talkback section so we can hear your thinking.

UPDATE: | had so many people who emailed me about Ventana or who voted Ventana “Other” and informed me via email, phone call in one case, Tweet and comment that I added them to the poll and subtracted the “Other” that I know was Ventana.  The poll now accurately reflects Ventana as a choice.

UPDATE #2 5/31/09 - This poll is going to close at close of business ET June 1, 2009 - meaning tomorrow evening.  I’m going to then post on the results of this and the enterprise innovation poll of a month ago. Watch for it Tuesday.

Here goes:

May 18th, 2009

On the Matter of John Schwarz: Thank You

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 6:07 am

Categories: Industry Analysis, Thought Leadership

Tags: SAP AG, Blogging, Financial Accounting, Internet, Finance, Paul Greenberg

In my post on SAP Sapphire 09,Day 1, I was generally very happy with what I saw SAP doing at Sapphire this year. Very happy.  But I was concerned about a couple of things including a comment that John Schwarz, SAP Executive Board member made about the reduction in force that SAP recently had.  Based on some thinking on my part and some feedback from someone I trust, I want to clarify a few things.

Please be crystalline on this. I have no personal animosity toward (nor a personal relationship of any kind with) John Schwarz. In fact, I find him to be a quite admirable guy who built a company that I’ve always respected (Business Objects). He has served his customers well over the years.  That said, I also want to make it clear, if it wasn’t, that I don’t think he thought or thinks that the people who were let go were actually useless or just meat that’s been cut from the bone.  I know from observation that he is not that kind of person and when I asked those who knew him, his decency was confirmed. It was an unfortunate choice of words, and that was what it was. Period.

I apologize to him personally if he has any concerns whatever that this was personal. It wasn’t and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.

I still think, and I want to make it clear that someone of his stature and experience and reputation has a significant impact with what he says and thus has to be careful about how he says it. I stand by that unequivocally.  The statement was a mistake.  But by no means does that mean it was anything more than a mistake for which some accountability has to be taken.

To his great credit, he has taken accountability and for that I applaud him. Please read his statement, posted on this blog as a talkback to the Sapphire last night and now in this particular entry (see below).  That willingness to stand and do what’s right doesn’t happen that often. More often that not, mistakes are just ignored, with the hope that they can be disregarded to oblivion. In this case, Mr. Schwarz took responsibility, and when someone in his position does that, he shows what a real leader and man of character does when faced with some adversity.

For that, thank you, John Schwarz.

This is John Schwarz’s response to the blog entry, posted as a Talkback last night:

Paul, I would like to clarify a misunderstanding with regards to the words I had used in the Sapphire press conference that triggered your comments . My comments were focused on customers and investors and were meant to reassure them that despite the actions we are taking to respond to the tough economic environment, SAP will continue to innovate and deliver on our product roadmap commitments. Our focused portfolio and improved productivity give us confidence that even in the constrained environment we can get the job done.

I regret extremely the impact on people of the recession in the economy, particularly on those people that are SAP employees. I am proud of the employment opportunity SAP generates for people all over the world.

May 13th, 2009

Sapphire 09 Live: Smart business plans, moral benchmarks

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 3:43 am

Categories: CRM - Traditional, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Marketing, Thought Leadership

Tags: SAP AG, Paul Greenberg

SAP is always a bit of a conundrum to me. They have extraordinarily talented people, an incredibly deep product portfolio that they are always extending, more often than not make good acquisitions that take some time but work out all in all, and seem to be actually dedicated to transforming their ecosystem - internal and network - when the world’s conditions merit it. Which is more than I can say about a lot of similar companies. On the other hand, they make business decisions that I politely would have to say are perplexing and statements that they just simply shouldn’t make.

All in all, I have to say, before I get too far into this post, I am a fan of the company. I find them to be innovative in places I don’t expect; with some caveats, especially related to Territory Management, they’ve developed a CRM product, CRM 7.0 that will be highly regarded and is a valuable addition to the choices that that enterprises have. More on that in another post. They are innovative in ways that have nothing to do with software - but have more to do with culture (collaborative value chain) and with perception and intellectual influence - their unique and useful Business Influencers Group, an organization that is an exceptionally smart idea - and unlike any other at any company I know. But SAP has these flaws that just…just…shouldn’t be there.

Leo Apotheker Keynote Kicks It Off

CEOs, as far as I’m concerned, need to be visionary, not salespeople. Several years ago, in 2003, Craig Conway, then CEO of PeopleSoft, went and did this almost literal song and dance routine about “no code on the desktop” when speaking about PeopleSoft’s first web-enabled applications and it sounded like a sales guy making a hard core pitch with a bit of theater thrown in that shamelessly (though I’m sure he thought it was funny) included his young children. There was no vision, there was no sense that you were dealing with a leader - just a guy trying to sell a product to an audience of about 16,000. It was pathetic actually.

Now, I’m not sure of the size of the audience at Sapphire 09, Chris Musico, an associate editor and bright bulb at CRM Magazine tells me is 10,000 here and 8,000 virtually - they call it their largest audience ever but there are not as many here as there were last year - live humans that is. The numbers are impressive.

But what I am sure is that Leo Apotheker knows the message and believes in it. His sincerity, to my slight surprise, came across, to the audience and if you followed the Twitter feed on Sapphire 09, you’d see that.

But that doesn’t mean the message was perfect. Nor the vision was totally clear.

Leo began his presentation by a grim look at the world economy and the effects of the recession on how the world of business is going to have to function. The net of that part of the discussion is that companies will have to function in a world that has limits and that is at greater risk. This means that in order to bring forward the next generation of business, its going to require “clarity.” That means a clarity of purpose and strategy. Businesses must be able to make strong choices based on a realistic evaluation of “the situation” and then executing on those choices. It means full visibility into the operations of an enterprise with speed and accuracy. It means leaders who think clearly and act accordingly. He mentioned that he had hosted a conference of academics from around the globe and they all decided that it was urgent to rebuild trust and confidence with all stakeholders - especially customers and shareholders. That, I have to say doesn’t take an entire conference to figure out, but it was still good to hear it.

Clarity, which consists of transparency, accountability and sustainability drove the core of his keynote. Around that, which was, of course to be expected, he pitched SAP software and services and SOA architecture. One point that i found interesting was that SAP now supports more than 25 industry specific best practices based roadmaps. SAP is working toward cross pollinating industry best practices, which in theory might sound good, but when it comes to best practices, history kind of bears out the idea that one company’s best practices might be the reason for collapse of another company - so cross pollination of industry-wide best practices might lead to nothing more than a bunch of bee stings rather than honey. So to speak.

Without going on forever on this, there were two specific areas that I want to cover because I see them as exceptionally important - one good - excellent in fact, and one the continuation of a mistake that SAP just seems to keep making.

The Good: Sustainability

I get the fact that my speciality is CRM so I’m not the most qualified to talk about sustainability as an expert. My commitments to being green (beyond seasick), carbon footprint reduction and using less paper tend to be at the level of citizen who owns a house who is trying to reduce energy use without freezing to death in the winter. However, I am more than aware of what has to be done at the corporate level.

When it comes to this, SAP, as evidenced not just by the passion and sincerity of Leo Apotheker on the issue, but in their actions as a company and in the products they’ve acquired and produced are going to be if not already a leading force in sustainable business over the next several years.

Apotheker pointed out that in 2008, SAP had reduced its total corporate carbon footprint by 6.7% compared to 2007. In fact, Peter Graf has been named Chief Sustainability Officer to deal with all things sustainability at SAP including not only meeting their corporate objectives but also to provide their related products and services.

Their commitment went beyond just the achievement of their corporate objectives. Leo showed a Sustainability Solution Map that was comprehensive and valuable. Here it is.

They have not only committed to be a company that is socially responsible, but they’ve developed an initial blueprint for other companies to be socially responsible and sustainable. That is something that no other company has even considered that I know, much less done.

But they’ve also monetized it and kept it at a viable level.

For example, the always incredible Ian Kimball, who does many of the SAP presentations to loud applause (guy is a master of this), showed a web based ecommerce application an SAP Web Store (a construct) that had a product - GPS system - that you wanted to buy. Under the GPS system was a note that said, “Guaranteed: Most environmentally friendly product in its class.” That doesn’t sound like much until lan actually took us behind the scenes and showed us the algorithms and dashboards and KPIs built into applications that had the benchmarks for that guarantee built in. In other words, it wasn’t just a claim, but it actually met standards that were provable via app.

But they went beyond even that. They actually have identified a path for themselves as a company that means a rigorous adherence to a set of sustainability KPIs that are probably a first for the industry.

All in all this is a world-class effort that they mean. This isn’t a marketing ploy or a trick to play on the conference. This is a passionate and serious commitment by a mega-giant company that can affect the next generation business models if they can follow through. I think they can and will.

The Bad: Once Again On Demand

I am constantly perplexed by the on demand strategy of this company. Leo was both vague and ultimately defensive and didn’t provide any real reason to let me see that SAP is on the right path to an actual Business ByDesign product that is anything but fluff. I heard Leo make a commitment to “on demand” or “on demand, on premise, hybrid or anything that you want to use.” I even heard him speak on the “cloud coming to earth” and their architectural map had a bottom layer of private cloud - virtualization - and public cloud in that order. But the delivery dates? Unclear. Again. It was almost as if he said, “We are committed to on demand and we’ll deliver it to you….someday.”

He even then said, “if you think SAP is a newcomer to on demand, then think again. We’ve been doing it for five years. You can do your research.”

First, they have been doing it for five years - and doing it badly. I had a conversation in Dallas with an SAP VP when the first “hybrids SFA” came out and was told that the reason for it wasn’t to meet a market need but instead to stop the encroachments of salesforce.com on their customer base. Awful strategy.

Not much real progress has been made. I truly hope that SAP someday gets this right because its almost impossible to be in the market without a SaaS product. They have Business Objects BI On Demand which is an actually good product, but we heard nothing about that. I guess we can continue to wait, but the message was “we don’t have much yet” whether it was intended that way or not.

The Press Conference

While this was a comprehensive press conference that covered a number of “ecosystem” announcements such as a smart and valuable global services partnership with Cognizant, it too was highlighted by one outstanding discussion/announcement and, in this case one horrifically stupid comment by someone who should have known better.

The Good: Business Objects Explorer

One of hte most intriguing products that emerged this conference was Business Objects Explorer, an analytics application that SAP claims may change the way that decisions are made forever. For me, that is a hard thing to say and see but no matter what this is an interesting and potentially important product.

What makes Explorer important is that even a mathematical moron like me can use it to get results of real interest and it provides results lightning fast, so that you don’t have to crunch numbers for hours or days before decision gets made.

For example, if you are doing a simple product analysis, and you want to look up all the refrigerators in a massive catalog - style and price - it takes milliseconds to get an answer. They did a run on some actual data from Sara Lee, one of their beta partners and they were able to go thru 266 million rows in a third of a second. It was breathtakingly fast.

But you can do much more complex analysis - let’s say a comparison of television models that are over 43″ and cost over $2500 or more that are located in inventory in the southeast states compared with all the same criteria for the EMEA and that are plasmas and LCDS but not DLP or any other variety. That would take a couple of seconds of clicking and, apparently, since they didn’t actually do this study, less than a second to get the answers.

Here’s a screenshot to show you the simplicity.

Now, of course, there are questions - which mostly revolve around data types. In the press conference Ray Wang, a superb Forrester Group analyst, raised the issue of data quality - what is the quality of the data going in - how that affects it? All in all, it will obviously but that’s out of the hands of SAP. He also raised the question of Master Data Management (MDM) - can it handle multiple data sources with different data types? They say yes, but how well remains to be seen. The SAP claim is that it can do that or it can operate as “accelerated Explorer” - which enhances queries power and speed when it comes to SAP own’s Business Warehouse - especially those that are over a million records in length - which even they admit start grinding BW’s analytic capabilities when things get that big. Explorer can easily handle it.

The combination of the extraordinarily intuitive interface and the speed of results makes this a truly interesting and potentially leading product.

That’s the good thing in the press conference.

Shame on John Schwarz

It was just one statement and I truly can’t imagine that he meant to put it this way. But John Schwarz, former CEO of Business Objects and a member of the SAP Executive Board, tripped and fell flat on his face when he….well, here’s a summary (paraphrased):

I’m sure that you heard that there was an SAP reduction in force that affected 3000 SAP employees. I just want to say that I assure you there was little impact in that loss and that in fact, SAP will probably operate leaner and more efficiently as a result.

I wonder if Mr. Schwarz, who I’m sure rests on millions of dollars of personal wealth, remembered that these people, who in effect he is saying are useless (no impact) fat (leaner), have families and no livelihood. I wonder if he remembers that we’re in a recession and its hard to find a job now. I can’t speak for how many of the 3000 are still not working, but I’m sure a significant amount are still looking.

I could excuse this shockingly cold comment by saying that Mr. Schwarz didn’t mean it and he may not have. But he is a member of the SAP Executive Board and what he says carries serious weight. This was a cold, cruel and callous statement that can’t go unnoticed. Literally everyone at that press conference I spoke with later (about 5 or 6 others) - analysts, journalists - were aghast at this.

There is no other way to be. Mr. Schwarz should apologize.

Consistent Doesn’t Mean the Same

Last year at Sapphire, one of the things that struck me funny was SAP’s incredibly scripted messaging which was so minutely micromanaged that it sounded inauthentic. This was around the RIM - SAP SFA for the Blackberry announcement. Everybody, regardless of where the message was delivered or who delivered it mentioned that they used their Blackberries as an alarm clock. Everyone. I commented on this at the time and talked to SAP about it.

Damn if they didn’t do it again - this time around their message of Clarity and Timeless Software. Not more than ten minutes after Leo Apotheker’s on the whole excellent vision and speech, John Schwarz said the same thing about Clarity and Timeless Software in the same way. Scripted and micromanaged again. Inauthentic again.

I won’t dwell on it. Suffice to say, there are two mantras I recommend to SAP that they repeat - in different ways and tones of course:

1. Consistent messaging doesn’t mean identical messagings
2. Authenticity trumps consistency everytime

Develop the message and then free your spokespeople to present it in any way they want to. Stop telling them how to say they. They have their own personalities and styles and interests and vocal chords. Let ‘em loose. You’ll get much better results.

In Sum: Day 1

Day 1 is always the key to any conference. The tone is set by the visionaries and the spokespeople and the revelations. All in all, SAP continues to impress me. They are locked and loaded and aware of the changes going on in who customers trust and how they communicate and they are responding. Leo mentioned the growth of Gen Y’s influence in the workforce (BRAVO!) and that 1/3 of the baby boomers are on their way to retirement. He got the recession down cold in terms of what to expect and how to think about it. SAP is responsive and working toward doing what it has to so they can meet and participate in the transformation.

But they still have weaknesses that their competitors can exploit especially in the SaaS space. They didn’t help their public image either with the Schwarz faux pas.

But on the whole, they are a company that is not only competing but in areas that matter like sustainability in business, it seems they are becoming actual leaders who have both smart business plans and a moral and ethical benchmark that other companies might do well to imitate.

Let’s see what today brings.

May 11th, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #8: Kindle DX, C-Level Smackdown RightNow's Greg G.; and Twibes?

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 4:00 am

Categories: CRM 2.0, CRM Buzz, Humor, Notable Stories

Tags: Music, CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Paul Greenberg

CRM Playaz Episode #8

We are back again.  Still posting it here on ZDNET.  This is one of our best shows ever because of the C-Level smackdown.

We talk about the Kindle DX which stands for…you’ll hear.

But we get something better than the Kindle DX (though there are lots of things better than the Kindle DX, now that I think of it).  Our C-Level Smackdown this week features Greg Gianforte, the CEO of RightNow, industry rockstar and HOFer and a good dude. Does he slip up? You’ll have to listen.

We do the Twidiocy thang and find out that “Twibes” is not a bad idea, but really is a stupid term.

When it comes to the opening and closing, we love Charlie Bobus and Muddy Waters.  BTW, There’s no comparison between the two. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should be ashamed.

As always, the music makes us free (and is creative commons licensed).

UPDATE: Brent and I have removed the segment of the show on the Sex 2.0 conference. We don’t normally alter what we do, but in this case we feel we had to because we found that we had inadvertently offended the attendees of the conference, and sex workers, which was not our intent at all.  Both Brent and I feel very comfortable in our edgy humor when it comes to the information technology world and especially CRM, because we are both well known by the members of that industry. Thus, they know our purpose is to mock, but to do so without rancor.  But in retrospect, this time we went outside the industry that knows us and as a result, we offended people who we certainly had no intention of offending. To apologize, we’ve removed the segment.

Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network

Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com