PGreenblog

THINK!!! Value MEANS Something!

Act I, Scene 1: The Story

(Scene opens on PG or some actor playing PG just musing, wearing his walking shorts, Yankees tee, and sweating bullets. He's walking upstairs and talking at the same time)

"So, like, I was on the treadmill this morning (11 pounds down since March 6. Remember? Slimming down...) listening to my IPod Nano. I have tons of music and podcasts I have on the device and was letting it ride its way through the list of artists in the somewhat random way that IPods often have - regardless of human attempts at intervention.

Before this I would watch movies on my PSP as a way to occupy treadmill time - since it can sometimes get so damned tedious. I used to try to read but my eyes are just no good for that because of the motion and distance from the book holder. So, instead, as I power walked my belly away, I watched UMD movies. I watched "Into The Blue" with Jessica Alba - pretty much to see her since there weren't any particularly redeeming qualities of the movie itself - which kind of sucked. I then followed this with the 3 hours of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I liked a lot -though it tailed off and ended rather abruptly actually. I watched Hitch with the always liked-by-me Will Smith - even though this particular movie was airplane fare for about five different flights I was on last year. Watching a movie on the PSP was a really cool way to get through the treadmill torture time continuum. Rather than a slow dance on a fast belt, time would fly as I watched in 30 or 40 minute segments each day. But, there came a time that I ran out of PSP movies to watch.

Since I didn't have time to go find another one or two - and watching two or three of the PSP movies weekly at $20-$30 a pop could get pricey, out came my Nano and it went into action.

This morning, I listened to "Straight Up," by Paula Abdul back when she was pretty cool - which, now that I think about was either the late '80s or never; "Are You Experienced" by Jimi Hendrix; "Superman," by Five for Fighting; "Beep" by the Pussycat Dolls and "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt."

All songs I either really like or they have some connection to me in some way...

(PG goes into the misty upstairs of his house and the scene cuts over to...)

Act I, Scene 2: Cutaway

(Scene opens at someone's business. Number of senior management types are sitting around a conference table, listening to PG jabber; he's all up in their faces, wearing his biz casual clothes, pacing the room, pointing and at times wildly gesticulating in the air - as it goes, pointing, "apropos of nothing.")

"So what do you think? You know when you hear customer value and you think about the customer experience, the closest you get to it or to what it means comes when you think about making money through customer value metrics and formulae or about business process change. And then you guys have these "process management" gurus come in and tell you how to change all your processes so that they provide a "valued customer experience" and then you ask them about the industry best practices and everyone bows to the gods of conventional thinking - but the best gods of conventional thinking. Those who have practiced the most. What's your idea there? Well, if you change your processes or you enrich them, then the customers will buy your stuff or services or be happy or satisfied or whatever. You think that works? Pffffttt!!"

Act 1, Scene 3: Surface Bubbles

(Scene cuts back to PG upstairs, now in his jeans and another Yankees tee shirt and he's at his desk - tapping out this particular blog entry)

"So, I'm on the treadmill and settling into a sorta pleasant state of mind, listening at the time to "Superman" by Five for Fighting and the song ends and there is a really brief pause. Then I realize that the next song "Beep" by Pussycat Dolls just started. Then I realized that I'm mentally ticking off the length of each song as it finishes (3 minutes, 7 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes etc.) and I look at my watch (one of the Polar heartbeat watches that monitors your heart rate and records it so it can be uploaded) and I'm doing this after each song. And the time starts to move slower than it had before I realized that I'm unconsciously ticking off the minutes in small bites. Its just plain - discontinuous."

(Strains of "James Blunt's You're Beautiful" begin to float into PG's head:

You're beautiful, you're beautiful;
You're beautiful, its true.
I saw your face in a crowded place
and I don't know what to do.

as he begins to muse even more about what seems to be an insight that's trying hard to surface)

Act I, Scene 4: Back to the Boardroom

(PG continues to pace the floor with these execs staring at him, not particularly amused or even into it all that much with the exception, as PG notices, of two of the senior management. He makes a mental note to focus his discussion around them)

"You think so internally. What you think customer value is is what you can extract from that customer. But did you ever consider that their idea of value is very different than yours? That while value to you as a stakeholder in this business is your bottom and top line improvements and your value to your shareholders; value to a customer has a much different meaning. God. I mean, you're customers aren't you? You buy stuff. You spend money. You don't like to feel like a metric or a line item do you? What do you guys think when you're out in the world doing something that isn't your business? How do you see value then? Do you ascertain the financial value of everything you ever bought or the efficiencies that the items provide to you or the process improvements the items will bring to your household? Did you ever buy anything on a whim? Because that day you "felt like it." Or because you thought it was "cool?" Sure you have. AND you've bought things because of their utilitarian value - because it would improve your "processes" at home? Maybe help you mow a lawn because you could ride around on it? Or maybe you bought a George Foreman grill because it cooked "good" or a Weber because the cooking was even better and more even and allowed you to cook more items for when you barbecued. Process improvement? Shur. But a serious limitation will continue to produce ordinary thinking until first, you realize that processes are simply organized ways to act in the world that seem to suit you or your company or your culture and second, when you think about the customer value associated with those processes, you aren't just dealing with bottom and top line improvements or best practices, you are thinking about providing value to that customer who's experience with you is based on interactions they have with you that are MEANINGFUL to them. But finding out what meaningful value is to a customer is a pretty tricky thing. Who knows actually why the customer buys until you ask them? Who knows what their motivations are until you stop presuming for them. Stop formalizing everything into a well-boxed set of practices, neatly bowed, that are tidy. Instead probe the idea of not just value in the statistical/mathematical measurement sense but instead in the emotional and behavioral. , What motivates a customer to buy from you can change from moment to moment, might be really weird but if you dig and find out what's the actual reason they buy things as opposed to the apparent reason that you presume, you could make some real breakthroughs in how to conduct your business. Think about this. Most people don't have a goal to be efficient in life, but to be happy in life. We want to leave a legacy, not a set of metrics when we leave this plane. That's the earthly one. Not the air one. Apply that to your business, which, after all is nothing but a part of life. To apply it appropriately, delve into the mind and emotions of your customer so that you can see what's meaningful to them. But to do this, you have to be ready to let the customers drive some of your strategizing with you and for you. So- Is you is or is you ain't ready?"

Act I, Scene 5: Breakonthrough To the Other Side

(PG is still at his desk but he's drumming his fingers and playing with a USB cable while he figures out what the hell is weird about this entire blog entry)

"God. You know what I just figured out? How weird is this?

I'm thinking about spending between $40 and $90 a week to buy PSP movies. And for what? To speed up time?

UN- RE-AL.

I mean, even though I'm listening to the Nano and ticking off the time of the songs, which then makes time seem go slower than if I were visually engaged in watching a PSP movie for 25-35 minutes, the reality is that 25-35 minutes is 25-35 minutes no matter how fast or slow it SEEMS.

So I'm spending or willing to spend all this money for a friggin' feeling. Watch the movie, time goes fast; listen to the Nano, time goes slow. But reality tells you that time goes - period. Regardless of whether it seems fast or slow. But since I'm interested in it feeling it go fast, I'm gonna shell out significant weekly bucks to do that. Am I nuts? Yeah, I guess so. But I'm still gonna shell out the bucks."

Act I, Scene 6: The Final Scene

(The stage is dark with a spotlight focused on PG, the stakeholder execs around the conference table are in the back of the stage with a bit of dimmed lighting so they can be seen but not prominently, as they sit, watching PG in a sort of ethereal setting as he wanders his office thinking out loud - as always. The senior management stakeholders are eerily quiet as PG starts a soliloquoy to closure)

"So what does all this mean? That's kind of the point. These stakeholders won't know until they ask me. I mean why is Paul Greenberg going to shell out on the average of $70 or so per week or two on PSP movies? Does he love the PSP that much? Is he enamored of the UMD format, which doesn't compare to an ordinary DVD though is pretty good? No, I'm not doing that. I'm doing it to speed up time that actually moves at the same speed no matter what I do. Weird stuff. Very weird stuff? But that's meaningful value to me even though there is no ACTUAL process improvement whatsoever. The process of time just keeps ticking but the feeling makes me want to spend to have it over and over - and get slim in the bargaiin. I wonder if Sony would ask me about meaningful value?

NAH."

(The lights go out, the curtain falls but projected onto the curtain is the following slide)

THE END

Author Squeeze, Publisher Please....

Remember that song that seems to be used as the theme for endless TV shows that get cancelled - "One way or another, I'm gonna find ya. I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha...."? That's the song that always comes to mind when I think about author's relationships to their publishing houses. (NOT editors, publishing houses). I've been musing on this lately because of an interesting anomaly in the world of publishing - Kaplan Publishers, who I'll blab on in a bit.

Anecdotally of course, since I certainly haven't taken the time to do a scientific survey, I've heard from many of my author buds, some of whom have sold millions of books, that they don't really care for the publishing house they are with and they would like to move on. In several cases, they have moved on more than once already, not because of a "better deal" but because of a poor relationship; they felt that the publisher wasn't really doing much for them except publishing their book (though, actually that is meaningful). It seems to be the way many of the largest publishers deal with their authors - unless of course you're writing fiction or a REALLYBIGNAMEAUTHOR..

Now, while not a REALLYBIGNAMEAUTHOR I think I've done pretty well for myself. CRM at the Speed of Light has been through 3 editions and is in 8 languages. So I have no complaints. Royalties have been decent enough. Bu us'n in the world of authordom (don't write like this at home. This was done by a pseudo-professional on a strange mind track) just seem to all have gripes with our publishing houses (Again, NOT editors).

Those gripes, which are sometimes bitter (though not in my case particularly) made me begin to think. What is the cost of change to an author? When does the relationship with the editor - typically the acquisitions editor - begin to get diminished because of the egregious lack of interest by the publishing house in the author's "welfare" i.e. the lack of collaboration?

This lack of effort on behalf of the author and lack of transparency between publisher and author often begins at the beginning when the contract is negotiated. Publishing contracts are very tricky. An agent can be helpful but first time authors don't always have them, so typically, there are things that they don't know to negotiate. It happened to me. I have negotiated countless IT-related contracts in my life and have been pretty good at it. But every publishing contract I negotiated, there was something I neglected because it is such a different animal. International rights royalities, subsidiary payment, shelf placement, you name it. I screwed it up. But you learn as you go and now I have an agent when I need one.

But, being a journalism school graduate and a student of the publishing industry, I understand their perspective. Their margins are being squeezed, their competition for blockbuster authors is both brutal and public. Because of fiascos like James Frey they are under scrutiny (though in that case, I'd have to say the publishers are unfairly getting the short end of the stick) like never before. New media are threatening their livelihood and it isn't infrequent to find that smaller houses are just going out of business and larger houses (why do they call them publishing "houses" I wonder?) are folding divisions, shutting down specific imprints and cutting back their staff as they find their territory being invaded by the POD people (that's publishing on demand, sci fi freaks!). The irony of publishing-on-demand is that years ago, pre-internet, it was called a "vanity press" - you paid, they published. Vanity presses were no real threat and looked on with righteous scorn. But with new technologies and tools and a ready-made, easily accessible distribution network available (a.k.a. the web), vanity presses are now PODs and IUniverse is a competitor and this whole previously scorned approach has now encroached on "real" publishers territories and scratched their bodies. No blood drawn - yet - but the pain from the scratches is noticeable.

The sales competition is particularly vicious in the book publishers world. The largest publishing houses easily dominate the sales, making the competition for the rest of the marketplace rough. Unfortunately, I can only speculate on 2005 stats but in 2001, the 10 biggest publishing houses had 88.4% of the sales with Pearson (my first publisher) at #1 (24.8%) and McGraw-Hill (my second and current publisher - though I had one other one) at #2 (18.3%). I can't imagine that its evened out much since 2001, but I'm being speculative here. Thus, the need to produce the numbers is intense and the stress levels of publishers and division chiefs and editors-in-chief are very, very high and often very public.

The "New Breed" Author; The Brand New Reader

The Additionally, as we've seen with the growth of new fiction genres like chick lit (though that's getting to be mundane now) or in the world of non-fiction when there are surprise hits like "Eat, Shoots, and Leaves" or "Freakonomics" which are on punctuation and a phenomenological view of economics that's very readable, both the authors and readers represent a new generation of consumers looking for what we've harped on in this blog to the point that your tongues are hanging out - a personalized experience.

Don't kid yourself. Readers are younger and grew up different. If it weren't for Harry Potter, an incredible number of young kids would much rather watch TV, DVDs, surf the 'net and IM than read. Reading needs to be a pleasure, not just a "gotta do it in school" for book publishers to be successful. There are just too many competitive, more visual (though less imaginative) other sources of pleasure out there. So that is another big concern. The nature of the reader and the reader's level and type of engagement has changed.

Enough on that. I'm talking about the authors here. While there's no lack of prospective authors who would love to be published, there are alternate ways to achieve whatever purpose the author has now. They can be famous with blogs. They can see their name in print with POD. They can circulate ebooks digitally. They can be validated, recognized, acclaimed, appreciated, leave a legacy, make money, see their name on a book jacket, and have some control over the effort - all without a traditional publisher. There is a new breed of potential blockbuster author in town or just a good writer who has a chance and can bypass traditional channels. They threaten the existing business models of the traditional publisher, because, as we all are as consumers, they recognize they are empowered to go in other directions. What traditional publishers have that the new media alternatives don't is cachet and deeper validation for the author. They theoretically have the distribution channels and marketing but the former is less apparent and the latter - the crux of a lot of the relationship problems between author and publisher - is often non-existent

But The Business Model....Oh, The Business Model....

Like most businesses, in other domains, the traditional publisher's business model is broken. That isn't unique. Most business logic is busted in the face of the Experience Economy's new consumers. In the case of the publisher, the lack of collaboration felt by the author is what is the root of the damage between them - and the restlessness of the author to move on to someone else - even when there have been sales successes with that publisher.

I LOVE My Editor - That's Why I Stay

The title of this is a typical refrain. The editor is a wonderful person and that's why the author stays. Its my experience with my editor at McGraw-Hill frankly. My acquisitions editor at McGraw-Hill is GREAT - his name is Roger Stewart and he is a brilliant guy with some real intellectual power, an hysterically funny sense of humor, a great track record in the industry and well liked and respected by his peers and I consider him a personal friend - one who I can hang out with and go drinking at a bar that was one that Jack London drank at in Oakland, that is tilted into the bay there because it has been sinking. Thus mywillingness to stick with the publisher. But that shouldn't be mistaken for loyalty to McGraw-Hill. My loyalty is to Roger Stewart. The cost of change to me would be greatly reduced should he not be the editor I would deal with at McGraw-Hill. And that is sad. But I recognized a long time ago in dealing with all three publishers, their interest is in selling books, not making me a good author. That's just their business. To the extent that making me a good author is a boost to possible book sales, well, that works. Roger's interest was selling books and helping me be a good author so I stayed through the three editions because our relationship was collaborative. But, for example, even though the book had sold well (especially corporately) even though I fully participated in selling the book, there was no marketing money ever expended on any edition, no marketing plan, no interest beyond Roger's and the corporate sales rep there Karen Schott who is spectacular too, in me at all other than as the name on the book that I wrote. The rest of the interest was in keeping costs WAY down - without any regard to what I might think.

Lest you think I'm bitter, I'm not. They have a business to run. They have costs to control and books they need to sell and they are in a vastly competitive space. I get that. But collaboration is the key to sales int the 21st century. Roger is a collaborator. I've stayed with McGraw-Hill to date.

But if the relationship between the editor and the author isn't that strong or if the loyalty of the author is to the editor and not the publisher, the author will move on and a potential for a substantial sale or continuation of good sales moves on with them and that isn't good.

Kaplan Publishing

Oddly, what triggered this entry altogether is that I have two friends who called me within about 8 months of each other who were considering offers from a very large publishing house (same one) and Kaplan Publishing (both were) and they were conflicted. Now Kaplan is by no means small (they produce around 150 titles a year) but they didn't own the size of market share that the other house did. If size mattered, the obvious wouldn't be Kaplan at that point. But both of my friends were truly struggling for the answer and both of them were clearly more emotionally committed to Kaplan than the larger publisher. The only reason they didn't make the decision easily for Kaplan was the size of the other publisher. Ultimately, to their delights, they both went with Kaplan, which incidentally is owned by the Washington Post.

That made me curious. Why did they do that? What was it about Kaplan that made them go to it, despite the size difference? I had conversations with them over time informally and then with someone at Kaplan, acquisitions editor Karen Murphy, a delightful person who is also a straightforward. individual. Between all the conversations here's what it boiled down to. From the beginnning, Kaplan showed that they would collaborate with their authors to provide mutually valuable results. Two things particularly pointed toward that. They provided a fully-evolved marketing plan for each of the authors prior to signature on a contract, even though they were both first time authors. These were comprehensive enough for the authors to understand what Kaplan stood ready to do with and for them. Kaplan also encourages the author. For example, if an author is in Chicago (Kaplan HQ), they can easily (given scheduling of course) meet with the sales, marketing, others people in the company, unfiltered. There is no isolation of the authors from "the rest" of the company. In other words, they do what they have to to collaborate with the author. Both "sides" give and receive value. The author-publisher experience is not confined to the author-editor relationship.

Not only is that refreshing from my author's perspective, its just plain smart business.

Listen and learn, traditional publishers, listen and learn. There are those of you, like Kaplan who get it. But the numbers of anecdotes I'm hearing from from often best-selling disgruntled authors about leaving are getting to sufficient frequency to be considered scientifically valid.

And that wouldn't be a good thing.

For publishers or authors.

Sometimes Even a Lumbering Giant Can Dance: Look at Joe Frazier!!

I'll tell ya. First appearances can be deceiving. I'm a sucker for the quick judgement. I make too many of them. Assume too much. Accept what I see on the surface. Got me in trouble in a lot of my earlier relationships. Luckily, there was this time in my life that I made a decision that in fact, that was really a stupid way to do things. See, what happened was that I had been involved with this woman (she and I were in our 20s at the time) and it didn't work. So, when we broke up, of course, it was her fault. Then I got involved with another young woman - a coupla years older than me who was apparently the polar opposite of the one I had just been involved with - well, "just" being about 8 months before. Note I said, "apparently." Because despite her entirely different surface appearance and my first impression, she turned out to be almost EXACTLY like the first one. Hmmm, says I. "MAYBE, just MAYBE its my problem, not theirs. Two in a row tells me something." So I spent two years (and deliberately stayed away from relationships) figuring out my problem and came to two conclusions.

1. Never ever trust a first impression. Spend time figuring out what you see - because it might not be what you get or what is actually going on.
2. Uh. Uh. No you don't! You'll have to get to know me a helluva lot better before you EVER find this one out!

But, lets say the answer to the latter one is the reason that I'm wildly happily married for the past 25 years to Yvonne. The first one is what is actually germane to this particular blog entry

It Gives You Pause (or Maybe Paws)

If I say "SAP" to you, what do you think right away? You'd probably think,

• Big enterprise software
OR
• ERP
OR
• enterprise applications
OR
• millions of dollars and big company spending
OR
• 800 pound gorilla
OR
• lumbering giant
OR
• why is he capitalizing all the letters for the stuff that runs from trees?
OR
• given what I just read about your old relationships, that's what you are, Paulie boy.

You wouldn't think, first impression anyway (damn that first impression stuff! Will I never learn?), that SAP would be all that focused around the new social customer and the technologies, strategies and the initiatives that these nimble little Web 2.0ish entities like say, Communispace or nimble giant internet presences like Google or Yahoo (do I actually HAVE to link to either Yahoo or Google in order for you to find them? If you can't find them without the link, just google them) are leading, now would you?

But your first impression would be wrong

In fact, SAP is doing something that is very cat-like and agile and has been spending a lot of time and effort and bucks doing it. I ran across this blog entry on Jeff Nolan's Venture Chronicles about SAP's rather incredible foray into the world of (as Nolan calls it) "Enterprise Social Software. There is one caveat to this. Venture Chronicles is actually SAP Venture Chronicles so it is an SAP-run SAP-centric blog and thus is guess what? SAP loving. Even so, what SAP is doing for the traditional enterprise in developing the new social tools that will establish the customer friendly technologies that are critical for the future of business in our good ol' experience-centered, customer ecosystem, is truly eye-opening.

For Example, Monsieur Paul?

1. They are developing a very interesting search engine. - What makes this search engine really interesting and somewhat different from a Google or a Yahoo or MSN Search is that it can handle structured and unstructured data at the same time and can dig into the ERP, CRM etc. data that is being held by the multi-terabyte at big companies in their datawarehouses in combination with capabilities to handle the data on the web. I.e. A blended search at the analytical level. This is slated for NetWeaver's next release.
2. SAP executives are blogging - they're linked directly into the SAP community, including heir apparent Shai Agassi.
3. SAP has the "Harmony Project" which is a LinkedIn for the Enterprise - effectively, it is a way for an enterprise (though it might be limited to SAP internally) to find out the social connections and "six degreess of separation" connectedness between a company (and perhaps its enterprise value chain - e.g. partners and suppliers) networks of employees.
4. Alumni@SAP - Apparently they have a social networking site for SAP employees to find out what alumni of their universities work at SAP and they come complete with personal profiles. According to Jeff Nolan, they've collected over 5000 profiles (16% of the current SAP employee population worldwide).

So that's just a few of the initiatives that I found with a brief swing around the 'net. There, I'm sure, are more than that, but creates a very interesting thought. Maybe SAP isn't so far off a possible win in the battle of the platforms. They certainly seem to at least anecdotally "get it" and not too little, not too late.

Let's just call it a very interesting second impression.

Surprahz, Surphraz! CRM Service Providers Found Lacking - Though I Wonder What THAT Means....

I'm always amazed at the studies that the CRM analyst organizations do. Some are incredibly arcane. Some are designed to clearly validate someone that paid them (Aberdeen was - and I can't say that they still aren't either way - notorious for this, like calling Goldmine the coming Siebel of the midmarket - in 1999 - sponsored by Goldmine). Some are just whacked out. Some are the obvious and are great validation for the obvious too. And others are genuinely useful surveys that add to customer insight. I'd say the one that I'm going to mention fits the "validate the obvious" category.

According to SearchCRM today, Forrester Research did a study on whether or not respondent companies would recommend their CRM professional service provider - which, really funnily they give the acronym PSP - though I could SWEAR that was taken by something already.

They Found....

That 40% of the companies surveyed wouldn't recommend the service provider they had to others. That the bulk of those that didn't get recommended had to do with the ability to "get along" with the provider - in fact that was a concern for 50%. Additionally, just over 50% felt that the integrators didn't really worry about adhering to a budget. Meaning, they didn't trust them.

Well, duh.

If there is one thing I've preached for the entire time I've been in CRM and in fact, have even sloganized it and have zillions who will vouch for me saying it (and I AM going to say I told you so here), it is:

WHEN YOU BUY THE APPLICATION, YOU BUY THE VENDOR

Repeat after me, sports fans, yell it to the skies over and over, louder and louder - let the waves of your unified voices resonate through the stadium's rafters:

WHEN YOU BUY THE APPLICATION, YOU BUY THE VENDOR

WHEN YOU BUY THE APPLICATION, YOU BUY THE VENDOR

WHEN YOU BUY THE APPLICATION, YOU BUY THE VENDOR

WE WILL, WE WILL, ROCK YOU!

Oops, sorry, got carried away a little there.

Look, it is obviously a case of trusting those you partner with - so that not only is the work enjoyable, but more germanely than even that, if there is problem, it is amicably resolvable. It certainly isn't a question of application functionality. CRM applications might execute on the functionality a little differently in each case, but opportunity management is opportunity management and pipeline management is pipeline management, ad infinitum.

I have a colleague or two who thinks that a business arrangement with an expert company is enough, but that tends to be a BIG CONSULTING FIRM view of the universe that most people don't live in. Most live in the world that says, "these are relationships between companies who are partnering with you to do something that you need (the CRM implementation) and they need (the checks that come with the effort). So, there has to be a firm clear statement of work and a BIG DOSE of trust and comfort between the two companies thus engaged." That means that compatible cultures (as William Band, the Forrester analyst who did this survey rightfully says) are really important. Not just expertise. Know why? Because Forrester figures that over $6 billion will be spent in integrator services for maintenance and implementation in 2006 and that chunk of change can't go flying down some untrustworthy hole - imply what you want there.

A Caveat, Dear Watson

That said, surveys like this are often really skewed because sometimes they are organized around the idea of what you might as well call planted memories. Not saying this one was, but maybe it was (I say, planting a possible seed of doubt and thus maybe a memory of something. Remember?). Customers have to have a relationship with the integrator not just engage them so there is someone to blame at the end of the day when something goes wrong. That means it is incumbent on both parties to be able to get along. Sometimes, just sometimes, the customer is wrong and hard to get along with - due to corporate politics, other agendas, imminent failures or a gruesome personality quirk. The vendor/integrator has due diligence to do diligently too. Problems are not always the integrator's fault. Failure to solve them tends to be because of a lack of communications, not always a lack of technical skills or a malicious intent on the part of the vendor or the customer. The poor relationship and thus the inability to solve the problem at hand becomes the problem.

So remember, duh to the survey but dumb and dumber to those who just ain't doin' it and doin' it and doin' it right - from the beginning - meaning developing the right relationship with the right integrator or vendor who is going to provide you with the services or applications you need to do your job. Remember, its not the services or the products, its the experience you have with the services, products and companies that determine the value and the success of the relationship.

One more time:

When you buy the application you buy the vendor - but know what else, the vendor/integrator buys you too.

And Forrester, really, c'mon; the PSP is a game console, for godssakes.

The Beat Goes On, The Beat Goes On, Fascinating Rhythms to My Brain....

The Basic Skinny

I just got back from a BPT training gig - our last of this current tour - ending in Boston. Easily our best and my favorite of the trip. There were about 30 some odd in attendance. Several of whom I knew well. First, I saw the young guy I used to work for, Nachi Junankar, a very bright, dear almost member of my family. He has his own blog in fact that is worth reading. The guy is a very good writer. I also saw my "brother-in-law-once-removed" (a new category) from Newfoundland, a very talented CRM savvy media guy (the "CRM savvy" part is by sheer coincidence - we're not from the same gene pool!!) Perry Giles and had the privilege of seeing Denis Pombriant, who as you know from both my unabashed admiration and his entries in this blog and his own blog is among the most astute thinkers in CRM. So I had a personal full house here. But just as great was the variety in the room - John Hancock, Boston Globe, Giorgio Armani, David's Bridal, Long & Foster, Draft Marketing Group, Half Moon Bay Resorts in Jamaica and many others. It was genuinely exciting - even though I've done it 9 times now. This one just topped it.

Two Things

Two things were notable. One is somewhat parenthetical to this entry and the other directly related but I'll mention both. Knowing me as you do, when wouldn't I add all the parentheticals and peripherals and sidebars I could?

Setting the Table

The way the exercise works is that I give the students three grocery store shopping scenarios. Each table (of around 4 souls) then discusses the scenarios and chooses one that the table will then represent. They are responsible for identifying the factors, expectations and weights that they gave the characteristics and possible interactions at the store that defined their scenario #1, #2, #3 decision. They do mock interviews using their flights of fancy, imaginations gone amok, wildest stories or just plain thoughts to bolster their selection. Each table then has a representative come up and explain what selection criteria factored into their decision to choose the store that they did. So for example, 24X7 convenience might be important, price might be critical, parking might matter, food quality might matter, store staff knowledgeability might be the most important thing, etc.

I love this exercise. Everyone can relate to it because everyone shops at grocery stores.

The Parenthetical

This just struck me as interesting. One of the tables took the scenario built around the largest retail grocery chain which wasn't upscale and was high volume. One of the table members made the point that one of the selling points was the high traffic volume. That was a curious one because who likes lots of traffic in a grocery store. The point was that the high volume of traffic meant faster turnover of produce, meant continually fresher produce than the other stores possibly would have.

Thinking beyond the box. Cool.

There is an actual science that researches this kind of anomalous thinking called "Chance Discovery" brought to my attention by my dear friend, my good buddy, Dr. Jeff Tanner, the Associate Dean of Research & Faculty Development at Baylor University and a partner of mine in BPT Partners. It basically takes a singular customer insight (among other areas it examines) and seeks out the potential value of the insight. Here is the definition of this nascent science by the (what else?) Chance Discovery Consortium (I don't think creative naming or metaphor is one of this new science's strong suits)

A "chance" here means an event or a situation with significant impact on human decision making -- a new event/situation that can be conceived either as an opportunity or as a risk. The "discovery" of a chance is to become aware of and to explain the significance of a chance, especially if the chance is rare and its significance has been unnoticed. Desirable effects of opportunities should be actively promoted, whereas preventive measures should be taken in the case of discovered risks. In other words, chance discovery aims to provide means for inventing or surviving in the future, rather than predicting the future.

So there is possible opportunity in all thinking.

So you're not really nuts for thinking whatever it is you might be thinking. You might be onto something and Chance Discovery, though young and not yet pretty, might help you figure it out.

Of course, you COULD be nuts....

The Not-Parenthetical A.K.A. Central Idea

One of the tables during the exercise did something interesting that highlights what I want to talk about. There were four people at the table - two with children and two singles or perhaps without children (not sure which actually). Even though the exercise was to battle through to a single choice, they couldn't do it. So they "self-segmented." In other words, the ones with children, took the more family friendly scenario choice and the ones without children took the more upscale, "lifestyle-directed" (e.g. organic foods, premium prices, shoppers experiential) choice. Amazing. First time that happened but it reflects something interesting that I'm increasingly seeing on the bigger stage of customer and human life on the planet as we know it. People are "self-segmenting" in all kinds of ways everywhere. You might see it as social tagging, or "social bookmarking" you might see it as "keywords" being used to identify interests, you might see it in a myriad of other ways. But even though I couldn't say its at critical mass yet, there is a noticeable trend (and interest) toward especially the younger generations of individuals analyzing and segmenting their own interests and own demographic/geographic characteristics in ways that analytic algorithms can only dream about (I'll bet that you didn't known that algorithms dream - they do. Really.). One of the best examples of this is Facebook where the collegians and high schoolers who are part of the "Facebook community" tag themselves with keywords that describe themselves in a really granular way, down to the level of their favorite Disney movie. In fact, the way it works is that every bit of data a student enters on themselves is matched against all the data of all the other millions of students registered on the site. Here is a very good explanation of Facebook and folksonomies (another term for social tagging) from a really bright young guy, a sophomore at Iowa State named Matthew Cahill, who writes rather very well on his Matthew Cahill.com blog (and apparently was just offered a job at Facebook):

To summarize the site, Facebook is a social networking system that allows students to keep up to date with each other’s personal lives, ranging all the way from marital status to your favorite TV show. Almost every facet of the website is driven by categorized tags. Essentially every bit of information you type into Facebook becomes a tag to reference against every other user. For example, say you like Family Guy and have that shown in your profile. Now you want to know who else likes Family Guy in your school. Your profile is littered with links as every comma-separated bit of information is converted into a tag, and you click on Family Guy in the TV Shows category. Instantly you are brought to a list of users with the tag defined like yours. Now you want to be more specific, you want to know who all lives in the same dormitory as you. Simply goto your profile and see that your address has been converted into a set of tags, then proceed to click the name of your dorm to generate a list of everyone tagged the same way. While it isn’t always perfect, since you are only shown people who list the address or TV show like you did, you have a relatively accurate grab of information.

Of course, this isn't the only way it works, but is among the most popular with sites like del.icio.us and Yahoo making major inroads into the social tagging space. Oh yeah, BTW, del.icio.us is now owned by Yahoo - proving Yahoo to be very smart indeed about this important new trend.

Watch OUT CRM Analytics Vendors - You Could Get Run Over - And Would That Be Del.icio.us?

I don't think they will get run over, but what I'm thinkin' here is that the current CRM vendors who provide analytics applications (either on premise or on demand) which is just about all of the CRM vendors, aren't really paying a lot of attention to this trend. The irony is that this could be one of those "feast or famine" situations where the gold is laying on the surface waiting to be picked up while the vendors are digging underground in the mines looking for it. I have no proof that they are or aren't taking this important new self-analytics trend into account. But I haven't seen a word emanating from a single CRM vendor - not a single-solitary-one, while the "neo-platformists" like Yahoo and Google are talking about it and acting on it.

I guess that the companies that depend on providing very complex algorithms to segment customer populations to fuel customer insight, will have a lot of code rewriting to do to take advantage of this. Also I imagine they are somewhat afraid of the privacy issues that might arise. But keep in mind one thing - this is SOCIAL tagging - meaning that people are willingly providing the links, keywords, and the weights and the connections to others without reservation in most cases - leaving that goldmine of data sitting on the ground sparkling away.

But hey, there is something else here. 'Cuz if all I have to do is go to Yahoo to find out who loves something that might relate to my business and find out in a singular and mass way - why do I need the analytics firms?

That said, these are sophisticated firms using math and algorithms that we mortals can barely dream of creating (I think thank goodness). That means that they have an expertise that might go far beyond the value we could independently derive from Yahoo and Facebook. So something tells me that this phenomenon isn't likely to drive the analytics market leaders out of business - at least not for a long while.

But what a market opportunity for them. If you think about it, what if one or two of them get really smart, and do some new coding and some new math and come up with something that can mine all this lovely socially available data from the new world of the new web and the new customer? Hoo-whee! Game-Set-Match-Mr. Analytics Company.

Okay, then. My challenge to ALL of them.

Are any of you savvy enough to monitor social tagging, self-segmenting and start thinking about the business value? If you're already doing it, prove it to me and say something. If you're not, tell me you're gonna and give me an idea that you're serious. Show me what you got, big fella. If not, have a great life in the 20th century. I hear that Henry Ford has some GREAT ideas.

Slimming Down, On The Road, Great Customer Experiences, and Mass Customization - How In HELL Are You Going to Make THAT Coherent, Paulie?

Every now and then, I get into a "mode." I was one of those kids who had to read everything in the world on the topic that I was interested in at moment and would devour all subject matter within my reach to understand how to do something. I still tend to be that way. Long lazier periods which then go into heavy overdrive on doing something until it gets done. All of you who would like to interpret my psyche please feel free to email me and let me know who my "inner self" is. I'd say "inner child" but I think that my child is an outer one, visible to all who look or who would rather not. That said, on with the story.

Slimming Down

That said, last week (about 10 days ago) I all of a sudden clicked into a "slim down my life campaign" which meant a bunch of things (wondering how this relates to CRM aren't you? Heh. Heh.). First, losing weight - I've gained around 20 pounds in the last 8 months due to all kinds of stressful sorts of things going on in my life (too much info?). Second, it meant slimming down how I traveled. I traveled with a 5.0 pound laptop with a 2.5 hour battery life, no built in anything (coupla USB ports and that's about it) and a heavy quasi-organizable bag that was loaded with adapters, PDAs, cellphones, PSPs, IPods - 60GBB thick IPods (4th generation. How retro) a bluetooth card, a firewire card, a modem card in those rare instances (never) that I would need it, a sound card that was better than the built in system which sucked, a wireless G card and countless cables that were there just in case that I literally never used once. The total weight was like 19 pounds or so and the cables etc. were a bloody irritating mess.

But to add fuel to the flames, I also was (and am) involved in 7 CRM related organizations that get my services for free, because I believe in social responsiibility to help where I can and in helping friends if they ask, write 35 articles or more a year for 15-20 publications - most for free - some as large as 10,000 words, some as small as 650 words, and have my own consulting practice which is just me where my multiple clients have me write white papers or consult on go to market strategies or improvement of position or mindshare strategies or speak at events> I co-own BPT Partners, our wonderful, lovely training/research/consulting company which in a few short months of existence has established a significant branded presence in the market far beyond what we expected at this point. I also am keeping up this blog several times a week. I'm about to start my "You Are What You Eat" CRM and customer experience-related podcast. I continuously do favors for friends at an individual level and get about 5 emails a week from strangers asking me for something and when those strangers are students in particular, I don't turn them down. (except one student who actually asked me to write her thesis. No joke.) Plus my actual travel has been over 55,000 air miles this year already and will be more than double that by year end judging from opportunities coming my way to speak (4-5 requests a month, I would say). Plus I have to deal with significant health problems with my family that as many who know me know, have been draining.

Lest you think I'm complaining, I'm actually not.

I love my life and I love being busy and I love getting "rock star" treatment on occasion when I go somewhere and people seem to think my opinions are important and I've recently been told that I'm a great person to give clients "a whack in the head" because of the way I do that. An interesting compliment. In a manner of speaking, I get paid to be the New Yorker I am.

My life is blessed with a wonderful family and great friends and a helluva business. AND I've written a book on CRM that is in 8 languages and through 3 editions. So I'm a very lucky person, indeed. But it can and it does get to be overwhelming to me (and everyone) sometimes.

Okay that's the scenario that led me to this realization around 10 days ago that it was time to slim it all down and minimalize things.

First Steps in the SlimDown

I began to work out and immediately dropped 4 pounds of water weight in about 3 days. Now its work, but its working.

But NOW we get to the crux of the matter

The Second Step on The Road To Blog Entry Coherence - On the Road

I decided to slim my travel down considerably too. My laptop and all associated crap was too unwieldy, bulky, tangled and heavy. And the laptop, a 3 year old Toshiba tablet was giving me grief. So I went out and bought a (I hate to say it) Sony VAIO VGN-SZ120, which is the retail version of the Sony VGN-SZ140 - a dual core laptop with a 13.3" screen, built in everything (DVD, bluetooth, wi-fil a/b/g) and with the extended battery 10 plus hours of battery life - all in a 4.0 lb package (God I hate Sony but those engineers can make great hardware - of course, as typical, they didn't bother to find out how the customers wanted the systems populated so they have an incredibly annoying amount of trial software packages and beyond the operating system, useless software on the system - with an occasional exception). With this system I didn't need any of the cards I carried and DVD drive was internal and it was fast and VERY light with a screen big enough for me to do my work on the road in a way that I wanted to. YAY!!! I then went out and bought and IPOD Nano (the 4gb variety) so I could slim down the IPod I was carrying. Why would I need a 60GB IPod when the Nano which carried 1000 songs was there? Who needs more than 1000 songs when they are traveling? So YAY again. I was slimming down, minimalizing and reorganizing things. So far so good. But SO expensive. But that didn't matter. Life had (and has) to change and since I was loath to give up the work I was doing - though priorities are being reordered on THAT too, I had to at least reduce the feeling of burdensome tangle and weight.

Heading to Even More Coherence - Great Customer Experience

I also decided it was time to throw out, give away or sell my 12 laptop bags on Ebay and buy one that made sense and was nice and slim and fit all that I would need to carry at the same time. I did considerable research and kept hearing about the travel laptop bags of Waterfield Designs so I decided that, despite being pricey, I would go with them. I decided to buy this particular combination (and a PSP pouch):
. Here's how it went:

1. I made a call and left my number because I had a bunch of questions on sizing and ordering the bag. There were an incredible number of laptop sleeve slzes and I needed a special delivering dispensation
2. Within five minutes I had a call back from Tanya, a Waterfield Designs representative who was incredibly friendly, incredibly patient and a totally knowledgeable person that made the conversation in which I asked about 20 questions completely enjoyable and informative. In the conversation, she helped me, with a series of detailed questions that she just knew (wasn't reading - or is a great actress) figure out which sleeve I needed for the laptop including things like "do you have an extended life battery?" I then needed to make sure because I had a meeting of the PACE (Performance Against Customer Expectations) Consortium meeting at RWD Technologies (check them out - awesome company) in Baltimore the next day, that I could get the "signature required for overnight delivery via Fedex" piece of the agreement waived. I did. There were several other "customization" questions that I answered so they could produce MY bag not just the Camel-Leather Mambo Combo (I take no responsibility for the name of what I bought).
3. In the course of our conversation Tanya told me something VERY interesting. Oddly we were talking about the kind of buckle that I wanted on the bag. I had a choice of what is called a paraglide buckle which is less likely to open easily than the other which is aluminum and is literally the same buckle as the seat belt - but then of course can catch on something and open easily - but looks kind of cool. Tanya told me that people love their bags so much that if after three years or so or whatever they want to replace the buckle (aluminum with a paraglide buckle) because they got sick of the buckle but love the bag, then they send in the bag and for $28 for the buckle and $15 labor they can do that. And THAT got me to thinking about personalization and mass customization in the way that Joe Pine and James Gilmore define it, because I've been queasy about the benefit of mass customization as most people use it in the day where co-creation of value that is meaningful is the mission critical individual benefit of business relationships between company and customer. Hold that thought while I finish this part.
4. I ordered the bag, paid the extra in shipping. In about 3 hours I had an email from Gary, founder of Waterfield Designs (a former bike messenger who analyzed his own travel experience and made a business of it) which was automated but in a mail-merged personalized kind of way) with my order information detailed including my specific delivery request, tracking number, specific items shipped and broken down by cost and a total.
5. The next day as I was walking out the door to my meeting, it showed up at the house at 8:15am, when our regular Fedex driver who is a dead ringer for Cheech Marin and a GREAT guy, dropped at the door for me

I love it and everything works and fits perfectly including just the flap covered sleeve with a piggyback bag for a day trip with the new laptop. Awesome. I would be dealing with these guys if you're willing to pay the price. All in all it cost me $378.00 but it seems that its worth it and the experience was wonderful. Go Gary! Go Tanya!!

Finally It Makes Sense - Mass Customization

Remember that thought I asked you to hold in list item #4 in the last section. The switching of buckles for the customer at an entirely reasonable price given the cost of the bag. Couple that with the customized service and the list of questions to improve my "personal bag" and it gets to my business point - albeit in a long winded kind of way.

I speak with Joe Pine II on occasion and he is a great guy (HUGE Yankees fan BTW. Like me in fact) and brilliant in his conception. Basically, he and Mr. Gilmore are the creators and the best evangelists of the idea of the Experience Economy which is, to me, one of the foundation books for 21st century capitalism. I agree with about 90% of it and given that they wrote that in 1998 and I never agree with anything but my own ego, that is an amazingly prescient book and a remarkably high percentage of any book to get me to agree to. In his and Gilmore's book "The Experience Economy" they often speak of mass customization. This concept pre-Pine always disturbed me because in my thinking we are past the age of mass customization which meant, as far as I could understand it, more, better modularized parts and services - according to the way that I thought about it. Shoshanna Zuboff points that out in her book "The Support Economy," that she thought that it followed old business standard logic that it meant producing more variety and providing it to the customer. She (a good woman too) and he (a great guy) disagreed on how to approach this new customer. Joe's thinking on mass customization is defined on page 72 of his book where he says it "means efficiently serving customers uniquely, combining the co-equal imperatives for both low cost and individual imperatives present in today's highly turbulent competitive environment." This means modularization of both goods and services. Shoshanna, on the other hand thinks that the entire logic of managerial capitalism has to be thrown over for one of distributed capitalism where the new enterprise are flexible federations of companies working to provide that individual value. So that mass customization in her eyes doesn't work. I have to admit, given my liberal inclinations, I still don't like the term. But I'll tell you what. Even though Joe and Shoshanna don't agree in their writings, they fundamentally are on the same track - though I think that Joe's name for it, the Experience Economy is much better than the Zuboffian "Support Economy."

Here's my thinking

Ultimately, 21st century capitalism is required to provide the means for both the co-creation of value between the customer and the company and what provides meaningful value to the company and the customer. You've seen my blog entry on the PC/Video game world. It isn't a matter of just providing product, but tools and expertise fromt the company so that 1. the customer can get the personalized experience of creating a new gaming experience that is meaningful to them in the result and during the process of creating a mod for a game. That is meaningful value and the company's responsibility is to design the support for that. The game company by providing the game engine, authoring tools or even source code, drive increased revenue because people will buy the game for the tools, not just the original game itself - often because of the "AWESOME" experience of the creation of the new mod for the game. In the case of Waterfield Designs, there is a visceral pleasure in the ability to make the bag that they provide what you want it to be and because it is an "analog" product - meaning not bits and bytes - it is something that has modular pieces that make it cost-efficient for the company to do it while providing me with a pleasurable kind of excitement about getting something that maps to my "slimming down" process. They modularize pieces and part of what they do is provide a level of service that is absolutely superb - meeting a need that I have. But that isn't the same thing as say, what makes the 17 year old mod designer who doesn't travel excited. He loves the ability to share what he developed with his buds and THAT amazing mod makes them excited to purchase the game to design their own mod. In other words, we are in a state of transition. SZ is right when she says we're learning as we're going but what is clear are two things - first that value now resides in the customer (The Support Economy) and profitability resides with the experience (The Experience Economy). And the road to the transition to the newer forms of business logic (The Support Economy) to the "theatrical" e.g. both literally that, and deeply emotional and meaningful in some way experience (The Experience Economy) lie through the alliance between the customer and the company in co-creating that value (The Future of Competition - C.K. Pralahad and Venkat Ramaswamy).

And thus the Great Synthesizer does it again!!! (CRM at the Speed of Light, 3rd Edition - Paul Greenberg)

All that from a conversation about a paraglide buckle.

BTW, no joke. The bag really does rock!!

"I Scratch My Head and Wonder..."

Ya know, there are times that I wonder what the actual strategies that companies in the CRM "space" such as it is are thinking about? I look at them and I scratch my head, given the pronouncements I read pretty much daily. Today my headscratcher is the "salesforce.com Unlimited" program.

So What Does It DO Again, Exactly?

As many of you reading this know, I've gone from a long ago salesforce.com skeptic to a strong salesforce.com "positive thinker" and a genuine admirer of their innovative thinking - thinking that has kept the customer marketplace fresh. In the third edition of CRM at the Speed of Light, a year before they announced it, I indicated that SFDC was going to try to move from CRM ASP to a platform provider. I KNEW what they were doing thanks to a candid refreshing talk to their brilliantly talented long time senior management dude, Tien Tzuo. (Yankees fan too). I also thought that despite the critics of AppExchange that it was a really bright and important idea that was designed to provide exactly the platform that they had planned for so long.Though I'm still not sure that they'll be the winner in the platform fight (I think that SAP or Rearden Commerce or a couple of others have a good shot too) AppExchange pretty well guaranteed them that they will be significant players in the realm in any case. I think that AppExchange follows a smart path opening the development platform to the (gasp!) developers from other companies who are then given an open marketplace - an SFDC Maxwell St Market (those of you from Chicago will know what I'm talkin' about). But adding some monthly service fees and calling this "Unlimited Edition" closer to the fulfillment of Business Web 2.0 seems to be making a lot more of this announcement than it should be. The reality is that there are 188 AppExchange programs/services developed by SFDC related companies and bully for them and for salesforce. But I wouldn't make this new "edition" much than a new edition with a higher price and more of some things - even the Enterprise Edition offers 10 AppExchange apps.

Does it get SFDC much in the end? That's why I'm scratching my head. It seems to be a REALLY BIG SFDC Enterprise Edition with MORE access to AppExchange. Good idea. Not a great one. Nor does it move them up the chain of platform dominance any more than they were already.

Prescriptive Post-script

Based on the above, I had a delightful discussion with John Taschek, the VP of Product Marketing at salesforce.com on the above. For those of you who don't know his prior life, he was the best columnist/writer the high tech world had and I miss the fact that he doesn't write any more but the lure of salesforce.com can do this and he is a true good person so I actually listened to what he said to me based on the thinking you read before you got the the subhead of this section. So here's some more, with his commentary rattling around in my cranium as I tried to understand this new release better

As far as all of this goes. I still think that AppExchange isn't the issue that I was trying to figure out. I figured out AppExchange awhile ago and I really like it and the idea of the "community" that it can breed. I found out that the unlimited edition is packaging (I appreciated John's candor here) and it seems to be a good package for the price. I still think that is not a realization of Business Web 2.0. John mentioned that it simplifies things for a lot of the customers so that they have unlimited access to the multiple apps and services sort of at will (though that is me saying that, not John) and I see that as good. So the Salesforce Unlimited Edition basically the Enterprise Edition Supersized with AppExchange built in and it has some real value as a package for a reasonable price for sure. Hard to complain about $195.00 per user.

The Platform Wars Continue: Luke & Darth or Obi Wan? Still Don't Know

I still don't think that the platform battle has been advanced any more in salesforce's favor than it was prior to the release of the Unlimited Edition as I said above. As far as SAP goes in this battle, for them to succeed as a true platform, they will need a cultural change and that will be tough but they have the muscle and money part down.. I think that salesforce.com is better culturally situated than SAP to be a platform but SAP has the $$$ and the muscle that salesforce doesn't. Standoff for now, even though SAP's problem with culture is dramatic and going to be tougher to solve than salesforce gaining its six pack abs. I think the sleeper here is going to be. Rearden Commerce, whose service oriented architecture-based platform has the completeness that no one else seems to have, What they don't have is the development community or sexiness or presence of salesforce, nor the dollars or mus-kels of SAP, but they are considerably more nimble than SAP and more complete than salesforce.com.

But then again, we can't ignore Microsoft, IBM or Google either now can we?

You've got SPAM

Once again, a great posting by Denis Pombriant who in my book is the leading analyst on the leading edge in CRM and the new innovations that the experience economy demands. This man has it pegged. And, BTW, I totally agree with what you're reading below this note. Just to clarify something, when Denis writes a post for this blog, not only don't I ever edit it at all but I also want him to get credit for it! I sometimes get notes or emails responding to "my" post which is actually his. All good notes, I might add. So I am putting this up and agreeing with it totally and he wrote it and that's that.

Read on, MacDuffs

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest this invasion of my space?

To bring you up to speed, AOL and Yahoo have announced a partnership with Goodmail Systems, a mass e-mailer, which will guarantee delivery of what we might now call SPAM through firewalls and SPAM filters and into your inbox. For a quarter of a penny per, these pillars of the Internet have agreed to drop their, ahh, prohibitions - or maybe the word is inhibitions, though I prefer to call it principles - to let commerce run amuck in an effort to reach the consumer.

Perhaps these guys just want to show that they really do care about ensuring the free flow of information across the Internet. You might recall the Chinese government strong arming some of these same companies last month over their search engines' alarming propensity to deliver the truth, warts and all, to Chinese users. In a country that does not believe in transparency, telling the truth is not a good idea and there are things like the Tiananmen Square massacre that are not fit for domestic consumption.

On the other hand consumption of material goods, many of which are made in China is so important in this country that even people who don't want to know about the latest product offers should be force-fed an e-mail stream.

What's particularly galling is that some experts have started calling this an "e-mail tax" as if those doing the mailing should be seen somehow as the victims of this whole charade. What about the customer, the person being bothered by this stream of unconsciousness? If you compare the four-for-a-penny charge for this service with the cost of direct mail (which I love to throw away unopened) you might get the idea that SPAMMERS do not care.

The double speak being generated by the perpetrators is mind-boggling. According to ABC News, a spokesperson for AOL, Lisa Gibby, "said the company will receive incremental payments from the premium service, but any profits will 'be put back into our effort to fight spam.'" I feel like the AFLAC duck. Come again?

In the same article, Richard Gingras, CEO of Goodmail Systems said, "certification will be used for 'transactions between businesses and existing customers, not for selling.'" I am sorry, I have tried really hard to come up with an example of an existing relationship that would need help getting an e-mail through a SPAM filter and the best I can come up with is the relationship between ex-spouses in a really nasty divorce. I can hear it now, Ding! You've got a subpoena!

Of course this is about selling.

Ok, so I am a CRM guy and you've probably read this far to see what the CRM angle is so here it comes: we are over using it. We increasingly use CRM as a blunt instrument to go after customers; we are making the same kinds of mistakes with CRM that previous generations in broadcast mode made without it. We are caught in the delusion that if we just try a little harder, become more efficient, and broadcast to more people that we will get the returns we want, but we won't.

We've reached a point of diminishing returns for broadcasting unsolicited offers. Customers are too individualized, they know this, and they expect to be treated accordingly. For the foreseeable future if you want better sales you'll need to start with better inputs to the sales process and that means more qualified prospects. That idea scares a lot of people because it implies asking a lot of open ended questions about lifestyle, preferences, and needs; moreover, the results are hard to quantify and even harder to calculate an immediate return on.

Too often we think of selling as a hierarchical activity like football. In football you huddle, call a play, and march down the field against the opposition to a goal. But marketing and selling is much more like basketball where you play a strategy game even when you don't have the ball. Players run the fast break, set picks and go up for rebounds without knowing if they will get the ball or get to score.
Scoring is relatively easy in basketball, that's why a basket is only worth two points. Basketball is like marketing-centric selling; it's all about the set up - getting the ball, getting to your end of the court, and getting the ball into the hands of an open player who can make a fifteen foot jump shot. In basketball, the team that plays the best fundamentals provides the best inputs into the scoring process and usually wins.

Will certified e-mail help companies sell more? I doubt it. The best use I can think of for certified e-mail would be for inviting potential customers to on-line forums to tell marketers exactly what they really think. That would provide us with the fundamentals we need to improve the selling process.

More Bewitched Than Ever

You, I hope, read my immediately previous "what's a blogger to do?" entry on which of the topics I had to decide on writing about. I posted that about 2 hours ago or so (I think) but here it is, not too much later, and I've already found two other things I'm going to write about instead, that weren't on the list. So much for trusting me. Oh well...

Really Nice Customer Story # Something

I think by now you've guessed that I love music. I'm a music freak to the point that i spent around $250.00 on a pair of earbuds called the Superfi 5 Pro by Ultimate Ears for my IPod that are just spectacular - nearly perfect. I use it for my IPod, my PSP, for anything else that will take a 1/8" or 1/4" plug that emits sound (no, not at that end of my body). I love the sound that they provide and the noise-canceling that my little buds do. Suffice it to say, the product is amazing (I said that already) But I have this horrible habit of losing my right eartip frequently - 3 times now - and always the right ear one - odd that. So I decided to order some extra sets of ear tips so I won't keep wondering why my right ear was hurting

Well, amazing as the product is, as it turns out, so is their customer service. Which made the experience with this very classy company very classy.

Brief Story:

I ordered two universal ear tip kits and a dual adapter so I can use these on a plane or wherever I want. I like them that much - though they are NO threat to my relationship with my wife or family or cats. I paid for it because shipping is Fedex 2 day and thus expensive but imagine my surprise when I only got one set and the adapter. I emailed them that night (last night) and this morning promptly at 8:something PST I got an email from a Jeanette Coffey who handles this shipping and a no questions asked apology and telling me that they are going to send the $10.00 set of ear tips priority overnight Fedex and I'll have them in the morning - meaning the shipping is far more expensive than the cost of the tips - all told probably a breakeven at best and a loss at worst. She then followed up with an email asking me what color (choice had been grey or black. I had grey. Not a mood thing - color of the IPod)? Then I got ANOTHER email with the Fedex tracking number and have a safe travels note with it. She was professional, attentive and amazing and I never spoke a single word to her. All email, problem solved with the class that Ultimateears provides with their products too. Now THAT's a customer experience and they have a new advocate, rather than an enemy. Remember my problem with Sony and the PSP software. That took months, they promised to credit my card with the cost (an unasked for benefit) but it still isn't credited 2 months later. Ultimate Ears. Sony. Ultimate Ears. Sony. Hmmmm. Not too tough a choice is it? Thank you Jeanette, You're a champ.

Mastercard Priceless is Timeless

I have to say that I think the Mastercard "priceless" campaign is one of the greatest campaigns in the history of advertising. Not only is it memorable and brilliant for its nostalgia but it can be equally as funny (remember the dog who got lost and took 3 ads to get home via a motorcycle among other things?) and it's possibility in providing emotionally rich events to feast on is endless. Contrast that to the incredibly lame VIsa is Life ads that are clearly VIsa's response to the "priceless" campaign. For those of you who watched the Olympics, how many wanted to shred their Visas after seeing that same set of ridiculous ads a googleplex (no relation) of times?

Well, as it turns out Mastercard is even smarter than I thought and has now understood that co-creation of value is the way of the new world economy or some such phrase I can conjure up like that. I was reading one of my favorite blogs/newsletter hybrids, Adrants (I've mentioned them before) and I see this article entitled "Mastercard Asks People To Write Its Priceless Ads": Here's the article lead paragraph:

Fully embracing the notion and value of consumer generated content, MasterCard, during the Oscars, will air two commercial which say basically nothing. The ads, Sailboat and Typewriter, will follow the customary format of listing prices for various items and closing with the final item labeled "priceless." However, the item lines in these ads will be left blank. The ads will close encouraging people to go to priceless.com, click on "Write a Priceless Ad Contest" and complete the commercial by filling in the blanks using their own words. A judging panel will select one overall winning entrant which MasterCard feels best completes either of the two commercials following judging criteria including creativity and originality, overall appeal and relevance to the Priceless theme. Following the selection of the winning language, the commercial will then be re-created complete with the winning consumers' Priceless verbiage and broadcast in the third quarter of 2006.

It goes on to say that Mastercard created a site that is called Priceless where people tell their stories and they post emotionally interesting bits of life along with things like their new commercial for the Mastercard debit card with MacGyver which is hilarious.

Of course, the important point is that Mastercard now is one of the cognoscenti companies that are buying into the creation of content by the customers.

And this is so good, just so good. Because when you have a traditional company that is providing a normally left-brained product that understands that value doesn't reside with those 16 digits interest payments but with the customer who can create it with you - then it seems like we are actually on to something here.

Though neither Visa nor Bode Miller are.

I'm Bewildered, Bothered, Bedraggled and Bewitched

I like the world "plethora." I think it represents the concept of "many" or "a lot" really well with a certain amount of premier wordsmithing built in. Thing is, I often have a plethora of topics to write about for this blog any given day and sometimes don't know what to do. Today is a good example. Here are the topics of the day - one of which I'll pick and write on between now and tomorrow morning, depending on time and circumstance (though not pomp and circumstance):

• Forresters 2006 10 Trends in CRM (surprisingly shortsighted)
• A study by the Verde Group from my favorite marketing site The Wise Marketer that reports that "Shoppers seek revenge for bad experiences."
• A section from the Bang & Olufsen newsletter on the customized design experience they try to create with their incredibly slick looking, well engineered A/V marvels
• A discussion on how I think that Ajax MAY be a threat to ondemand that is being underestimated - though I'm not done researching that one yet so don't hold me to that prognosis

See, I find all of them REALLY interesting and think all of them should be done and then think maybe I'll do some of them with the podcast next week and then I don't know what the friggin' hell to do.

So, know how I choose?

If I only have a little time, I take the one that's gonna be the shortest. If I have longer time to write then I take the one that's gonna be the most fun to write about. If its really long and involved like the Ajax one, I'll take 3-4 days to write it (after weeks of research) if need be.

That's my ridiculous criteria and I'm stickin' to it.

Watch the blog either later today or tomorrow for whatever I choose to write about - or another subject entirely.

You have any preferences on the what you want me to write on? Any of the above or something different? Drop me a comment before tonight ends (Eastern Standard Time U.S.) and lets see what rocks, if anything...