Contemporary Irritations: Changing History

As you know, I've always been adamantly opposed to negative campaigning. I don't mind honestly critical thinking - in fact I welcome that - and I don't mind a battle on the merits of something. But I really don't like it when one company trashes something.

It gets particularly painful when companies I like do it.

When companies I don't like do it, I'm pretty much on it. You hear about it.

When companies I truly like and sometimes even admire do it, I'm honestly not as enthused but I still have to be a straight shooter and do it anyway.

This is the tale of a company that I like.

A Tale of Infusionsoft

Last week, I heard from Infusionsoft via press releases and links that they were changing their name from InfusionSoft CRM to Infusionsoft (the full press release on their name changes is here) and that they would no longer be involved in CRM but now in "e-marketing." Their reasons are discussed on their website:

"Looking for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for your business? Before you go down that path, there's something you should know about CRM. For years CRM software companies have made big promises. And for years, they've missed the mark. Outrageous claims of all-in-one business solutions turned out to be…well, outrageous. CRM software has been a big disappointment... especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Why, you ask?

• CRM software is old technology invented decades ago
• CRM was originally created for very large businesses, not entrepreneurs
• CRM solutions for "small business" aren't much more than contact managers & static data repositories
• CRM has an extremely (and embarrassingly) high failure rate

Basically, CRM software has failed to live up to the Customer Relationship Management philosophy and what it was supposed to be. And unfortunately, small business owners have thrown countless dollars away on "miracle" CRM solutions that amounted to little more than frustration & additional headaches!

Today's small business needs something that goes WAY beyond CRM software. If you want to grow your business instead of just managing it, then you need eMarketing software."

Now they are an "emarketing" company and that is supposed to be completely different and far more successful than CRM.

First, before I get into it.

I have no problem with being critical of CRM. I don't even like the term and think that it needs to be changed or evolved or eliminated for something else. We are in an era where customer engagement is the order of the day and managing customer relationships is no longer viable nor desired. The name reflects a period that had different customer expectations and different perceptions by practitioners and vendors.

But what's going on here is disappointing for more than one reason.

First, for purely selfish reasons, Infusionsoft is reducing CRM to a software solution - despite the software industry claims to know better. Anyone in the field including the good folks at Infusionsoft, know that when we're dealing with CRM, we're dealing with a strategy for customers, not just an application or on demand service. The reasons for its failure were not uniformly ponderous software but more often than not failed thinking about the strategy and the programs prior to the implementation of the software. In fact, if you look at the reasons that were given when CRM did fail, the big ones were failure to adopt (which is a software issue) and a failure to define the elements/metrics/indicators for success (not a software issue). So this description is pretty self serving.

Second, as my good buddy Brent Leary has pointed out in many columns, we're at a point (despite Infusionsoft's claims) that there are numerous options for small business to choose from ranging from Infusionsoft (emarketing notwithstanding) to CRM Guaranteed to Zoho to salesforce.com etc.

Third, and most ridiculous is that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Meaning all Infusionsoft did here, unless they can prove otherwise, is rebrand themselves - which is great and fine. But they felt that in order to rebrand (and distinguish) themselves, they had to start reviling something they had actually been no more than 2 weeks ago without any fundamental changes to anything but their message and website. They were (and still are) a CRM application - a very good one for small businesses I might add - and just because they call themselves something else doesn't make them something else. Maybe I should change my book title to "EMarketing at the Speed of Light...."

I just find this sad -- and silly. I truly like this company, think that Clate Mask is both a smart guy and a great guy. But this effort that they are making to distance themselves from CRM without any changes but to their message and the generic trashing of CRM that's used to trash CRM non-specifically is just...well, sad, sad, sad. Because they didn't need it just to rebrand.

If they had simply said that they were going to rebrand as emarketing and explained it around changes they made to their applications functionality - and how they had been misaligned as CRM when they were actually more of a company providing emarketing (which in all fairness is more of the weight of their applications than any other components) then, okay. No problem.

But, in effect, to rebrand and then blame it on the failure of CRM and then not change their applications to reflect what they're doing? That smacks of desperation to differentiate. If they are actually changing their applications and just not telling us, then their timing is bad. They shouldn't announce their bye byes to CRM until they've eliminated their salesforce automation components and their ecommerce components so they can truly eat their own yummy emarketing dog food.

And don't bother with the CRM sucks argument. Stay positive. Just be straight as to why you decided to rebrand. How can you be one thing one day and then trash it totally the next and not make any other changes than verbiage? If you're making other changes that gives me (and everybody else) a sense of why you truly had to trash CRM to make the changes, please announce them so I can say, okay, that works for me (and everyone else). I have no vested interest in CRM nor do I have one in emarketing. But because I like you guys, I'd like to see you not do things like this which seem somewhat petty.

Damn, I'm disappointed.

Technorati : CRM, Emarketing, InfusionSoft, Zoho

Comments

[Charlie]

I am an Infusionsoft customer and can honestly say that whether they're called Infusionsoft CRM or plain Infusionsoft, they still suck. It's a terrible system and I can't wait until we can move away from them.

[Clate Mask]

Paul,

Thanks for taking an interest in what we’re doing, even if you don’t like the approach. I’ve always appreciated your honest and candid view of things. And I have to admit, in reading the web page you referenced and our press release, it does come on a little strong against CRM and CRM software in general. That wasn’t necessarily our intention. Let me explain.

We totally agree with you that CRM is a strategy, not a technology. If we were a little loose in our verbiage to that effect, shame on us. Sometimes we all get a little sloppy with shorthanding CRM for CRM software, which as I said, shame on us.

We also strongly agree that CRM software implementations usually fail for reasons other than the software (undefined strategy, ill-conceived goals and metrics, un-documented processes, etc.).

Our intention wasn’t to blame CRM software. Our focus is on the small business. Here’s where we’re coming from.

We think traditional CRM software misses the mark for the small businesses we’re out to serve (most of our customers have 2 – 25 employees.) And so this is what makes us tick—the needs of the small business.

CRM software is fine for bigger businesses with big budgets, big staffs and big chunks of time on their hands to make it work. But small businesses need something different than CRM software. They need automation of their marketing and sales processes. They need the software to do the work of many bodies. They need software that makes it possible to automatically build relationships with prospects, customers and partners. They need software that helps them market more effectively, sell more efficiently and serve customers more proactively. They need software that helps them GROW their businesses quickly and profitably. They need "CRM 2.0 software," "Sales 2.0 software," whatever people want to call it.

We've struggled for years with what to call our small business growth software because we know its highly automated nature and strong marketing focus make it different than traditional CRM software. We aren’t changing anything in the software, but we are saying it’s time to more clearly differentiate. So, we're calling it eMarketing software--and it's meant for small businesses that want to automatically convert more leads, get repeat sales from customers and grow their businesses without growing their staffs. It's no different than what we've been doing all along... but we needed to break free from the confusion that was created by the CRM moniker and stand out as the definitive marketing automation software for small businesses--the space that we've always tried to serve, no matter what it's called.

The bottom line is that for the past several years, we've tried to provide what small businesses need under the name of CRM software, only to find that many of them don't resonate with the CRM software term. They want marketing. They want automation. They want to grow their small business. And that's what our eMarketing software gives them in a powerful marketing automation solution that is also broader than most CRM software programs (as you know, our application includes e-commerce, e-mail marketing, affiliate management, order management, etc.).

Honestly, I don’t care what it’s called. I just want to serve small businesses and help them grow through an elegant marriage of automated marketing and sales. Interestingly, I believe that if the marketing automation segment of the CRM software industry had developed well over the last few years in the large and mid markets (SFA- and Support-oriented CRM software programs have flourished, but the Marketing Automation sector of CRM software has been very weak) we could have comfortably stayed in the CRM software world. But with the dearth of Marketing Automation CRM software companies serving big and mid-sized companies (Unica and Eloqua are probably the only strong representatives and Eloqua doesn't even call itself CRM software), it just made it too tough for our marketing-oriented small business solution to really stand on its own in the CRM space.

BTW, I had a fascinating conversation with our friend, Dennis Pombriant about WHY the marketing automation segment of CRM software has been slow to evolve… but that’s a conversation for another day.

Bottom line, I salute you, Paul, for the great work you do in the world of CRM. And I hope our intent to serve the space of “eMarketing software for small businesses” doesn’t keep us from staying in touch. In the end, I believe our eMarketing software is right at the heart of furthering CRM strategy for small businesses. I just came to the conclusion we had to “name it and frame it” so we could stand out from the crowd and be recognized for what we really do.

[Gregory Yankelovich]

I have been leading CRM implementations for over 12 years, but I have never heard about Infusionsoft by this or any other name. However I do hear phony differentiation claims shouted by software companies all the time, and this one is not surprising. The louder they shout the more we tune out their noise.

I mostly agree with your analysis of reasons for CRM failures - "reasons that were given when CRM did fail, the big ones were failure to adopt (which is a software issue)" - but this one is only partially correct in my opinion. Too many initiatives were not adopted because they did not factor in any add-on value for the employees, i.e. were conceived as management control tools which also fall into strategy failure rather than software failure.