By Chris Bucholtz One of the things social media allows us to see clearly and instantly is that some people don’t get social media. I see this every day in the CRM Outsiders Twitter feed (we’re @CRMOutsiders, by the way). Many of the people following us and being followed by us pre-date my arrival, including … Continue reading »
Confusion in the Cloud – and a Small Thing You can do to Fight It
By Chris Bucholtz Let’s face it – most people have but a passing notion about the cloud. That’s thanks to marketing people, mostly, and their nearly pathological need to take today’s hot buzzword and attach it to whatever it is they’re selling. This is not exclusive to technology; five years ago, the real-world analog was … Continue reading »
The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study
By Chris Bucholtz Yesterday, Nucleus Research issued a paper (read it for yourself here) that made a fairly encouraging claim: for every dollar spent on CRM, companies were seeing a return of $5.60 in benefits. That’s a very interesting number, although it’s a number in an area of research that can be very hard to … Continue reading »
Switching Gears: Transforming Transmission Repair by Building Processes Around the Customer Experience
By Chris Bucholtz The auto repair industry can’t boast a history of great customer relationships. Part of it is customer-based – no one’s really in a great mood when their car breaks, and it’s hard to deliver a great customer experience when the customer’s in the midst of a bad experience. But a lot of … Continue reading »
The data helps the relationship, but the relationship drives the sale
By Chris Bucholtz A few years ago, I did a webinar with some respected thought leaders in the area of sales about the impact data was having on selling. No one was willing to use the term “data-driven selling” – that was too much for sales people’s sensibilities. But the guests were willing and able … Continue reading »
What Sugar 6.3 teaches us about customer co-creation
By Chris Bucholtz Social media and social CRM are the kinds of things that offer multiple points of value. People who have their throwback CRM hats screwed on too tightly tend to see the formula as data+SCRM=sales dollars as the only metric, which isn’t exactly right. There are other benefits to engaging in SCRM – … Continue reading »
Klout: the Popularity Contest that Misrepresents Itself as a Metric
By Chris Bucholtz Over the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing a bunch of stuff about Klout come across my desk. For those of you who are unaware of what Klout is, you can visit the website try to figure it out on your own, or you can go with this brief synopsis: It’s a … Continue reading »
Expert Voices: Kathy Herrmann on Determining SCRM ROI
By Chris Bucholtz Back when people were pooh-poohing social media and social CRM on the grounds that it was too difficult to determine return on investment (ROI), Kathy Herrmann was one of the few coherent voices in the crowd shouting back, “Yes! Yes, you can!” SCRM ROI has become slightly less mysterious and slightly better … Continue reading »
Can you sell with social? Only after building a solid relationship
By Chris Bucholtz As I keep saying, there are as many ways to use social media for your business as there are businesses. The best way to use it, of course, will be based on the behavior of your business and on the behavior of your customers. It will not be based so much on … Continue reading »
Are your people the weak links in the CRM chain?
By Chris Bucholtz I never get tired of talking about CRM as a discipline, not a technology. Yes, yes, yes – the technology allows you to scale the discipline, but ultimately, the ideas, initiatives and actions that result from CRM and reach customers are not executed by technology – they’re executed by people. (Clint Oram, … Continue reading »
