What else is there to say. As consultants, we now have
the answer to finding social CRM opportunities — especially in the middle
market. I’m glad I could help.
I’m used to taking great ideas and reverse engineering them. In this case, the
ideas only seem to apply to the enterprise level businesses because I’ve never
heard a peep from any of my customers about a pressing need for Social CRM. I’m
still working on developing a more robust relationship marketing effort in most
cases.
So, with the answer 42, we now have the ability to reverse engineer what all the
big enterprises seem to have found — social business nirvana. Hmm, where do we
start? When I had a thing for financial engineering, it was easy. It could look
at just about any output and figure out the inputs and how they were calculated.
But 42? Hmmm….42.
Where do you think I should start?
All jesting aside, I think it’s important that we start at the beginning. And
Social CRM is really the end, or the periphery, to some sort of plan or
initiative. I’ve been listening to a lot of consultants that have so much more
experience than me that I’m almost hesitated getting involved in this
conversation earlier this year. But, heck, I’ve got nothing to lose! 🙂
Can smaller businesses (and I do deal with them) or middle market manufacturing
companies really benefit from this social CRM stuff? They’ve never really openly
embraced the customer-centricity issue and still have silos all over the place.
So what can we expect from them? And how do we start this conversation
if we’ve never been able to start the more basic one — who is your customer?
The answer is 42, but we still don’t really know the question.
