Global Brand Project: Become the Chief Celebrant of Your Community, Not its Celebrity

In recent posts I have been developing the manifesto for the Global Brand Project and found that my perspective resonates with many marketers working in both global and local roles.

I saw a presentation that really caught my attention this week. I want to share it with you –it endorses much of what I have been saying and more importantly adds qualitative value to the discussion, bringing something new to the table on which I had not focused sufficiently:  The humanizing power of social media on brands and how harnessing this channel is transform our brand landscape.

Let’s look first at Mainwaring’s view of what makes brands successful. He lists 6 keys:

• Defining purpose and core values
• Distilling the purpose and values into emotional terms
• Crafting a manifesto
• Writing a vision statement
• Committing to the brand purpose
• Align internally

Brand purpose is a subject I covered in a previous post [http://www.consumergoodsclub.com/cgc-richard-kohn-blog/234-marketing/722-unilevers-global-social-mission-]. When brands stand for something it is extremely powerful in defining their future, acting as a compass for all the brand’s activities.

Mainwaring finesses this adding that once the brand has purpose and something we care about, it can build a conversation within its community and make a contribution to the cause. Here’s an example http://greenxchange.force.com/vGXhome of how Nike is using its community influence to benefit the environment.

Social media so radically democratizes the communication process that brands that are not authentic, transparent or accountable are very quickly found out. Look at the backlash that BP had to deal with once it started advertising again about how it cares for the environment after the Gulf of Mexico spill last year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9n-X6zf8UY

What this boils down to is that social media is driving brands to become more human. In the dark old ages of the early 1990’s brands could control communications through three main channels (TV, radio & print). For today’s consumer it is almost inconceivable for them to buy anything without checking peer reviews, blogs, carrying out price comparisons and a multitude of alternatives.

Cut-through in this market means that we really must know like and trust a brand before we will ‘invest’ in it – just like the sort of decisions we make around those human beings with whom we want to interact.

There is a good reason why Dell ( http://www.Dell.com ) the consumer computing company continually receives excellent reviews from its consumers – it’s because it does not talk about itself all the time, but makes sure that it is the loudest cheerleader for its consumers who make up the Dell community.

Social media is transforming the consumer landscape in which brands operate, democratizing the buying process through the interactions of a dynamic focus group of 1.5 billion people active online on a daily basis. Harness this power for good and it will transform the fortunes of your brand, make an error – like trying to control what is being said on line about your brand – and the level of damage will be amplified across multiple platforms and millions of desktops.

The key takeaway from the presentation: The world is moving fast away from the brand of Me to the brand of We.

I think this is a truly important contribution to the Global Brand Project. If you have an hour or so, take a look at the whole of the presentation yourself (http://t.co/4A0rBIa ) there’s a lot more good stuff in there that’s worth the time. It would be really interesting to hear from people how this message resonates with them.

I look forward to your comments and input.

Think About CRM: How to Increase Your Sales By 100%

In my last post I asked whether the CRM industry is ready willing and able to service the many small and medium sized businesses who could be potential customer. This post looks at how businesses should use their own systems and analysis to target clients – because this is something that I think a lot of CRM solutions sellers are failing to do.

You probably know the saying ‘the cobblers children wear the worst shoes’. The same could be applied to any industry, and the CRM business is no different. What’s going on here? When you work day to day in a business, servicing clients, looking for new business or developing enhancements to our offerings we often forget about our own business and to apply the same standards to our business as we would to that of a client. Why? There’s lots of reasons. No-one gets any credit for selling and implementing an internal CRM system; we are the experts so of course it’s already in place; we think we are actually doing this.

Working like this on our own businesses never seems to be a priority. When in fact it should be priority number one. For a start, if I am selling any service what better advertisement do I have for my services than the fact that I used them to attract a new client? Here’s a simple example. As a marketing consultant I advise companies that an effective communication channel they can use is to have something published that presents them as subject matter experts – when other people read your views it increases your profile and reputation making it more likely you look to them for support than someone else from whom you have heard nothing. Do I ‘put my money where my mouth is’? Of course. You are reading this article.

Applying the same to the CRM industry poses an interesting question. If our CRM solutions are so good, should we not be able to ‘prove’ that by demonstrating that we used our own systems and solutions to target and convert our new clients?

I think this is a question that many companies should be asking themselves. If your company, a CRM solutions provider, is finding it challenging to maintain, develop and grow your business ask the question: Are we using our own services and solutions properly and effectively? I think that a lot of companies are not.

So this brings me to the headline – how can you increase your sales by 100%? It really is as simple as using the products and services you offer better and implementing them in the same way that you would advise any of your clients.

Surely, if the solution that you are offering is as good as you promote it as being and as beneficial as promised to your clients and prospects, there could be no better advertisement for your services. You have one great advantage over the organizations that you might target – you really understand how CRM works and what it can bring.

Too many of us get caught in the inertia of dealing with our day to day troubles to see that the easiest of solutions can be the most powerful. Use your service on your business, write up a detailed case study and then explain to the prospect you are sitting across the table to that it was by using your own solutions that you got to them and soon you will see how growing your sales by 100% needs you to do nothing more than truly and passionately live your brand.

What action steps will you take as a result of this article.

It would be great to hear from you with stories of how you used your own services to bring in business.

Think About CRM: Why Small Businesses Don’t Buy CRM Systems, and How to Get Them To

Why small businesses don’t buy CRM systems, and how to get them to.

If you listen to our politicians, the way that we are going to get out of our current tough financial environment will be by small, local businesses becoming more and more successful.

We hear a lot about the banks, high-tech and manufacturing enterprises but the truth is that the mom & pop businesses, the small enterprises that are truly the engines of growth. Once these businesses start to grow, they stimulate demand and from the grass roots our economies start to pull themselves out of the doldrums.

If they are so important to the economy, why do so few of them invest in CRM and what would having a CRM system deliver to them? Here are a few thoughts.

1. Small businesses do not understand CRM:  There has been such a focus on enterprise solutions in CRM that small businesses do not think that CRM is suitable or relevant to them. They simply do not understand the purpose of a CRM solution, the benefits that it can bring them or the value that it will deliver in their business.  This is an issue for the CRM industry which should be addressed by more emphasis in marketing campaigns on explaining what CRM means for the small business.  As an industry, we need to question if CRM suppliers done enough convince small business owners that CRM is a worthwhile investment for them? Has the CRM industry satisfactorily communicated the benefits that a CRM solution can deliver to small business?
2. Don’t believe it’s worth it/value it: Money is tight for small businesses. While a big business can wait a few years to get a return on their investments, small businesses generally do not have that luxury. As a result, CRM is not adequately valued by these potential customers. They have their client lists, they generate new business themselves, they keep their key customers happy – so why would they need the investment in a CRM solution. The industry needs to make sure that small businesses do believe that CRM provides a significant return on investment for their businesses. We need to be prepared to provide these potential customers with a reason to believe that the investment in CRM is worth it for them.
3. Done believe you about the results: Allied to not believing that CRM is worth the investment comes the next problem that they do not believe the results that are promised to them. Have we got enough testimonials to be able to show them that companies just like theirs have benefitted sufficiently from their investment to justify CRM in their business?
4. Don’t believe it will work for them: OK, so you have shown a potential customer with a small business that CRM has value to them and that other similar businesses created a return on investment on buying a CRM solution – the next problem is helping them understand that a system will also work for them. This is no longer a question of whether they believe that CRM offers benefits, more an issue that the business owner cannot see it being effective in her particular business: Why? The implementation will take too much time and effort, there will not be full compliance – we have all heard these objections before, but has the industry done enough to make CRM implementation manageable for the small business? What more could be done for them?
5. Don’t believe they can afford it: Of course, any good CRM professional would say that a potential client cannot afford to be without it. Nonetheless, many small businesses will claim that purchasing a CRM solution, or committing to a service is beyond their means. As I said above, money is tight. Are the pricing models we have in the industry sufficiently flexible to attract small business owners? Does it look like any CRM supplier takes an element of risk in their models to compel business owners to part with their cash. In most cases, the business can afford the solution, they just do not have it at the top of their priorities. It’s our job to get it there.
6. Don’t want it now: You’ve spent hours with the prospect, they like the solution, they love what it can deliver and believe that it will be good for their business and it fits within a budget… just not now because we are dealing with another initiative. Creating urgency is an essential part of any sale, but how do we achieve this with CRM? Last minute offers are not likely to inspire confidence, they already believe that the solution could help them. The response might be “if not now, when?” Creating urgency of the need is an essential part of the sale which is even more important to utilize in the small business scenario. Why? Because these businesses always have something more urgent to do, spend their money on or fire to fight. The industry needs to tap better into the needs of these groups to find out why CRM might become an urgent need.

I have no doubt that there are some great success stories from the industry in working with small to medium sized businesses. It would be great if you can share these within this community.

Think About CRM – What’s Changed in 10 Years?

This article was first published at http://www.thinkaboutcrm.com where I am a regular blogger.

Has CRM really developed in the last 10 years?

Almost ten years ago, I designed and then implemented a new sales and marketing management tool within the company I was then working. For those of you interested in the technical details, this tool worked within Lotus Notes (the company’s communication platform at the time), accommodated 6 languages including Cyrillic and Latin scripts and was fully integrated into the legacy accounting systems of the company.

An additional module was developed to link the tool to our planning department so that when sales calls were made, our teams would know about available manufacturing capacity. Finally I developed an additional interactive sales tool linking to the system that provided our sales force with 6 variables they could manipulate (e.g. cycle time, manufacture date, quantity, price) on any sales call to get the sale.

It was, in my humble opinion, a thing of beauty. We could look, real-time (or at least on-line because this was in the days before ADSL/broadband) at sales vs. targets for all our clients and numerous other KPIs and management metrics that we defined as we developed the tool.

Anyone with a modicum of experience in CRM will know what’s coming next. We implemented the tool trained everyone and started using the system. Within 12 months use was limited to planning, marketing and finance. 12 months later, we abandoned the solution altogether as the company changed the enterprise platform to Windows and our Lotus Notes programs could not be redesigned to fit.

While thinking about this recently, I wondered if anything has really changed in the world of CRM since then. I questioned if the mistakes we made in developing our CRM tool still prevent effective adoption when we are all much more programmed to use web and online applications as a matter of course.

What were those mistakes? Here’s why I think our system failed:

1. Sales did not get involved in system design. Implementing our CRM system was driven by the marketing team. Our objectives were not the same as sales, yet we expected them to get involved and spend time inputting data and entries into the system. While we had mapped out the sales process, we totally underestimated that recording data in a prescribed manner would totally change the way that sales worked.
2. Legacy data that was input to the system was insufficient. While we tried to import and integrate as much legacy data possible into the system from the start, it was not as clean as it should have been which created frustration with users. One or two stray pieces of data in the wrong hands resulted in the CRM tool getting a bad press from day one.
3. The CEO and CFO were not seen to be using the system. Senior management buy-in to any major change program is essential. Without leadership from the top no one else will follow. We had hoped that once the CEO saw the benefits of the management accounting that the system offered, he would lead from the front. This might have worked had the CFO used the new management accounts available within the system instead of presenting reports generated by the finance team ‘based on’ the CRM data.
4. We did not have a great enough emphasis on inbound sales. Our sales team failed to see the value from the system because it did not do enough to help them by providing inbound sales leads and opportunities. The sales team did not perceive the system as helping them to drive revenue. Instead, they saw it as a management tool that intruded in the relationships that they had developed with their customers.

I have no doubt that there are many more reasons why CRM implementations fail.

What are the lessons learned here?

• Alignment in developing any CRM system is key. Even though we had process mapped the whole of our business in developing the CRM system, process mapping and reality are often very different things. We should have aligned more closely with the objectives of other departments and functions we wanted to engage in the system.
• In any situation of change remember WIIFM. We failed to gain the trust of all the potential users of the system by demonstrating to them what was in it for them. No-one will change their behavior until they really believe in the benefits for themselves and trust that the change has not been implemented to monitor them. With finance and sales as partners who needed to buy into the project not supporting the change, we were bound to fail.
• Ease of use, not functionality will drive use. This is a development of the above point. If in developing the tool I can find a way to reduce the workload on people it is more likely they will use it. I still believe that the functionality we developed in our system was top notch – but it did not necessarily make reporting easier for the users.
• In business revenue is everything. Any CRM system has to be seen very clearly to drive revenue. Users did not immediately see that our system would deliver revenue. As a result they could not see the benefit in compliance and adoption. Explaining how the system will deliver value and revenue should be the number one priority.

I have posted regularly about how CRM can drive customer loyalty. That is a very honorable objective, but purely theory if I cannot get my own team to use the system. Have you got a solution for this that you want to share?

Regards,

Richard Kohn

The Marchitect

http://www.themarchitect.com

Global Brand Project – What Local Marketers Want

This post was first published on http://www.consumergoodsclub.com where I am a pro blogger for my passion, the Global Brand Project

What Local Businesses Want from Global Marketing

My last post depicted the inherent conflict between global and local marketers. It asked the question what benefits do local marketers see from having a global marketing team in their business. This post suggests the key business areas where local marketers want support from global resources.

The language choice is deliberate. Notwithstanding the natural friction between local and global teams, I believe there are areas where most local teams would welcome and invite support from global marketing.

The want help with:

• Strategy
• Insights
• Innovation
• Best practices

Global marketers who understand how to deliver on these needs, create high-energy co-operation with marketers working together to build global power brands. For every brand driven by a visionary leader who has identified and successfully communicated a universal truth behind which the whole business has rallied, there are 20 other brand leaders facing resistance from local managers to that global vision. Addressing local markets needs breaks down this resistance.

Local management teams often complain that global marketers do not listen to their needs. The result: they fail to engage each other on areas of common ground – choosing instead to look for issues and challenges between them.

When global teams focus on these four areas, they create a valuable ‘reason to be’ with the local markets.

Strategy: The global team is privileged. They have oversight of the whole business so can compare, contrast and benchmark the performance of one market against the other, see the movement in category trends or predict future market developments in emerging markets. Setting and aligning the strategy should be a priority task of the global team. It lets the global team demonstrate they understand the business reality faced by their colleagues and engage them in discussion.

Insights: Power brands are driven by a universal truth or insight. Identifying, refining and then exploiting insights is hard strategic work. Few local marketers have time for this. They are focused on day to day execution of their marketing plan. Local markets expect the global team to be able to step into the consumer’s shoes and see what really motivates her. Local markets need global to divine these previously unknown, overlooked or under-appreciated attitudes & behaviors which can then be exploited. A great example of this is the way that Special K connects with consumers’ wishes for a convenient way to manage their weight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPJpkgqLQ_M

Innovation: New product development drives brand growth. Local markets want new news to share with consumers and customers. They rarely have the resources to develop breakthrough innovation and rely on the global team to deliver relevant, competitive products that support the brand positioning or deliver on a newly identified insight. P&G has created a $1bn business behind the product developments in its Swiffer business. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCiJzpMtqZM In many companies innovation comes in the form of new products. Communication innovation is overlooked. Local markets need both from the global team.

Sharing best practices: Knowledge sharing can be a big win for the global team. The global team is are better connected and networked than local marketers and should be able to identify which processes, initiatives actions or training that have worked well on one market could successfully migrate to another.

To each item on this list I would add metrics. Business is managed by metrics. A global team that fails to demonstrate they understand this loses credibility. A recent survey Marketing Week reported many CEOs do not think their CMO understands the commercial challenges of the business – instead concerning themselves with metrics like brand awareness and customer satisfaction. Global teams that support their proposals and initiatives with meaningful commercially relevant metrics will be seen to deliver on local market needs more effectively than those that do not.

Are you in a local marketing team?

What else do you need from the global marketing team to be able to do your job more effectively?

Is there something more important that you want from the global team that is missing here?

I look forward to your comments and input.

Regards,

Richard Kohn

The Global Brand Project

Written exclusively for http://www.consumergoodsclub.com