Making the Most of What You Need – Biz Needs on WeCanDo.BIZ

Grabbing as much business as we can is probably the prime driver for pretty much every business person out there…our Biz Needs and Twitter Sales Leads tool helps you do just that.

Social CRM Article for the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management Magazine

Effective online networking requires you to do more than simply
collect contacts.  In this article in the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management’s Winning Edge magazine, I give my views on its true potential.

Visit the ISMM’s website here.

We welcome your comments on the article below.

Social CRM – more views and thoughts and a little controversy maybe

A Few Weeks of Silence and Then….

Over the last few blogless weeks I have been doing a huge amount of reading the thoughts and musings of others on the hoary subject of Social CRM. There is a lot of good stuff out there, a lot of what I would suggest is fairly mindless repetition and an awful lot of product placement of the ‘New Improved SocialWidget 2.0′ with its strap line of ‘Social because we put erm ‘Social’ in the name’.

Corporate Attitudes to Social Media

This morning I happened on a great set of survey results from Mack Collier who shows that whilst a lot of companies recognise that there are huge benefits to be had by using social media for marketing that they are pretty unsure how to go about it.

Social CRM and Automated Relationship Building

I have just been reading @scorpfromhell’s blog ‘Is Social CRM about automated relationship building?’ with great interest.

The whole article reflects the authors horror that marketing departments are looking at ways of mining the social web to find better ways of targetting push marketing. Sending coupons to people who say they don’t like stuff and thanking people who say they do for example.

Corporate Resistance to Social CRM

So, imagine you are a sales manager. You walk into your office and you find all of your team ‘messing about’ with social networking sites. What would your reaction be? I have managed sales teams and managed sales managers and I guess that my historic reaction would have been pretty much unprintable.

I know why too. Social networking has very much been seen as, well, social. Not very business-like. A bit matey.

The world is changing and changing rapidly but are opinions at the coal-face of the business world also changing?

Social CRM – what on earth is it?

Social CRM is a term that has been bandied about for some time. Do a search on the web and you will find all of the big players talking about it. Oracle, SAP, Sage etc all seem to have some sort of offering or some sort of message.

The question I would ask is, are the people who traditionally market CRM solutions the best ones to talk to us about Social CRM? Having worked during my career for large global software vendors I know all too well how easy it is for them to pluck a new cool term from the market and then to redefine an existing product set as one which neatly fits the ‘new’ paradigm. And I wonder if such is the case with Social CRM.