Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) for Medium

and Small Enterprises
 Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) for Medium
and Small Enterprises
How to Find the Right Solution for Effectively
Connecting with Your Customers

Antonio Specchia
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2022 Antonio Specchia
The right of Antonio Specchia to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 9780367708894 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367708863 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003148388 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388
Typeset in Garamond
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
This book is dedicated to everyone who does not stop learning.
Contents

Foreword
Why Entrepreneurs and Managers Should Read This Book
Acknowledgments
About the Author

1 Understanding CRM
Introduction to the Book
About CRM (tool)
What Makes CRM (tool) Useful
Why So Many People Are Not Fully Aware of What CRM Is
Introducing the Concept of CRM
“Reason Why” of CRM
From Policies to People
Why CRM Tools Are Not All the Same
Our Idea of CRM
How CRM Became Popular: A Bit of Storytelling
A Salesforce Advertising Message in Its Early Stage
A Disruptive Approach
Well Beyond Numbers
The Leader Is Here to Stay
More Market, More Options, More Opportunities
An Innovation That Matters for Every Business
 The Tool for Relationship Management
CRM Big Bang, or Not
Summary

2 The Value for the Organisation

Digital Transformation for Whom
CRM Is a Journey, Not an Event
CRM Project Success
Process Data-Driven Architecture
Multichannel Interaction
Value Creation
Performance Assessment
Summary

3 Sales Process Management

Sales Process Design
Sales Process Stages
Lead-In
Contacting
Discovering Opportunities
Qualification
Qualification Methods
BANT explained
MEDDIC/MEDDICC
Qualification Purpose and Outcome
Developing Solutions
Product
Service
Negotiation
 Learning Opportunity
Purpose and Outcome
Summary

4 Leads Generation
Leads, Prospects and Opportunities: Marketing
What Engages People
What Is Leads Generation?
How an LG Funnel Works
Sell Now
Help Now
The Buyer Persona
Prospect and Opportunities
From Leads Generation to CRM
Leads Generation
Sales Process
Leads Generation
Sales Process
Audiences Nurturing
Summary

5 Helping People (Customer Service)

People Search for Solutions
Communicating Value Through Valuable Service
Customer Experience
Business and Technology Strategies Must Become
Indistinguishable
Enabling the User-First, Omnichannel Experience
Sync the Tech, Data and Human Agenda
 Customers’ Service IT Tools
The Customer Service Vision 2020
The Past Year Brought Swift and Unprecedented Change
The Changing Definition of Good Service
Help Your Team Meet Customers’ Expectations
Let Customers Say It Once, and Once Only
Connected Conversations Lead to More Insight
Summary
Case Study
Giardini, an Italian Case of Success

6 Data Architecture
Information and Data
Data Methodisation
Why Data Should Have a Structure
Data Optimisation
The Kernel of Data Architecture
Collecting Data in Real Life
Effects and Risks
Summary

7 Reporting and Forecasting

Process Reporting
Reporting and Forecasting into B to B, Complex Sales
Processes
Sales process KPIs
People KPIs
Financials KPIs
Pipeline Analysis
 Opportunities Analysis
Activities Analysis
People Analysis
Financials Analysis
About Metrics
Quantitative versus Qualitative Information Reporting
The Survivor Bias
Sales Team Surviving Strategies
About Today’s Reporting
Forecasting on Sales Process
What Is Expected to Be Foreseen
Reporting and Forecasting Tools Choice
Some Possible Tools
Tableau
Power BI
SAS
Qlik
Sisense
Jupyter
Summary

8 Implementing a CRM tool

Starting a CRM Implementation Project
Define a Project Deployment
Defining What, How and to What Extent
Big Bang or Lean
Implementing a CRM Solution
Pre-Setting
 The Lighthouse
Planning the Project Deployment
Data Architecture
Dirty Data
Process Workflows
CRM Outputs
Decision-Making
Reasons Why CRM Implementation Projects Fail
Mission Setting
Design and Planning
Leadership Commitment
Compensation and Rewards
Business Units CRM
Salespeople Engagement
Execution Failures
Key Points
Conclusion
Summary

9 How to Select a CRM Platform

Introduction to the Selection Process
Selecting the Technology
Decision-Making about CRM Platforms
CRM Vendors and Platforms
Microsoft
Oracle
Salesforce
Zendesk
 SugarCRM
Zendesk Sell
Pipedrive CRM
HubSpot
CRM Platforms Summary
Low-Code Platforms
Appian
Oracle (Visual Builder)
FileMaker
Visual Lansa
Bubble
Ninox
Low-Code Platform Summary
Conclusion of the Chapter and the Book

Index
Foreword

It is refreshing in these times of “digital everything” to read a book that

highlights the art and the profession of selling, through discussing CRM.
We are, at least here in California, submerged by new products without a
market and some of us don’t go to pitching events anymore. VCs and angel
investors are sick and tired of having to explain, to solitary inventors, that
their opinions about their own products are useless without the evidence of
a real market acceptability. Entrepreneurs, who count on their own personal
likeability to raise capital, are in for a rude shock: they will be told that
what really counts is not what one wishes to sell, but what people wish to
purchase i.e. there is only one BOSS, the Market!
There is a legend that says Henry Ford disparaged the “customers”. As
he, apparently, had said that if he had asked the customers the answer would
have been they wanted “faster horses”! He certainly had not asked the
customers a thing because by age 46 he had gone bankrupt twice and it was
only upon the establishing, under duress, of a proper advisory board and
management team that the Ford Motor Company “invented” the modern car
dealership concept, established 470 dealerships within the US and Canada,
and started to sell automobiles like never before in history.
If producing cars is an art, selling them is also an art, together with
financial management and controls; these three fields have to be executed
equally well by passionate and competent practitioners who take pride in
their specific professions. Marketing and sales are, however, more than a
profession; they are the very essence of business.

Products can be made for personal consumption, they can be someone’s hobby or be invented
and manufactured for personal enjoyment.
Financial management without a transaction to account for would be non-existent.
But marketing and sales are the very essence of business, as expressed brilliantly by Peter
Drucker: “The aim of business is to create and retain a customer”.
The aim of any business, I teach, is not to make money! Making money is
the outcome, the ultimate goal is to produce a product or service that adds
value to the lives of others.
How to make people aware of your “solution” to their problem? How to
find, reach, screen, inform, educate and interest possible users? What are
the tools that strategic business developers use to research and identify
potential clients? How to develop and maintain client relationships? How
does one monitor project teams to ensure contracts are executed as agreed?
These are only some of the tasks of CRM that this book addresses. What
really interests me is yet another aspect of the role of the “person who takes
the product out of the company”. I call these people the “marketers” and
their best attribute, to me, is not that they sell the company’s products as
created. To me the real talent is that they “listen” to the feedback, the
criticism, the real needs of the customers and have the chutzpah, the
courage, to inform their “product people” about the real needs that the
products DON’T fulfil. Since to be truly profitable the company has to offer
a product/service that truly meets people’ needs and satisfies what people
want, the company’s financial success cannot be reached without knowing,
profoundly, its customers.
And this is the fundamental idea that makes me endorse, wholeheartedly,
this book. If knowing yourself, according to Aristotle, is the beginning of
wisdom, then knowing your customers, according to the author, is the very
essence of business.

Ernesto Sirolli
Enterprise Facilitation founder, Sacramento CA
Why Entrepreneurs and Managers
Should Read This Book

We believe that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a marketing

challenge, not an IT matter. For this reason we want to offer an easy to
digest book avoiding the excessive complexity of a fully comprehensive
and too technical book—this book provides direct guidelines to those who
need useful information on how to design and implement a CRM
effectively, not in the operational way which is different by each tool, but in
its logical structure: a logic that goes far and beyond the name of the
vendor.
CRM is a growing topic among small and medium-sized enterprises as
well as solopreneurs, and it is now clear that CRM is also a tool that
businesses should have in place to manage sales processes. Teams of
salespeople must have a system to run their daily activities, and small
businesses and solopreneurs must have a way to track their marketing and
sales effort, a functioning structure for maintaining their contacts with
prospects and clients aimed to improve the effectiveness of their sales
effort. CRM tools, once only available to large corporations, are now part of
the powerful technology accessible also to small and medium businesses.
Small and medium businesses are now able to implement CRM solutions
with a more cost-effective balance as an alternative to traditional tools like
Salesforce, Dynamics or Oracle. The reason for success is mainly the
simplicity of the new tools and solutions that have been developed for the
management of sales processes. This book discusses how to implement a
CRM from the perspective of a business person—beyond the approach of
IT consultants or technical staff—aiming to create benefits on the business
development via enabling efficiency in Sales Management and setting a
Sales Process control. Small and medium business owners may understand
why and how implementing a CRM in its proper way will create value for
the business—how it will boost business development by improving their
sales management to lead to happier customers. Business professionals
must be able to set up CRM systems avoiding mistakes and waste of time.
This book provides an overview of what a CRM tool implementation
should be able to enable in the organization and discusses the logic of CRM
for sales management; essentially, it will give entrepreneurs the know-how
behind CRM, supporting business to enhance their customers’ relationship.
Acknowledgments

Thanks to many people this book is going to be real. I think they all know
who they are—colleagues, friends, clients, experts, even those I only met
once (or never)–with whom I shared ideas, and who inspired me.
I can mention CRM world gurus, to whom I had the opportunity to
speak, and mentors who enabled me along the way.
The books in the Bibliography are there because I used them, I learnt
from them and their authors. They all gave me something invaluable:
knowledge.
I would like to mention people who helped me in this journey, like Liis
Kupits and Elisa Turri, who both shared in the day-by-day effort during the
book preparation. If there is ever a time that our paths go in different
directions, I would say thank you for having been here with me for a while.
About the Author

I consider myself a businessman, my value proposition is CRM architect. It

means my talent is to design and implement CRM, no matter which tool,
according to the client’s expectations. My job is to make the digital solution
match the organisational requirements and the logic of its marketing
strategy. I do this because of my marketing background and 20+ years of
experience in marketing and sales. One consideration matters: even though
I have written quite extensively and this is my second book on CRM, I'm a
man of doing; I first consider what works, then why and how it works.
Starting from that, I believe my approach to the CRM know-how can help
everyone interested to learn more about the topic, especially those who are
keen to use practical guides but also theoretical knowledge. My approach
won’t be too technical here; I’ll use a logical approach, focusing on what
actually works for business.
What I would like to achieve with this book is to inspire entrepreneurs
and managers to use CRM in a more aware, confident and successful way,
avoiding being sold a solution with incredible capability in theory, that is
hard to use in practice. I want to help enable businesspeople to make better,
informed decisions; to contract and lead service providers in a more
effective way and, ultimately, set the organisational expectations on an
effective knowledge of CRM logic.
I strongly believe that something hasn’t been said enough: Customer
Relationship Management is not at all an IT matter; CRM is, instead, first
and foremost a marketing challenge! This is why I offer this book focusing
on the logic of CRM and how it should work to support an organisational
performance enhancement. In this sense, I can say that I always start with
why.
Chapter 1 Understanding CRM
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-1

First of all I would like to make it clear that CRM is a marketing challenge
and not at all an IT matter. This concept will be developed through the
book, aiming to eliminate the confusion that we are just talking about
software. While this is an introductory chapter, it is expected to provide an
overview of the “Reason Why” and some background of the CRM.
For this reason the topics covered in this chapter are as follows:
Introduction to the book
About CRM
Why so many people are not fully aware of what CRM is
Introducing the concept of CRM
The “Reason Why” of CRM
Why CRMs tools are not all the same
Our Idea of CRM
How CRM became popular: a bit of storytelling
The tool for Relationship Management
Summary

Introduction to the Book

Choosing the appropriate software application to run Customer
Relationship Management should be the outcome of an explicit
organisational strategy, mainly about its purposes and how it should be
deployed. The know-how to implement a CRM tool according to
organisational strategy becomes critical to support the organisation’s goals
and achieve its objectives. A well-implemented tool will help in executing
the strategy for the best. Hence the capability to operate a decision about
which tool, among the many available, should fit the organisation’s needs
while the way to implement it to support the organisational goals should
also be part of the management know-how. For this reason, this book is not
only about the process and techniques for setting up a tool, but it also
presents various implications of the CRM and specifically its strong tie with
an organisation’s business strategy and the way it runs its marketing. Later
in the book, we will see how to select software solutions and how they can
be useful. In this chapter, we will start by analysing the logic of CRM and
its connection with the business strategy.
As Paul Greenberg said, “I do not use a CRM for myself, but as long as
your business grows, you can reach a point where you can’t even run your
business without it.”*
* Greenberg, P., The Godfather of CRM, SalesPoP, 2019.

About CRM (tool)

As you may already know, a CRM tool is just an application over databases.
For that reason almost anyone can create a CRM, starting from scratch
using any database (Db). The question is: “...would the resulting CRM be
any useful?Ӡ Hence, we may ask what exactly makes a solution usable for
CRM purposes? Any Db is just a data container. Dbs differentiate
themselves regarding Data Definition Languages, Speed, and Security. But
what makes it usable for any specific purpose is the piece of software that
lies between the human interaction and the Db, more than just the Db itself.
Probably tech developers would have a slightly different opinion on this,
but no one will deny the importance of the User Interface to boost the
human interaction with the machine as an important element of the value of
any digital solutions.
† Stephens, R., Beginning Database Design Solution, Wiley, 2009.
Thus, if you would like to develop a CRM over a simple Db you can
surely do it, then you’d better be able to define functions and features in
advance and set up the development of a proper software to manage the
interface for users. This is why just using a spreadsheet as a CRM is not
efficient, as we all now know.‡
‡ Koleda, E., Why You Shouldn’t Use a Google Sheet as a Database, Medium, 2019.

What Makes CRM (tool) Useful

What really makes a CRM (tool) useful is the ability to track each
interaction, task and communication with the contact persons bearing a
clear and strong relationship to Opportunities and Companies related to that
person. The CRM should capture every interaction easily, but on the other
hand, users should be enabled to find out information within the whole
track of the “relationship” with a person/organisation even more easily.
Again, the CRM tool should rely upon the concept of empowering our
organisation to easily collect data around and about the people who interact
with us as well as any interaction or opportunity that arises at any time with
those people. And just the data that are truly useful for business purposes,
not just any available or collectible data, should be uploaded in the tool.
Collecting adequate data on a person’s interests and needs enables the
organisation that owns the CRM to use that data to shape information that
can be useful to that person, to inform them about what matters to them and
(ultimately) offer what he or she expects; doing this we create value to the
organisation by pursuing its purposes. Finally, data can be truly powerful
and useful when aggregated; the organisation then becomes capable of
shaping information across market trends and business forecasts.

Why So Many People Are Not Fully Aware of

What CRM Is
What remains unclear to many is what exactly a CRM is. Notwithstanding
the growing importance of the tool and its rising popularity, if you ask for a
definition of CRM and what it is useful for, rarely you will get a proper
answer from managers or entrepreneurs.
Some random definitions of CRM you can come across could be:

“CRM ... refers to software that helps companies track

interactions with their future and current customers.”

A Beginner’s Guide to CRM

“CRM is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers, a

business’ greatest asset. Research has shown that companies
that create satisfied, loyal customers have more repeat
business, lower customer-acquisition costs, and stronger
brand value, all of which translates into better financial
performance.”

Siebel Systems

“CRM is the process of managing interactions with existing as

well as past and potential customers.”

Insights Success

“CRM is the business strategy that aims to understand,

anticipate, manage and personalize the needs of an
organisation’s current and potential customers”

PWC Consulting

“CRM is a strategy that companies use to manage interactions

with customers and potential customers. CRM helps
organisations streamline processes, build customer
relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and
increase profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a

CRM system, a tool that is used for contact management, sales
management, productivity, and more. The goal of a CRM
system is simple: Improve business relationships.”

Salesforce

“CRM means a combination of business strategies, software

and processes that help build long-lasting relationships
between companies and their customers”

Creatio
 “CRM (is) an enterprisewide business strategy designed to
optimize profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction by
organising the enterprise around customer segments, fostering
customer-satisfying behaviors and linking processes from
customers through suppliers.”

Gartner Group

“CRM is all about understanding customers within the

marketplace in order to meet and exceed their expectations,
which will help achieve organisational objectives.”*
* Bulton, R., Creating and Managing a CRM Platform for Your Organisation, Routledge,
2019.

Richard Bulton

Introducing the Concept of CRM

We can see how the idea of CRM as a system, just a digital tool, is largely
in the minority amid those definitions. The most salient word among them
is “strategy.” It suggests that CRM is first and foremost a logic, an
approach, a strategic view of the business and not just a software tool. And
it makes sense as building relationships with customers is the essence of
any business, the kernel of the recent developments in marketing. When the
idea of marketing was conceptualised, the purpose was to crystallise a
methodology around the interaction of businesses with markets. In its
earliest version, Pete Borden’s Marketing Mix that included the famous
4Ps,* showed his mainstream idea to leverage on policies to impact on
markets and ultimately on each customer. Only 20 years later the American
marketing scholars Leonard Berry and Barbara Jackson added a fresh
theory about Relationship Marketing: While Berry argued that Relationship
Marketing is a marketing activity to “obtain, maintain and promote
effective relationships with customers,” † Jackson improved the concept of
Relationship Marketing as a fresh new approach for the marketing industry.
Her contribution focuses on the essence of Relationship Marketing which,
according to her, is to “attract, establish and maintain a close relationship
with enterprise customers.”‡
* Borden, N. H., “The Concept of the Marketing Mix,” Journal of Advertising Research, 1964.
† Berry, L., Relationship Marketing. American Marketing Association, 1983.
‡ Jackson, B. B., Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers, Lexington Books, 1985.

“The aspect of long-term relationships with customers and

other stakeholder groups has been neglected in mainstream
marketing management literature, as pointed out by several
scholars (Christopher et al., 1991; Dwyer et al., 1987; Ford,
1990; Grönroos, 1994b; Gummesson, 1997; Håkansson,
1982; Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Möller, 1992, 1994;
Parvatiyar and Sheth, 1997; Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995a).Ӥ
§ Möller, K., Aino, H., Relationship Marketing Theory: Its Roots and Direction, Journal of
Marketing Management, 2000.

“...It has been welcomed as a saviour from the detrimental

impact of traditional marketing or marketing-mix theory.Ӧ
¶ Grönroos, C., From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm
Shift in Marketing, Management Decision, MCB UP Ltd., 1994.

This revamp of marketing as a collection of techniques to create, build and

develop relationships with people* concurs with the vision of Thomas
Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems, which was the very first company
focused on the development of a CRM system as a digital tool. We could
say that in the 90’s we saw “Relationship Marketing” giving birth to CRM
software to execute marketing strategies. The transactional marketing paved
the way to a new approach where transactions were consequences of
relationships with stakeholders, and specifically with clients.†
* Christopher, M., Payne, A., Ballantyne, D., Relationship Marketing: Creating Shareholder
Value, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002.
† Kotler, P., It’s time for total marketing, Business Week Advance Executive Brief, 1992.

“Reason Why” of CRM

With this picture in mind we can now better understand CRM in its whole
scope, spanning well beyond the simple “keep in touch with clients” and
including the whole marketing process, especially in its sales stage. More
than customers we should perceive clients as persons, eventually
stakeholders, who are each situated at different stages of a relationship with
the company. From ignorance and unawareness, to an aware interest (or
aware lack of interest), to repeat customers, they all have a type of
relationship—from none to close—that matters to the business.

“Companies large and small across a variety of sectors are

embracing CRM as a major element of corporate strategy for
two important reasons: new technologies now enable
companies to target chosen market segments, micro-segments
or individual customers more precisely and new marketing
thinking has recognized the limitations of traditional
marketing and the potential of more customer-focused,
process-based strategies.”‡
‡ Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, Butterworth-Heinemann, Elsevier-Routledge, 2005.

From Policies to People

Probably the biggest shift from managing policies to managing
relationships can be approximated by two opposite approaches:

Policies are enacted and their outcomes are checked so that they can be altered, struck out or
confirmed.
Policies are designed over market understanding, generally based on relevant group segments
analysis.
Relationships are created using messages and contents, by engaging people on a more direct,
often at the personal level.
Relationships are built and developed, while feedbacks are tracked, as relationships can end,
stagnate, continue or thrive.

The informative power of direct relationships with people who can or can’t
be customers is deeper and more detailed than just measuring policies
outcomes.
Why CRM Tools Are Not All the Same
The previous conceptualisation seeks to clarify the enormous difference
between the two main types of business models: consumer oriented and
company oriented, also known as business-to-consumer (B2C) and
business-to-business (B2B) models. We believe that this dichotomy
between B2C and B2B also impacts on the CRM as a choice between
employable tools, while probably it matters with regard to applicable
marketing strategies. One can define B2C as aimed at a large number of
clients, with little or no relevant value per single transaction. On the other
hand, B2B is generally characterised by smaller audiences but significant
values per transaction. The difference between the two models is also
related to the usefulness of Relationship Marketing: while in B2B each
person counts and each single relationship matters, in B2C the focus is not
so much on each single person, even if the effort to make each client “feel
good” is still important. Hence when we evaluate B2B, Relationship
Marketing really matters whereas when we discuss B2C, Relationship
Marketing takes a different path.
To understand CRM as a strategic approach or even as a tool, we will
divide these two perspectives into two specific discussions when required,
even though they have a strong common basis that often converge, as
boundaries are not set in stone. Thus some techniques and methodologies
from B2B can blend into a more people-oriented approach. We will discuss
each point later in detail.

Our Idea of CRM

Our idea of CRM should be clear by now: it is the logic that influences
brand’s marketing on long-term decisions and ultimately, the way in which
the company operates on the market. At the same time, CRM is also the
tool used to manage the company’s presence in the markets and its
interactions with stakeholders.
We see the CRM as the link between marketing strategy and marketing
processes, the way to manage the execution of the company’s mission on a
daily basis. It is a concept that functions as the strategic attitude (CRM
logic), but it is also a real thing: the software that empowers the
organisation in executing strategies (CRM tool).

“...What has changed over the past decade(s) is a series of

significant trends that collectively shape the opportunity to
better serve customers through information-enabled
relationships marketing, or CRM.”*
* Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, Butterworth-Heinemann, Elsevier-Routledge, 2005.

How CRM Became Popular: A Bit of Storytelling

Companies can get the same CRM results using just pencil and paper.
Nobody today recalls that the first method for keeping in touch with clients
was a Rolodex, just a repository of names and main data. Later came the
time of business cards book.
Some companies see less value in any complex system for tracking
clients’ interactions; this is logical when the business model is focused on
very few clients, or even only one, and everything is managed manually by
one or two persons. As soon as we see a shift away from those
circumstances and the number of clients rises, so too does the changeover
of clients, then keeping track of interactions manually becomes more
difficult.
In the early 2000s, Salesforce promoted themselves with a strong
message to compete with strong existing players: what should be, what is
now, and how to close the gap. In a few statements Salesforce highlighted
their Unique Selling Proposition.

A Salesforce Advertising Message in Its Early Stage*

* Unknown source.
Heaven is where business’ operations and infrastructure are Efficient and Effective
Hell is where operations are stuck, infrastructure are slow or broken and the effort to achieve
anything is excessive
Sin is to buy software from companies like Oracle and Siebel that are expensive and
inefficient
 Correct shift is to use software as a service, and letting the service by a provider that can
manage it efficiently on behalf of you
Namely ending the software ownership (reducing CapEx)

If this message was real, and we believe it was, the implication is

interesting. We can see the disruptive approach that Salesforce took against
such huge players.†
† Kellogg, D., Is Salesforce/Siebel a Classic Disruption Case?, Kellblog, 2014.
What was promised by Salesforce’s CRM was a smooth process
management that would boost the business; what was being delivered by
the bigshots at the time were often hugely expensive, sometimes ineffective
solutions that took businesses to the ground (clients said). But we were then
only in the early stage of CRM evolution.

A Disruptive Approach
Salesforce moved the greatest part of the software development out of
clients’ offices—and ownership—enabling clients to access a platform.
This disruptive approach has shown its benefits on a technical level as well
as at the financial level. It gave a strong boost to markets by reducing costs
and raising performance. In the first decade of this century, Salesforce
recorded a fantastic growth rate, hitting US$1.6 billion in turnover, then
continued growing also in the second decade at outstanding rate: they hit
US$20 billion in 2020 (to be fair, acquisitions along the way comprise a big
part of this turnover growth). Around 2010, more solutions started
appearing on the market but demand grew even faster, creating space for
many players. Some major players were established before 2010;
SugarCRM was founded in 2004 and Hubspot in 2006, even if their growth
didn’t soar as much as Salesforce did, they are still relevant players among
the plethora of contenders. Last year the solutions available on the market
numbered more than 600 different players, and still growing.

Well Beyond Numbers

But the market numbers are only the visible side of the phenomenon and
they reflect the trend of organisations that approached CRM tools in the
hope of gaining efficiency in their processes. What developed clearly in the
last ten years is a growing interest around the topic, more literature, a wider
embrace by companies; generally a growing awareness of the benefits of
the digital solution for the business. The growth in demand has led directly
to the growth in the solutions offered.

The Leader Is Here to Stay

If Salesforce’s role as leader of the industry has been clear, and its position
appears even stronger nowadays, the widening of demand has given many
competitors the opportunity to enter a lucrative market. And thanks to new
available technologies that have given newcomers the possibility to become
more efficient, smarter and faster than the old giant, the industry appears to
be in turbulence even now. It is not foreseeable whether the leader will be
overthrown, but there is certainly remarkable growth happening lower
down in the industry.
The stronger trends among the contenders seem to be two, namely sales
process management and marketing automation, while customer service and
call centres remain relevant but less trendy. The two features are often
related to CRM tout-court; in fact they are two stages of CRM in general,
but the proposition focus mainly upon one of them. Another important trend
involves off-the-shelves (or pre-built) platforms versus more customisable
solutions, where pre-built platforms are cheaper and (theoretically) easier to
adopt especially for small businesses; they answer to the demand from new
users giving the whole industry a significant boost.

More Market, More Options, More Opportunities

Nowadays organisations have a variety of options available in the market at
almost any price, but most importantly they can choose among many
different approaches and ways to solve the problem. Such availability can
lead to a better match between the company’s expectations and the tool,
even if the selection process can be more confusing and time consuming.
Companies that find the right solution reveal good financial reports,* to
prove that the trend is here to stay and that it is healthy for businesses,
customers and employees as well.
* Leggett, K., Quantify The Business Value of CRM, Forrester Research, 2019.

An Innovation That Matters for Every Business

Markets change at a really fast pace; clients are more complex to retain,
margins shrink, and competition becomes harder as new, cheaper
technologies become available and empower small businesses to compete
with big players.
Companies today can seek to improve their customer management by
utilizing a range of database, data mart and data warehouse technologies,
as well as a growing number of CRM applications. Such developments
make it possible to gather vast amounts of customer data and increase
customer feedback, as well as to analyse, interpret and utilize them
constructively. Furthermore, the advantages presented by increasingly
powerful computer hardware, software and e-services are augmented by the
decreasing costs of running them. This plethora of available and more
affordable tools of CRM is enabling companies to target the most promising
opportunities more effectively. † We would add that companies seek
efficiency by implementing digital transformation, doing more with fewer
resources in order to create a competitive advantage. CRM systems should
first focus on the real improvement of operational efficiency in any
processes managed, and should then proceed to discuss the return on
investment (ROI) of the possible solutions, as efficiency enhancement is
directly related to better financial performance.
† Payne, A., 2005, ibid.

The Tool for Relationship Management

As we said at the beginning of this chapter, a CRM tool technically is just a
database empowered with some specific functions by an overlaying
software. The Db performances are important as they can affect the system
performance. Imagine a CRM that takes 15 seconds to give you access to
information; it would be considered not acceptable. Mainly the user
experience, including lead time, often gets more relevance in the software
that manages the Db rather than the Db performances.
But let’s consider this: “A database is a tool that stores data, and lets
you create, read, update, and delete the data in some manner.”* While
according to the definition of CRM seen before, we can define the CRM as
an organisational activity to develop the knowledge about markets and
stakeholders.
 * Stephens, R., Beginning Database Design Solutions, Wiley, 2009.
This organisational function can be performed by a CRM tool, which is a
platform or a software designed to instil efficiency specifically in this part
of the human labour. Like any data storage the tool is a system to process,
maintain and retrieve transactional, behavioural, personal and social data
in the most efficient way. The purpose is to create effective, meaningful
information arrays, available in real time, fulfilling organisational needs and
supporting the achievement of the company’s mission.
Among the expected features we can list:

providing information to support marketing activities—campaigns, events, communication to

specific audiences, etc.;
enabling companies to preside over multiple contacts (leads), understand individuals’ and
organisations’ needs, qualify potential customers by proper parameters;
enabling market analysis and understanding by highlighting tendencies and growing needs
through individuals’ and organisations’ feedback tracking;
supporting sales processes, deploying execution of activities related to each designed sales
stage along the sales process journey; and
enabling sales process management by reporting over sales process efforts and results, thereby
aiding forecast management and sales process planning.

The specific purposes of a CRM tool are to:

Ignite efficiency in the organisational collection of data, assembling more reliable information
about individuals and organisations to hit marketing goals
Ignite efficiency in sales process management to boost sales effectiveness
Provide data into the organisational infrastructure enabling meeting business objectives

Over this conceptual framework we can list many features that a system can
or has to allow to users; we normally incorporate them in four big areas:

1. Leads Generation
2. Sales
3. Customer Service
4. Operations

These areas of intervention embrace the whole business; just adding some
features like project management and process management, we would be
depicting a system that can create the backbone of the whole company. By
gathering data from different sources and offering them, in real time, to
data’s consumers, the system can effectively substitute several data silos
that companies are used to run.
Now it should be clearer how the CRM function is much more than just
contacting clients.

CRM Big Bang, or Not

Companies can activate all functions at once or just select some of them and
start from there, adding other features later in a phased manner. In the
meantime, different platforms can arise more focused (and useful) on one
area than another, creating the opportunity to shift from one to another,
while the big picture would eventually lead to a fully integrated system that
can virtually connect any process in the business. We can argue about
whether such a complex system is something to launch as a single big
event, an all-in-one shot, or if it should be built in stages, seeking outcomes
by nurturing a learning-by-doing process. We will analyse each such
prospect in the second chapter of this book, but we must acknowledge that
technology changes fast and the procedure that was formerly used to build
complex, all-in-one tools by a well-established and verified provider is not
a must anymore.

Summary
In this chapter we introduced CRM in general.
We discussed the logic of CRM well beyond its scope as digital tool, but mainly its role related
to business strategy execution.
We discussed what a CRM tool is, having started by looking at what a database is.
We also discussed CRM as a marketing revamp that influenced the industry immensely and
how the subsequent digital revolution enabled the creation of the CRM digital tool.
Then we discussed how it became widely adopted in organisations and what value it brings to
them.
Chapter 2 The Value for the
Organisation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-2

Hundreds of customer relationship management (CRM) software

programmes are today available in the market; they respond to a growing
demand mainly led by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Lately
the competition has been high and it can be complex to understand the
value each tool can create for an organisation. To simplify the problem we
will evaluate the benefits that a CRM can generate for an organisation and
in the last chapter of this book we will go through some different platforms
to evaluate their approaches. In this chapter, the focus will be on the value
that the adoption of a CRM system can create for any organisation in its
general approach. To evaluate what and how each company would be able
to extract value is a more critical point: to support the understanding that
each company should run upon their own situation, better to check case
history of medium-size companies later in this book.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Digital transformation for whom

2. CRM is a journey, not an event: a Lean Approach
3. CRM project success
4. Process-Data-Driven architecture
5. Multichannel interaction
6. Value creation
7. Performance assessment
8. Summary

Digital Transformation for Whom

The approach to develop digital solutions is generally more mature in large
enterprises, while medium and small businesses find it more difficult to
develop a long-term approach to digital transformation. It has been said that
management tends to overestimate the short-term benefits of digital
investments while they are keen to underestimate the long-term benefits of
digitalisation. It probably speaks to a human tendency to lower expectations
upon long-term value of everything in general. What we can count on is
here and now, while what will happen in years to come is out of sight.
But corporations are not infallible. Accenture, in their report “Digital
Value or Digital Vanity,” states:

“It is hard to believe that any company would invest millions

in a major transformation without a clear picture of the value
delivered. Yet this is happening every day when it comes to
digital. Not only is it the hottest investment around, it is the
most difficult to quantify.”*
* Campagna, C., Arora, S., Delawalla, A., Accenture-Digital-Value-POV-V05-FINAL.pdf,
https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-77/accenture-digital-value-pov-v05-final.pdf
Accenture, 2018.

If this is what corporations do, how would medium and small businesses be
any different? The literature usually points out that actually small
companies are less capable to benefit from digitalisation and they are
slower in seeking the productivity enhancement related to digital
transformation at any level. It is commonly reported how corporations can
leverage productivity enhancement on a larger scale, and that creates a
significant incentive for them to invest in digital transformation.
On the other hand, we experience the complex world of medium and
small businesses on a daily basis, and we tend to agree with many authors’
voices when they report: small is beautiful. † Some authors highlight the
benefit of starting businesses small and making them grow; ‡ some just
focus on the smallest scale of business as possibly being the most human
friendly;§ while others point out that the bigger a business is, the worse it
works.¶ But even without fully embracing the pessimistic view of Freek
Vermeulen, we can recognise that big corporations are not the heaven, and
yet they play a paramount role in our society.*
† Schumacher, E. F., Small Is Beautiful, Vintage Publishing, 1973.
‡ Sirolli, E., How to Start a Business & Ignite Your Life, Square One Publishers, 2012.
§ Jarvis, P., Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
¶ Vermeulen, F., Business Exposed, The Naked Truth about What Really Goes on in the World of
Business, Pearson, 2010.
* Baumann, H. D., Building Lean Companies: How to Keep Companies Profitable as They Grow,
Morgan James Publishing, 2009.
There is a pervasive belief that medium-sized companies have a vital
role in our society in maintaining social cohesion, spreading innovation and
managing resources even better than big corporations can do, † if for no
other reason than that they just can’t afford to waste millions of dollars.
† European Commission, Entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs),
[https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes_en].
This is not the right space to fully discuss this topic, but let’s say that one
of the large corporations’ main innovation strategy is based on acquiring
start-ups and small businesses that have been able to ignite great ideas and
bring them to life. This is something that bigger organisations find hard to
achieve. At the same time, medium and small businesses dramatically
outnumber large corporations, and a tremendous amount of innovation
happens in SMEs.‡
‡ United Nation Conference on Trade and Development, Why we should care more about small
and medium-sized enterprises, 2016 [https://unctad.org/news/why-we-should-care-more-about-
small-and-medium-sized-enterprises].
We should therefore discuss how medium and small businesses are not
only able to benefit from the digital revolution, as they are the first utilisers
of innovations put in place by High Tech corporations, but they actually are
also the real engine of innovation, creating it and applying it to many areas
of human life.§
§ Acs, Z., Carlsson, B., Karlsson, C., Entrepreneurship, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and
the Macroeconomy, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

CRM Is a Journey, Not an Event

Innovation, and particularly digital transformation, in each of its
denotations, is often seen as a disruptive shift, usually perceived as a
change of paradigm from manual human-based work to embracing
machine-driven production.
If we take this view, we should consider that digital transformation
began in large scale in the 90’s and is still here. Even companies that started
embracing “digitalisation” early on are still involved in continuous
technological improvement. They have spent 25+ years developing their
own “digital being”, making this not just a transformation, but a different
existential paradigm where being digital is the way to exist. Hence digital
transformation (DT) is clearly not an event; it has better depicted itself as a
journey. But probably it will soon be clear that there is no end to that
journey: digitalisation is a long-term continuous adjustment that includes
fine tuning, alteration and, not rarely, complete changes of methods. It is
clearly not just something to put in place and go.
In the same way, when an organisation embraces a project over CRM,
either to perform a completely new instalment over a blank slate or to
implement a new tool to substitute the existing one, they should be aware of
the long-term process that needs to be run so that they can begin to build it
from the very first step. Defining the strategy and figuring out how to
execute it will be the first stage that frees the organisation from just
embracing the tool as a “way-to-do.” Companies should be aware of how a
gradualistic approach enables them to adjust the next steps over each stage’s
outcome; it is powerful. If we were to seek a metaphor to explain the CRM
implementation project to anyone who is familiar with the lean start-up
approach,* we could utilise that method to better explain how to engage
with a CRM implementation process: start small, test, learn, improve. An
approach that, ultimately, is extremely useful to any digital matter, while it
could be less valuable for other, more bricks and mortar, circumstances.
* Ries, E., The Lean Startup, Crown Business, 2011.
This approach implies a clear vision and understanding of the long-term
result you aim to achieve. Then the how, that is the execution tactics, will
be something you put in place according to the long-term vision.
Developing a clear understanding of CRM as a know-how, a strategy, and
over the management of tools that can facilitate it, will enable you to stick
with the execution of the strategy even if the tool changes. It enables you to
become independent from specific “way-to-do” that each tool may impose.
Empowering the organisation to govern the execution by choosing the tool
that properly fits the organisational requirements instead of being driven by
the tool’s way-to-do, with limited or no plan for the strategy, that would trap
you in the tool.
A list of milestones on that journey would reveal two main areas, namely
strategy and execution. Starting with the first area of CRM, strategy, we
would investigate:

The reason why relationships are (would be) important for your business
The different (possible) lifetime value of the different types of clients
What transitional marketing strategies did your business leverage
How a transition to relationship marketing would transform the inside culture
What cross-functional approach would be good
How to flex the organisation to a new paradigm
Why this shift would be relevant in the competitive environment
How messages engage leads and what should be the promise of the business in a relationship
marketing paradigm
How to boost the service culture of the organisation
How to inspire the sales culture to place customers at the centre of business
How to embrace a value proposition based on trustworthiness
How sales should happen and what the outcomes should be
How the new business should take place, where the new people could be found and why they
would come to you
How the organisation could shift into a one-to-one marketing paradigm

The previous list can probably be extended according to the organisation’s

circumstances. It is important to investigate the brand’s character; the
business “reason-why” that will enable the organisation to highlight the
strategic matter. Clarify how the would-be (if not already begun) transition
from a traditional marketing approach (and behaviours), mainly
transactions-oriented, to a paradigm of people-centred and relationship-
based engagement would enable the organisation to survive.
On the other hand, regarding how to execute the CRM implementation,
we would enlist more actionable tasks:

What processes would be the priority for enhancement by a digital tool

How processes should work according to the RM
How new prospects engagement should work
How nurturing existing clients should work
How upsales to existing clients should work
How cross-selling to existing and potential clients should work
 What a prospect thinks, sees, says, feels
What is the pain, and how does he/she have been solving it
How the value proposition would better be recognised by potential clients
What are the activities to be done alongside the sales process
How service should be delivered before and after sales
What is right to know, understand and test regarding prospects’ decision making
What user experience competitors offer in their product/services mix
How the users/clients’ expectation will rise over time.

The preceding list includes more actionable tasks; however, it is not

exhaustive but a mere trail to lead a deeper analysis aimed to clarify within
the organisation, understanding the purposes and prepare for the CRM
implementation.
It should be clear that, although we are only at the beginning of the plan,
and without having considered the technical aspects of the deployment, we
can already foresee how many of the topics in the previous lists are
dynamic.
When parameters change, the execution should follow suit, and without
listing each of them you can immediately predict how the changes in some
of them would have a relevant effect on managed processes. If the
processes need to be adapted, the CRM tool, as a system, should be able to
facilitate it. Although many tools could be flexible enough to follow
organisational adjustments, what does really matter here is to clarify the
complexity by crystallising a system design and putting it in place in one
shot.
It could be intuitive how a lean approach would help in adapting to new
circumstances, but too often the myth of saving resources with a big bang
leads managers to forget the benefits of lean methodology.

CRM Project Success

Formulating a proper definition of CRM is not just a workout of words and
concepts affecting just minds; the way we define CRM will impact how the
organisation will perceive it and what expectations it will exert. The
definition itself affects how CRM is accepted and practised in daily
routines. “It involves a profound synthesis of strategic vision, a corporate
understanding of the nature of customer value within a multi-channel
environment.”* Payne and Frow suggest a continuum between the
dichotomic definitions of CRM: the logical, strategic matter on one side and
the technological solutions on the other. † We agree with that graphic
explanation of the perception that organisations exhibit about CRM. We can
add that probably in the last 15 years, all those organisations that took the
strategic perspective on CRM are, unfortunately, at risk of extinction.
* Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, Routledge, 2005.
† Payne, A., Frow, P., A strategic framework for customer relationship management. Journal of
Marketing, 2005.
In fact, CRM project failure hasn’t slowed down since Adrian Payne
reported an astonishing 70% failure rate for CRM implementation projects
in 2005. Recent studies cite a project failure rate of up to a daunting 90%!*
Another author lowered the failure rate to just 70%, stating clearly the
reason: “It is expected that the system itself will bring the content and
strategic direction for marketing, sales and service. However, a system can
only map and structure strategic content, but cannot create it.Ӡ Hence, we
live in an odd situation in which CRM adoption is booming, with more and
more companies asking for it, but the industry is failing to deliver the
expected results.
* Edinger, S., Why CRM Projects Fail and How to Make Them More Successful, HBR, 2018.
† Guethoff, A., Why 70% of all CRM projects fail … and how yours will not be one of them,
LinkedIn, May 2020.
Clearly, the dichotomic model described by Payne and Frow helps to
show managers’ perception of CRM. A model that would better describe
the reality of the paradigm would show technological solutions embedded
in the strategic approach, as both are necessary; the tool can only create
value under the strategic umbrella (Figure 2.1), in the absence of which
failure is guaranteed.
 Figure 2.1 CRM tool as the kernel of strategic thinking.

Process Data-Driven Architecture

Although CRM enables organisations to collect data, what organisations do
with that data can often be cloudy. To outline what it means to be a process-
driven as opposed to a function-driven organisation, let’s imagine the
customer journey. A stakeholder perceives the organisation as singular
being, one single entity; the functional boundaries are in place to support
the sharing of duties and responsibilities over stages of the client’s
continuous journey, improving the productivity of employees. In Figure 2.2,
the customers are the receivers of outputs of organisational functions. The
main goal, from the customer-centric point of view, would be to make them
perceive the unity of the organisation even if they interact with different
people. Then there are internal processes:
 Figure 2.2 Functional organisation.
Strategy development
Value definition
Information management
Multichannel interaction
Value creation
Performance assessment

Internal processes consume data. They gather data about markets,

customers, competitors, stakeholders, and events to elaborate information
used to propel decision-making. Data that become available in each
functional area are collected, and they are related, to the same customer or
stakeholder. The customer-centred approach not only matters in terms of
customer experience but also impacts on data management, being able to
track events along the way as well as decisions taken consequently. All this
portrays the customer journey and the experiences related to it (Figure 2.2).
The processes enumerated above belong to two domains, namely
strategic and operative. Strategic processes comprise the first three bullet
points, while multichannel interaction, value creation and performance
assessment are more operational. We will discuss the operational ones here.

Multichannel Interaction
The number of channels for communication have proliferated in the last
decade, and many of them have become ordinary media for business
communication as well as personal interactions. Voice communication is
becoming more and more important lately as the fast pace of today’s life
requires faster interactions and more efficient ways of exchanging
information. In today’s business-to-consumer (B2C) environment, contracts
are often finalized by voice interaction, and while e-mail has been the
biggest shift from paper communication, today the relevance of that media
is shrinking. Thus the need to govern more channels, not only to be reached
but also to give information and collect data, becomes central in the digital
transformation journey. WhatsApp, for instance, is becoming important
and, increasingly after the acquisition by Facebook, is relevant as a direct,
personal contact media. This also boosts Messenger from Facebook; for
every company that has a Facebook page, Messenger matters.
Voice rendering is also growing in focus, especially on mobile devices,
as it can drive interactions with customers in many cases, ranging from the
engagement of new clients to customer service.

Value Creation
While value definition is a strategic endeavour, the creation, or even better
the co-creation of value, belongs to the front line, or the operational sphere.
The utility value is a relevant conceptualisation for business, and it also
implies discussion of the so-called value trade-off: customers should
receive a valuable usefulness from the product/service provided to justify
the trade, and that value has to be higher than the corresponding value they
could receive using alternative solutions. That higher value proposed should
cost (the producer) a fraction of the cost that customers would face when
utilising different methods. The difference between value perceived and
cost of production is the value extracted from the client. Or, better, it is the
area where the producer decides to place its price: the higher the price, the
greater the margin that can be extracted from the clients; the lower the
price, the greater the value that will be delivered to the client (that can also
backfire).
But what matters is how organisations can effectively master their
influence on the value perceived. In this domain, it probably relies on the
most important part of relationship marketing. If transactional marketing
was based on a massive communication to audiences who then would
decide their preferences, relationship marketing relies on a more complex
process to nurture customer preferences. The back-and-forth between
clients and organisations, the several interactions that happen along the way,
even more than the still important moment of truth,* shape the client’s
experience and affect their preferences. For this very reason, relationship
marketing places the client’s experience under a crucial perspective, and at
its best a continued, positive relationship is the best influencer of customer
preferences.†
* Gröonros, C., Service Management and Marketing, Lexington Books, 1990.
† Foxall, G. R., Consumer Behaviour Analysis: The Behavioural Basis of Consumer Choice,
Routledge, 2002.
By now it is clear how CRM as a postulate boosts the customisation of
the value creation process. This process is even more relevant in B2C
environments where sometimes prices emerge alongside the relationship
itself. Value, and thus price, is a matter of perception rather than cost, the
relationship is the territory where perception is created, developed and
nurtured, but also negotiated between different perspectives.
As mentioned, the CRM tool’s role is to support CRM logic; it means
also to facilitate the clarity of value proposition to the clients along the sales
journey. So it will be possible to outreach the value co-creation.

Performance Assessment
Information technology firmly dominates this area of organisational
management. In a new paradigm of people-centred events and data-driven
processes, there is no concern that a cross-process repository that empowers
efficiency in processes and interactions may enable a gentle assessment of
performance.
Activities and tasks related to customers along the relationship are part
of the labour required to run the business, sometimes the greatest chunk of
it. Measuring and planning the effort empowers in planning improvements,
fostering efficiency in processes and in the business as a whole. This
definitively exerts influence on the bottom line.
A CRM can become the daily tool for many processes related to
interaction with clients. If featured with activities tracking, the CRM can
enable reporting of cumulative tracking as well as individual activities.
Both can be useful to assess process effort as the amount of work required
against the results per deal, per salesperson and cumulatively. The amount
of work required for creating the service with clients, especially during the
sales process, has always been under debate and it is commonly considered
hard to measure and even harder to plan with accuracy.
While in other processes we can better relate activities to results, in sales
processes and also in processes that affect people in general, this can be
quite varied and often hard to track. But very often it’s where the greatest
potential for enhancement can be hidden, and developing a gentle way to
track activities can unleash productivity enhancement.

Summary
In this chapter, we analysed the digital transformation for medium and
small businesses, why it happens and what aspects of it matter to them.
We highlighted the role of medium businesses in stimulating innovation and their role in the
economy.

We clarified once more how CRM is mainly a strategic matter, and only
later a technological tool, software being the support for execution of the
strategy.
CRM tools come later; first comes the strategy of Relationship Marketing.

We analysed what specifically about CRM implementation is part of the

digital transformation and gave a general overview of the reason why
implementation projects should be considered long-term projects and not
one-off.

Hence, it is important to carefully consider the rate of project failure as a warning before fully
embracing the implementation.

We then described how data-driven processes dominate the organisations

and how a CRM tool would allow better control of them.
Management decision-making is a net “data consumer” to be fed continuously.
We then evaluated three operational processes that are strongly related to
CRM, and how they can be included in and boosted by CRM as a tool.
As they are directly involved with execution processes, they can directly show the value
created by implementing the CRM tool.
Chapter 3 Sales Process
Management
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-3

At its beginning, customer relationship management systems were

developed mainly for customer care/services purposes. This usage was
firstly developed by Thomas Siebel, and it was CRM’s main purpose till the
first decade of this century when the technology started gaining more
popularity in the sales departments of medium businesses in business-to-
business (B2B) markets. Today among medium and small businesses that
implement CRM, almost all of them aim to enhance the sales process
management. This shift into the revenue-generating area could be among
the reasons that have boosted the demand for CRM technology.
In this chapter, we will describe the secrets of CRM for sales process
management and how to implement it.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

Sales process design

Sales process stages
Lead-in

– Contacting
Discovery opportunities
Qualification

– Qualification methods
– Qualification purpose and outcome
– Developing solutions
– Negotiation

Learning opportunity
Purpose and outcome
Sales Process Design
The sales job has always been considered unpredictable by definition. And
it is still beyond direct control: even the most successful salespersons are
able to win only a slice of all the opportunities they come across. At least in
normal conditions, in my country we have a motto with regard to sales: you
can fool one person all the time or everyone once, but you can’t fool
everyone all the time.* The logic is clear: we can’t control other people’s
decisions; we can try to influence them and we can become very convincing
using the art of persuasion, † but we cannot drive them to decide. Luckily
nobody really can control it. We can see this also by analysing what the best
salespeople do: they provide a well-structured, informative “service” that
leads their counterparts through a planned experience. The more that
experience fits the buyer’s expectations, the more it is that likely a positive
closure will be reached.
* Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, on politics.
† Cialdini, R., Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Harper Business, 1984.
In this chapter, we refer mainly to the business-to-business approach,
while the business-to-consumer sector often, though not always, has simpler
sales processes. In the real estate domain, for instance, the sales process for
private families is generally not that simple and fast. This suggests that it is
not so much the wider B2B or B2C scheme that matters when it comes to
the complexity of sales processes, but that they largely depend on the kind
of purchase and on whether buyers perceive the service/product as a
commodity or, instead, as something mission-critical.
But how exactly does the “sales process” work? It could seem odd if
while designing a CRM we ask clients to explain their sales processes and
they are stuck in a moment of silence. Even well-structured organisations
quite often don’t spend enough time formalising how their salespeople
work, what exactly they do while interacting with prospects and clients, or
even what the buyers expect to experience while interacting with the
salespeople.
They just tend to take for granted what the salespeople should be doing.
Most probably they know how they work and what they are expected to do,
especially sales directors, but if you ask them to write it down, they might
trip. It is mainly a lack of formalisation, not a lack of know-how. Thus
enquiring of them in a proper way enables us to unveil the sequence of
actions that shape the interaction process with prospects, the journey each
prospect generally takes from the stage of unawareness to the purchasing
act, or just up to the point when the prospect decides to quit.
To structure it under a simple approach, we can divide the process into
stages; at each stage, certain actions are expected and they should provide
an output.
Stages are in sequence as ideally the journey will have a starting point -
the entrance into the process-, then some steps to be performed before
reaching an end where prospects will exit the process for better or for
worse. Obviously, in a figurative journey people can jump stages getting
different shortcuts, or take longer to get accustomed to the process.
Designing the sales process means defining those stages in a way that
depicts what is expected to be done in each of them and what outcome is
expected.

Sales Process Stages

In many cases, the use of sales stages is merely a static naming convention,
including, for instance, “Contact Made,” “Proposal Sent,” or “Negotiation.”
We argue that naming each stage in a more dynamic way exerts an effect on
people who have to act accordingly. The idea is not to create a repository
for deals and opportunities once “contact has been made,” but to constantly
remind to salespeople what is expected to be done. This technique applies a
strong driver to what is to be done well beyond the simple silos of stages to
be filled of contacts data, but more as a dynamic workflow that salespeople
run by each single action. Actions that are well described in each stage
naming.
For this reason, we list below a broader suggestion of stages’ definitions
to name them with the perspective of enabling efficiency in sales process
management.

Lead-In
When entering the process cold, deals have to be processed starting with an
“in” phase. When a new contact comes in touch with the brand, it should be
passed to the salespeople’s attention, enabling them to take care of that
person. Often in this stage, a marketing automation tool pushes new
contacts which have been dug out of the market using marketing
techniques, and in this stage it is expected that salespeople would reach out
and start working with them.
This stage can also be an assignment zone where salespeople are not yet
involved; in this case, a process will create the allocation of each deal to the
correct salesperson. Hence another stage can be in place—a stage in which
getting in contact with the leads is the outcome. If the lead generation can
produce that assignment, then the very first stage can be directly actionable,
that is, Contacting.

Contacting
Here each salesperson can manage a list of new opportunities to start
working on and then initiate them into the process. Actions to do are the list
of activities the organisation planned for the contact procedure, either in
voice or by messaging, largely depending on the specific market’s pattern
habits. The outcomes are the first understanding of the prospect and the
verification of any opportunity in place. There is also an important
difference between “cold leads,” people who know nothing about our
company/proposal, and people who have already expressed some interest in
us. Cold leads imply “cold callings” as it uses lists of contacts bought or
(legally) developed. For instance, an industry directory can provide
hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers and email addresses,
generally speaking company email addresses, or they can be found by
scraping (more or less legally) social media like LinkedIn. The latter allows
users to download lists with data when people have given permission for
their contact data to be distributed, an occurrence that is becoming rare.
In a few words, any time a company starts its sales process using cold
leads, salespeople face a challenge: get the attention of their counterpart via
“out-of-the-blue” contact. This was a quite effective method in the earlier
era of telemarketing; however, in today’s market an excessive use of this
approach has made it questionable.
When the list of new leads is created based on people who have already
expressed interest in what we do, in our company’s brand and value
proposition, then salespeople can operate in a more comfortable way, not
bothering “innocent” people who know nothing about them but getting in
contact with market operators who are, at least, in search mode. Such new
leads comprise people who are aware of the problem they need to solve and
are actively looking for solutions. Hence they have already expressed
interest in the brand/company and a contact from the company doesn’t fall
totally unattended. In the CRM jargon, they are called “Hot Leads.”
What can happen when the process focuses on cold-leads
nurture/development is that salespeople have to focus their abilities on
engaging completely unknown people in a conversation. The purpose of the
interaction is to nurture a need, raising awareness of the (possible) problem,
in people who are often not prepared for it. If this is quite usual in some
B2C business models, it is, unfortunately, also widely adopted in B2B
markets too: the procedure of calling up a list of companies (within a
sector) to dig out someone interested in a solution (for a specific problem),
is widely known in the marketing industry as a common procedure of B2B
lead generation.
When instead the lead contacting is operated on lists of leads who have,
at least, expressed an interest in what we do/propose, then getting contacted
is not totally unexpected. Thus the focus of those sales processes is more on
the quality of the following part of the process: on providing them a
valuable experience of the brand/company. This includes nurturing the
counterpart’s interest in the possible solution they are possibly actively
looking for, to solve a problem they are aware of. Hence the skills of the
salespeople become more relevant into the next stages of the process.
Also, the “Contacting” stage could be merged with the following one:
“Discovering Opportunities.” Nothing blocks salespeople from moving into
that mode right away when they are just in the Contact mode. Our logical
division in stages has the purpose of clarifying what has to be done and
what has to be the outcome of certain activities. The Sales Process is not to
be intended as a series of independent silos, but as part of an organic flow
where actions have to be put in place at the right time by well-prepared
sales personnel. The human touch is essential in this type of sales process.
Otherwise we would refer to machine sales: an e-commerce, as an
unmanned process that follows different rules under control of a designed
CRM technology.
Discovering Opportunities
This stage can take place at the same time of “Contacting”, or it can be
moved to a time when meeting the counterpart will be fully dedicated to
this analysis. This stage could also be the first one when a dedicated
Contacting stage is not in place, like after the “Lead-In” stage. We believe
in the importance of listing it separately to highlight the relevance of the
Discovery Opportunities’ outcome: understanding the requests and
expectations of the (potential) customer. Discover, by asking what the
prospect is looking for, is sometimes an activity that is truly undervalued.
Time pressure often makes salespeople (and even more so sales directors
or entrepreneurs) keen to get a shortcut: assuming they have got what the
client wants with a limited or even no discovery session at all. This is a very
common mistake in sales: running ahead without a proper understanding of
what the counterpart, the client, is really looking for taking assumptions.
The feeling is that personal productivity relies on the capability to run
each task in the fastest possible way. Which, by all means, is also true. But
when we work with other humans, the capability to be able to define the
right velocity to move from A to B is complex and, in some way, something
odd that largely depends on the counterpart we are working with. Thus,
productivity in sales can be complex to assess and control. Complex but not
impossible.
To reach that goal of productivity assessment and control, we strongly
suggest putting in place the sales process stages in accordance with this
method, not slavishly, but by applying the organisation’s culture and
employees’ personal creativity.
By adding a dedicated stage, namely “Discovering Opportunities,” the
activities to perform become more clear: it is imperative to dig out every
detail about the opportunity/opportunities, using a set of queries that
enables a proper unveiling of the situation, of the expectations and about the
counterpart’s feelings.
The queries’ methodology is nothing new,* but is still quite unknown.
Experienced, well-trained salespeople are the ones who can apply the
queries’ methodology† with confidence. They are able to perform the art of
questioning in such a smooth manner that it avoids leaving the recipient
with a bad taste in their mouth: “Are they putting me under probing
questioning?”
* Barber, J., Good Question! The Art of Asking Questions to Bring a Positive Change, Book
Shaker, 2005.
† Fisher, R., Ury, W., Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement without Giving In, Random
House, 2012.
The querying process can be very warm and comfortable for prospects
already keen to buy from you, while cold leads could be more reluctant to
answer. If performed in the correct fashion the queries process is not only
comfortable but also extremely powerful in motivating the prospect to stick
with it and to the sales person. It has been proved‡ that salespeople who ask
more questions, with the candid intention to understand and help the clients
in getting the best for themselves, perform better in sales. Discovering
Opportunities is then an extremely important stage, where not only each
sales person is enabled to better understand what the client really needs, but
even more importantly because it is a process capable of pushing the
relationship to a new level, becoming more meaningful and resourceful.
Trust is a matter of intentions, hence being able to truly act with the best
intentions is a powerful driving force that people perceive, a force that leads
to winning trust, a force that enables better selling.
‡ Grant, A., Give and Take, Penguin Books, 2014.
Discovery Opportunities is, then, a powerful sales tool and not just a
stage along a process. Due to its power it should be performed during every
sales process, no matter what, if we want to enhance the success rate.

Qualification
As per the previous stage, Qualification can also be conducted earlier, at the
time of the very first contact. We believe that the sequence should be
followed as presented: first Discovering Opportunities and then
Qualification, not the other way around.
Moreover, keeping the two quests separate as concepts and behaviours
allows us to perform a better qualification of the person first and foremost
in order to engage that person before investing effort to explain what we
can do for our counterpart.
Comprehending the problem and the expected solution is paramount,
only then we would proceed further: if the person/organisation really
matches the parameters to bring us effective and successful business.
Here is where this method enables the greatest benefit: by not mixing the
two analyses together and avoiding easy leaps into discussing what we can
do for the client.
Businesses should know who their ideal clients are, then they need to be
able to select them among the many potential opportunities: with a process
that outlines when a prospect fits into the parameters for being a (good)
client.
On this duty sits one of the most important sales issues, an entanglement
that also implies how salespeople should work, how they should be
compensated and what are the expected outcomes.
It is often debated whether businesses should say “NO” to clients; no
matter if you are a solopreneur, a professional or a multimillion company,
some clients are better to let go. But while it is important to be aware of
problems that can arise by engaging wrong clients, no business can in fact
really feel good about the action of saying “NO” to clients hence to get rid
of opportunities.
It is considered that opportunities are scattered to anyone in business.
Thus, it is neither in the business people’s way of life nor in the
salespeople’s mandate to tell a prospect: “We do not want you.”
What can, instead, be effectively done is to clarify the conditions under
which any opportunity has to fall, thus making the counterparts accountable
for matching those conditions. The ability to be clear upon what is relevant,
the conditions, will allow people in sales to provide an honest framework
for the service production. Hence filtering opportunities with fine mesh
filters to move forward only with the ones that match the conditions is the
final purpose of this stage.
More than merely a matter of saying “NO,” it is a matter of engaging the
counterpart to show and declare a positive intention to fit into those rules in
order to obtain the solution that solves her or his problem.
Cialdini explained extremely well the way in which, by adopting the law
of scarcity, salespeople can make their client feel eager to win the game,
and getting in possession of the (scarce) product they were, earlier, just
curious about.*
* Cialdini, R., ibidem.
 The qualification process can have a similar effect on the prospects who
approach a possible solution they are interested in. The reason is TIME.
It has often been said that B2C marketing and sales techniques are
different from the rules in B2B markets. Hence the sales techniques often
used to mislead, manipulate or just persuade a single person, the consumer,
don’t work when the buyer is an organisation. In general terms, this is true,
but we should check specifically how some methods or techniques can
actually bear results.
Considering the law of scarcity, leveraging it can actually work during a
sales process with a professional counterpart under some circumstances:

The object of the contract is complex solutions or products with a limited number of possible
suppliers.
The product or service is effectively mission-critical for the client.
The time frame for the solution to be in place is limited, better if it is really short.

Business buyers also are people, and even if some of them, the professional
buyers, can play the game with the same or even better weapons than
average salespeople, under the previous circumstances also them can feel
the pressure of time, the need to rely on a trustworthy provider, the need to
procure something that wouldn’t be extremely easy to find elsewhere and
which is relevant for their own business to survive.
To be clear, the range of solutions that fall into this framework is not as
trivial as many of us can be tempted to think. And, in many ways, the
businesses that have been able to leverage those factors are the ones that
thrive. Being able to recognise when one or all of those conditions are in
place then leverage them is what a well-designed sales process should
enable in the sales person.
Discovering Opportunities and Qualification stages are designed to
enable salespeople to perform those checks and collect information and data
that can depict the client’s condition so that the proposing solution can
benefit from that very knowledge.
If this rule is considered less relevant for sales of products than sales of
services, it is because products are often ready to ship while services imply
a co-production stage or at least a greater involvement of the client.* But
when products also include an amount of service, then a more detailed
analysis of the clientele can help to avoid or reduce following problems and
possible related shrinkage of the economic return of the business.
* Carlzon, J., Moments of Truth, Ballinger Pub Co., 1987.
Qualifying the opportunities in the most efficient way is, then, one of the
most important stages of the sales process, and it is a duty of the
organisation culture to make sure of how this stage is properly set in place,
and also how salespeople should manage the filtering: the more strict the
filter is, the fewer opportunities will move forward. Tightening the filter
will affect the output of the whole sales process that will hit a lower level of
turnover. The greatest problem arises when salespeople are rewarded just on
the turnover. A reward system is a powerful driver of people’s behaviours;
the structure of the reward directs the way in which people work, what they
believe in and the values they nurture in their daily commitment.
When the reward system focuses just on the total amount of money
resulting from the sales process (turnover), it gives salespeople the message
that it is not important who the client is or what he or she needs, while the
only important matter is how much the deal is worth. This approach can’t
encourage people to use the proper filtering procedure: anything that boosts
turnover will be OK under this framework.
In the opposite situation, salespeople who have no adequate incentives,
neither on turnover nor in qualitative deals, could be less keen to move
deals ahead if they are even suspected of bringing in any problem. Under
this framework, they can use an ultra-fine mesh filter in pursuit of peace of
mind for themselves and for the organisation.
The qualification stage plays a fundamental role in the business’s health,
by letting only selected, suitable deals pass through, it enables the business
to reduce risk and losses. On the other hand, the purpose of the sales
process is to bring in the maximum amount of new business (in accordance
with the business plans and capabilities). We can therefore see the
qualification stage as probably the central duty that gives sales their
direction: growing the business via good, appropriate deals and suitable
clients.
In operative words, the qualification stage should be performed by
engaging the clients with clear purposes, delivering clear messages on what
is important to share to help them successfully.
 The Discovering Opportunities is a kind of “let’s now understand what
exactly you need and if we can make it for you...” enquiry, (a method that
places on the client the effort to bring the sales person on board on the
solution requested). The qualification stage would instead be a sort of “Ok,
now let’s understand if you match the criteria to be a good client.”
Allow us a bit of drama: please don’t try to use the second statement
verbatim if you are not a close friend of the client!
The focus should be on the intention behind it; when queries are used in
the proper way, this method is assessed to be extremely powerful and
persuasive in engaging the client in the deal (scarcity law).*
* Cialdini, R., ibidem.
Hence keeping the stages “Developing Opportunities” and
“Qualification” well defined, enclosed and separated is a way to give them
importance, structure and gravity. Even if along the way experienced
salespeople can mix them, adapting them to the flow of the single, unique
relationship and interaction they develop with each client.

Qualification Methods
In order to support the salespeople in their process to assess each
client/deal, there are some effective frameworks that, likewise the 4Ps
marketing mix for marketers, help to guide the action of salespeople when
they are about to check the matching of qualification parameters. Just like a
list of checks to keep in mind and tick one by one, the model BANT is the
4-digit model of client qualification, while the MEDDIC is the more
extended 6-digit model.
BANT is the acronym for:
Budget
Authority
Needs
Time

To clarify it, let’s go through each part.

BANT explained
Budget
This comes first mainly to make the acronym work but also because
without an available budget we all risk spending time for nothing.
It is always tricky to ask a client: “Can you pay for it?” But it is even
more tricky to assume arbitrarily that he or she will be keen to pay the right
amount. For sure enquiring about availability to pay can leave a bad taste in
the client’s mouth, so the salesperson should find a way to ask that not only
in a manner that avoids hurting the client but also leverages the law of
scarcity to engage the client’s commitment in the deal.*
* Cialdini, R., ibidem.
The way to pursue the real answer requires patience, empathy and
language control. Take it slow: do not ask it as the very first question,
engage in discussing the solution the client really needs, reinforce the
counterpart’s eagerness in getting exactly the solution you are talking about.
Reinforce the focus on the benefit the client is pursuing by adopting that
product/solution. Then the client will be more open to evaluating the effort
he or she is ready to face.
Quite often the available budget enquiry comes last in the process; even
if it may be a yes/no condition, making it last can sweeten the pill. The
more the client perceives it as a collaborative, well-intended request for
information, aimed to co-create the solution that fits the client’s
requirements, the more the client will be open to unveiling it. It is probably
the most important point of the four, and that’s why it should be performed
last!
One more thing: you shouldn’t believe you have to stay within the
client’s budget.
The budget is merely one dimension of the compensation the client is
available to pay in order to get what was a very initial idea of a possible
solution; while any added value can change that intention. Hence we now
come back to the relevance of the “Discovering Opportunities” stage: if that
quest was properly run we can now match the information. The outcome of
the two pieces of information joined will be the understanding of the
client’s awareness about the complexity of the solution previously figured,
and whether, how much he or she is prepared to pay for it.
 If the outcome is not positive, then the sales person has the option to try
to bridge the gap between expectations and the intent to pay. That bridging
can rely on lowering the client’s expectations about the solution requested
(reducing its cost) or (better) raising the client’s perception of the intrinsic
value. Hence having appropriately performed the Discovering
Opportunities quest before, will enable the salesperson to manage the
situation for a better outcome.

Authority
What if we invest time in convincing the counterpart only to discover too
late that the person we convinced is not the decision-maker? It is not only a
matter of time, which is also important, but anyone who has tested what it
means to start the process again knows that the second process will never be
the same. If we achieved a positive outcome with the first person, there is a
risk that we wouldn’t get the same with the second one!
Jokes aside (half serious), if the person we are talking to is not the
decision-maker, it is better to know it as soon as possible. The process itself
needs to be changed if the counterpart is not the buyer but a user or just a
stakeholder. The content to share may not be the same, the persuasion
levers might be different, and thus the process might leverage other pillars
according to the role of the two different persons. The main risk of this title
void is to take for granted the requiring person as the buyer, responsible for
decision-making. It can lead to mistakes and an excess of effort addressed
to the wrong person.
Efficiency is also about making the right things, not just making things
right.

Needs
Salespeople may tend to avoid this point in the mistaken belief that it is
enough to talk about what the client wants or about the product/solution we
are going to offer, so the doubt is: “Why should I ask again what he or she
needs?”
But this title is not about the explicit requirements the client expressed
(or would have expressed) at the Discovering Opportunities stage. Not at
all. Here we have the opportunity to enquire about the person we are talking
to, that person who owns an agenda. An experienced sales person knows
how important it is to know what her/his main goals are, what he or she
expects from this process, what are the benefits, opportunities and possible
outcomes.
Also, in B2B most of the time we talk to people and those persons have
needs and expectations we have to understand. Giving answers directly to
those personal expectations and queries matter for the deal’s success more
than most salespeople tend to believe.
In Hitch,* a great Will Smith film, Alex “Hitch” Hitchens meets a
prospect who candidly confesses his unethical intentions about the girl he
wants to win.
* Tennant, A., Hitch-The Cure for Common Men, Columbia Picts, 2005.
Hitch reacts quite badly to it, not only refusing to take the deal on board
but threatening the guy if he wouldn’t let him go.
Without reacting like Hitch, being aware of the personal intention behind
the buyer’s involvement in the purchasing process is relevant for the sales
person. We can’t argue about the ethical inner drivers of each business and
how they direct the behaviour in sales. More often it is not about going
beyond the ethics of business, but about understanding what drives our
human counterparts.
But let’s stay on the value of the information for the sales process:
First, it gives a clearer picture of how to fill in the personal expectations of our counterpart,
who ultimately is the decision-maker (Authority).
Second, it gives the seller more tools to leverage when they come to objections and value
negotiation.

What we shouldn’t deny is that in certain cases personal drivers can be

stronger than the logical and analytical ranking of the purchase’s pros and
cons.*
* Cialdini, R., ibidem.

Time
Time is often the most valuable tool of a seller. As time is simultaneously
the most valuable asset and the most scarce, being able to engage with the
time perception and time-fit requirements of the client is an invaluable
ability to manage any sales process. Hence assessing the time expectations
of the client is essential, as many salespeople know that, upon this lies the
potential deal.
First, a proper enquiry about the client’s request can unveil much about the counterpart. It
reveals a lot about their own perception, knowledge and awareness of the purchasing process
and the solution’s creation time.
Second, it says a lot about how urgently the solution is needed.

When the client’s request is not compatible with the purchasing process or
the solution’s availability, the sales person might learn something important
here. Enquiring more the client to unveil the game further can highlight
some main scenarios:

1. Lack of awareness and/or overconfidence on the possibility to

procure the solution faster than (considered) possible.
2. The client relies on information from other providers who
alternatively
a. voluntarily misled him; or
b. have the solution ready to ship; or
c. rely on a faster production process.

3. The client’s urgency to procure the solution shows

a. the client urgently needs the solution; or
b. the client has started the purchasing process in time.

Let’s try to guess some scenarios upon the previous data matching:
The client has started the process in time and has allocated a proper time
frame to procure the solution.
Making enquiries will support the client’s confidence in their perception that the salesperson is
collecting information to provide the best service.
Then proceeding with quality along the sales process can be vital. The client can be well
organised and prepared to deal with the business properly and can expect a similar approach
from suppliers. Salespeople should try to engage the client on the very same register, avoiding
shortcuts or simplification.

The client declares a short time for the procurement process.

 The sales person has to enquire carefully about the client’s reasons, as the perception acquired
from enquiring could clash with the sense of urgency of the counterpart, but it is essential for
the seller to learn:

– what information the client has;

– what he or she really knows about the solution; and
– why the client needs the solution so urgently.

The counterpart could be less sensitive to the quality of the process. Sellers should test it,
evaluating carefully what drives the client. If they have wrong information, correcting them
can be extremely difficult. Sometimes a proper assessment of the information and a
demonstration of the true reasons can take the salesperson to a higher position, from where he
or she can leverage the credibility gained. This happens more frequently when the solution is
really mission-critical. If the critical mission is not in place or not already perceived, then the
sales person has the hard job of testing whether there is room to educate the counterpart or
deciding to dismiss the deal as unqualified.
The time is achievable even if it is compact. The information is invaluable as it allows the
salesperson to leverage the value of the solution using the time/price dichotomy.
The client has the power to change their expectations, hence investing time to support the
client’s decision by providing an informative service can enable both parties to win trust and to
get closer to winning the deal. That is to say, just get closer, not win it yet.

Time can be considered the check of the qualification stage: working on it

enables salespeople to perform better in their sales processes management
and, ultimately, convert more opportunities. The real trouble is that it can
require a lot of time.

MEDDIC/MEDDICC
This qualification method* is attributed to Dick Dunkel, John McMahon
and Jack Napoli who developed it together as sales trainers in PTC, in 1996.
* White, A., MEDDICC: The Ultimate Guide to Stay One Step Ahead in the Complex Sale,
Meddicc Ltd, 2020.
In fact this is an extended version of the BANT acronym, which allows
salespeople to keep under control some more parameters pertaining to the
same purpose: understanding if the deal can be qualified. It also introduces
a slightly different perspective on the way to analyse elements; it can help
when the organisation’s culture prefers this approach.
Metrics: Identifying key parameters that justify the economic exchange
Economic buyer: Who the decision-maker is
 Decision process: How the purchasing process works and is run
Decision criteria: Analysis of the main criteria that affect the decision
Identify pain: The problem in place, what the client needs to achieve, the problem/solution
approach
Champion: Stakeholders’ control of and influence on the decision

And eventually
Competition: Analysis of the competitive landscape to be aware of the client’s options

There is no need to go through each item, as it wouldn’t help much in

clarifying the purpose of the Qualification stage. We just notice whether the
model actually embeds the Discovering Solutions stage in the metrics, such
as identifying pain, decision criteria, decision process and competition, and
introduces some complexity such as stakeholders’ influence, that is correct
to point it out. The benefit of this model is to recall more elements in one
place, while the limitation is its reduced simplicity. On the other hand, the
BANT model’s benefit is its simplicity and direct actionable tasks, while its
limitations pertain to the modelisation and excessive simplification of a
complex process. This is something that MEDDICC model does not resolve
as, even more, it includes tasks that, in several authors’ opinion, would
require an adequate clear space* to be performed properly.
* Grant, A., ibidem; Cialdini, R., ibidem.
When in 1964 Neil Borden developed the 4Ps model the world
applauded it; the great benefit of simplification helped masses of
salespeople and entrepreneurs to understand what marketing was.†
† Borden, N., The Concept of the Marketing Mix, Wiley, 1964.
Some years later Booms and Bitner proposed to raise those Ps to 7.‡ But
credited to Philipp Kotler a motto started to circulate: “No matter how many
Ps you list, there is only one P that matters: People.” Whether the author is
right or not, it shows that reduction of complexity is always in place to help,
“as things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.§
‡ Booms, B., Bitner, M. J., Marketing Strategies and Organizational Structures for Service Firms,
in James H. Donnelly and William R. George, (eds), Marketing of Services, American
Marketing Association, 1981.
§ Credited to Albert Einstein.
Qualification Purpose and Outcome
As mentioned previously, the purpose of this stage is to clear the crowd of
opportunities to focus the organisation’s resources on the best ones. Even if
many businesses tend to show excessive appetite when it comes to sales,
and their internal culture implies that “...no deal or client exists that
shouldn’t be dealt with.” The appraisal of opportunities should still be run if
for no other reason than to ensure a better negotiation. Organisations who
imagine they can serve everyone, run often less successful businesses; in
their sales processes, the loss of an opportunity which is very often a
client’s decision is frequently considered a salesperson’s failure.
We can notice a positive correlation between the success of an
organisation and its ability to serve certain customers but not all of them.
Sometimes organisations are able to create a market upon that knowledge: a
need not yet fulfilled of a niche of clients can be their best market.

Developing Solutions
Here the focus is on depicting or designing the solution. This is what
salespeople generally enjoy the most. Very often confident salespersons
who are in love with their job and tend to apply their real passion much
more than an effective, deep strategic analysis, in order to achieve sales
performance can use well-developed oratorical skills in talking about the
object of the proposal, either a service or a product, with a swinging
enthusiasm aimed at engaging their counterpart. Sales pitching is such an
important skill when it is well-rooted in a strong and well-designed sales
process, but it is greatly overrated when it is the lone skill leveraged by a
salesperson who only relies on it to succeed. That mistake of skill’s value
has fostered a sort of human reaction which has reached the point of
depicting salespeople as not pleasant to be around.* And entrepreneurs who
love their products, who are product-people, oriented to the best product
quality, † are the first to fall in love with that style. Then of course clients
also fall in love with such an amazing way to engage interest. There is only
one minor issue: the clients who fall in love are the ones who are in line
with the proposed solution/product. They are the ones who were seeking it,
hence they love when someone can explain it with an enthusiasm that draws
them into every benefit of the service/product. Every other person, not
really engaged yet in the proposed solution, will just be annoyed by that and
more often than not they will lose interest completely.
* Credited to Woody Allen: “There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an
evening with an insurance salesman?”.
† Sirolli, E., Trinity of Management, Sirolli Institute, 2012.
Why does that happen? Is it not the main skill of a salesperson to sell the
product/service for the best?
It does happen because the function of sales is often misunderstood. In
certain cultures, sales means convincing someone with: “Look how good my
product is!” Something that was true when the market was crowded of
buyers and sellers led the game (unbelievably it happened not too long ago).
At that time it was enough to be good at explaining the product/service to
be successful in sales.
Hence the common belief that a good salesperson is someone who can
convince others about his product. But sales dynamics have dramatically
changed since the market changed, something that became evident at the
turn of the century.
Nowadays sales can be really complex and require a methodology more
than improvisation and, according to the kind of business and market, they
also require a pattern of skills much more complete than just talking well.
We do not diminish the value of the ability to engage the client with
storytelling and convince them with rhetoric when it is time to engage them
with the solution. Nevertheless, we have to highlight the importance of all
the other skills and tasks of the sales process and the necessary ability to
balance and play with all of them. It is true that a great actor who engages
audiences with great rhetorical art can be amazing to see, but what if the
piece was badly written?
In the same way, it can be very sad to assist a great performance about
the solution under proposal done by an enthusiastic salesperson who arrived
at it after having made a series of wrong assumptions.
Hence the Developing Solutions stage is much more than just explaining
it.
Of course, the simpler the solution is, the easier this stage will be. If it is
clear that the client is there to buy a Ferrari, it is also very easy to assume
what he or she would like to hear. Even if selling a Ferrari is not always as
easy as pie; if we assume the solution is something easy and clear, jumping
to explain it would seem the faster and better way to win the client with a
reduced effort.
This will become much more evident when we discuss complex
solutions that imply several options and how they can dramatically affect
the experience, the value or the price. As well as many other aspects in the
client’s perception.
The idea of Developing Solutions comes from the technique used by
complex solution salespeople who take the client with them and go through
the solution design, the shaping of it—as much as it can be done according
to the business/market—and truly assess a pattern of choices and features
by querying the client. It is actually a real process to develop the final
version of the solution tailored to the client.
In every industry where solutions are developed for the client, the
procedure is well known, but sometimes even for much simpler products or
services there are many custom options which allow a walking-through
process that makes the client an active part of shaping the solution to fit
their needs.
BTW, can you imagine a Ferrari buyer who doesn’t ask for anything
more than a standard basic model?
The Developing Solutions stage is gaining importance in a growing
number of markets and businesses as options and customisation become a
competition battlefield.
In terms of the walking-through process, we can consider some areas
where the seller can lead the client. Let’s try to list the most relevant of
them in two groups—products and services—with the purpose of
highlighting what can be considered most relevant for each of them.

Product
The subject of products can be covered under five main topics:

1. Features
2. User’s value
3. Benefits
4. Value added
 5. Competitor comparison

When shaping a product, it is extremely easy to discuss any feature to add.

Depending on the client’s perception of needs, the seller can explain each
possible feature and its added value to the product as this can support the
client’s decision-making process.
The user’s perceived value of a product largely depends on the user’s
purpose related to the product itself.
Benefits can be extras to add on top of the user’s value of the product.
The salesperson can properly highlight them to make the counterpart
aware of them. Extra benefits are unexpected and can be perceived as free
value added to the product use.
The value added is mainly related to the client’s purpose of use.
Knowing what product is going to be substituted and what the choices are,
the salesperson can leverage the client’s perception of the value of use, and,
even more, leverage how this solution could add any extra value in its use.
Comparison with competitors can be tricky. Experienced salespeople
rarely go there, to avoid leaving the impression that they are just
diminishing others’ products in order to make theirs look better. But
notwithstanding that, sometimes helping the client to compare products can
be useful; avoid forcing any point of view or opinion, but use facts-based
analysis and the process of enquiring about what the client needs and how
this or the other product will fit into that pattern of needs.
This can be a very hard task for any seller who is keen to use shortcuts,
or who tends to be overconfident about the product he or she is selling,
having limited awareness of the competitive landscape. Compare other
solutions, to work successfully, requires a truly open mind, a deep
knowledge of most—if not all—of the solutions that can compete, and an
effective client-centred approach based on the intention to truly achieve the
best for the client (well beyond our own need to sell).
This is the reason why organisational culture matters so much with
regard to this task performance: when the company has a customer-centric
culture, it enables each salesperson to develop this approach and be the
client’s ally in the product selection.
Service
Service can be covered under three main topics:

1. User’s experience
2. User’s value
3. Outcome

Services have the characteristic that they do not exist until they are created
with the client.* Hence they differ from products as during the service’s
sales process the object doesn’t exist and the value perception largely
depends on the user’s experience of the service co-creation. In some way
this is also a relevant part of the product’s value, likewise the user
experience of a physical object really matters to the user’s perception of
value and it is considered, nowadays, the ultimate competitive battlefield.
But for services this subject becomes of paramount importance.
* Carlzon, J., Moments of Truth, Ballinger Pub Co., 1987.

An amazing Alan Arkin partnering with a wonderful Michael

Douglas in The Kominsky Method (Netflix, 2018), comments
on the water pressure of the hotel shower where they are
spending one night: “I’d love to pay more for a hotel with
proper water pressure”

The value of the service itself clearly depends on the user’s purpose, but
how to leverage this is what matters the most. Salespeople should have a
clear plan of what actions affect the counterpart’s perception of value,
matching the user’s purposes to the offered service features. Salespeople
who only rely on the brand’s image and do not feel any need to engage the
clientele on what they will get from the service developed under that very
brand are not using the opportunity for leverage to boost the user’s
experience during the sales process!
Experienced salespeople know that a service always implies a larger
outcome than merely its individual service purpose. The complex task of
transferring to the counterpart an appropriate awareness of “all possible”
outcomes the client will be able to achieve via the specific service, will
influence the client’s value perception. Hence this capability of a
salesperson is absolutely necessary and relevant for the sales process
success. This could also be a new and enhanced use of the salesperson’s
oratorical ability to engage the client in foreseeing the solution’s qualities.

Therefore, Developing Solutions is the stage where salespeople can

unleash their historically attributed disposition to leverage people’s
emotions to engage their counterparts’ feelings and persuade them. It is not
really important whether the deal regards products or services, even though
some specificity of the two can suggest a fine-tuning of the process. The
Developing Solutions stage is where salespeople engage the prospective
client exploiting their best skill in the art of persuasion* by using
storytelling, rhetorical methods and empathy with the person before them.
But what is extremely important is to clarify that all those qualities can be
ineffective or even have a boomerang effect against the salesperson if not
preceded by a diligent analysis that only comes from the Discovery
Opportunities and Qualification stages.
* Cialdini, R., ibidem.

To sum it up, we can say that the whole process up to this point, if
rigorously applied, is a construction of the last stage: the Negotiation. To be
precise, a successful, modern sales process consists of three phases:

1. Analysis
2. Exploitation
3. Negotiation

First comes deep analysis of the client, starting from any explicit
requirement to concealed and untold personal expectations and needs.
When properly run, the analysis can unveil powerful information that the
salesperson can exploit during the discussion to engage the client with the
solution.
The analysis phase, which takes place either in the Discovery
Opportunities or the Qualification stages, supports the Developing
Solutions phase. In this view the Developing Solutions phase represents the
outcome of the analysis, and it should rely on a client-centric approach
operated by the competence of asking questions.
The Art of Asking Questions,* which boosts empathy, nurtures a
reciprocal understanding and engages the counterpart in the co-creation
from the early stage of interaction, thus enabling the highest success rate in
sales. † Most successful sales processes are developed with that customer-
centric approach, as they are based on good intentions and salespeople have
been well educated in mastering the art of questioning.‡
* Fadem, T. J., The Art of Asking: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, Pearson Education,
2009.
† Cherry, P., Questions that Sell: The Powerful Process for Discovering What Your Customer
Wants, Amacom, 2018.
‡ Gee, V., Gee, J., OPEN-Question Selling: Unlock Your Customer’s Needs to Close the Sale... By
Knowing What to Ask and When to Ask, McGraw Hill, 2007.
Those phases of analysis and exploitation together have the purpose of
engaging prospective clients in the solution shaping, hence giving them the
clearest idea of how the solution truly matches their needs.
The expected outcome of the first part of the sales process is a situation
where a potential client is much keener to conclude the deal with the
salesperson who led the process; thus, the client has a better understanding
of the value of the deal and is aware of the conditions under which he or she
can procure that product/service.
In a few words, someone who is eager to close the deal.
This will introduce us to the next and final stage of the sales process:
Negotiation.

Negotiation
If it gets to this stage, a deal has a good chance of being won. Theoretically,
if all the previous steps of the process have been led with accuracy and
tasks have been consciously deployed—and there has also been included
quite a touch of luck—then closing the deal should be just a matter of
deciding its ancillary conditions.
In fact more often than not negotiation is not an easy piece of work; but
quite the opposite. When it comes to actually putting the signature on the
bottom line, very often major complexities arise.
 The theory is that there shouldn’t be any difficulty if the preceding
process has been developed meticulously; thus an agreement would be
possible and only requires some more understanding from both sides.
Making a step forward from both the seller’s and the buyer’s side is
possible as there is an area where both parties have the very same intention
to be in accord. It implies that when this doesn’t happen, a problem can be
found in the process—maybe something hasn’t been performed properly, or
some data have not been taken into account at the right time, or maybe even
someone has misled the counterpart (which is not always just the
salesperson).
If it is quite logical and straightforward to agree that a properly
developed process should enable a smooth negotiation, it can be not so clear
how to relate the missing agreement problem with any previous issue or
even less how to connect the difficulties in getting a “yes” from the
counterpart with some earlier visible mistake or misunderstanding.*
* Fisher, R., Ury, W., Getting into Yes. Negotiating an Agreement without Giving In, Random
House, 2012.
Many books are available on negotiation, and the complexity of it is
suggested by the existence of professional negotiators. Organisations
require the engagement of these professionals when strong negotiation
skills are needed to develop complex, multiple-side agreements upon
critical issues.
We do not want to explain how to negotiate or how a proper negotiation
should appear; in this book, we only have the opportunity to clarify how the
sales process works systematically and how each part of it has an effect
somewhere else.
If we are not aware of the system dynamics in the sales process, then it
becomes possible that we will not be able to manage it for the best: even
though the negotiation would go well most of the time, we could be far
from the optimal point without being aware of it.
When trying to figure out some connections between visible effects in
the negotiation stage and their roots in the sales process, we can answer by
defining what people should or shouldn’t do in each stage/situation. But this
would be a prescriptive approach which is not the intention of this book, we
only aim to give readers food for thought and enable you all in getting
confident in developing your own vision of the ideal sales process for your
business. Especially now that we are at the bottom of the sales process
management topic discussion, and having described each stage in detail, we
can be pretty sure most readers have got the sense of what we tried to
explain, and they are already empowered by a complete framework of
ideas, perhaps not new ones, but better formalised and indexed.
Hence, we just highlight how connections work with the intention of
clarifying a way to operate the analysis when any sales director,
entrepreneur or business person will be looking for wiring back problems of
the sales process with possible roots along the process itself.
Difficulties at the negotiation stage are generally related to the client’s
experience along the process. One common case might happen when the
enquiring process suffers a misunderstanding or fails to bring empathy to
the interaction. When we, as clients, feel uncomfortable under probing
questioning from a salesperson that seems to have no reason, we can issue
our rebuke at any time—such as later, during negotiations—according to
our own, unexpressed purposes.
When sellers are in the process of querying their counterparts they
should be trained to master the Art of Making Questions in a way that
creates the best experience for their counterparts and avoids rebuke.
Lack of analysis always brings problems during the Developing
Solutions stage and any alteration or adjustment on the way to the solution
already depicted can leave the client not fully convinced about the
capability to understand what is expected by the whole provider company,
not just the single salesperson.
Failure to foster engagement in the Developing Solutions stage can lead
to troubles during negotiation as the client is not satisfied with the
experience yet.
Working back this way by formulating questions about how the system
works and how it should actually work, is the way to fix almost any
problem in sales.

Learning Opportunity
The analysis of the sales process should, according to the preceding
discussion, start from its outputs, understanding why prospects convert or
quit (and when) and what they say or hide about the relationship with the
brand.
Going back to each moment of truth* and wondering about them in order
to know what a proper investigation can enable an efficiency improvement
process is the course to be taken here. Because whether deals are lost or
won, they all are, and should be, learning opportunities. Whether an
organisation is about to redesign the sales process or just in pursuit of
improvement, the analysis of the output is valuable when comprehending
both, won and lost opportunities, and alongside the art of asking questions:
strategic questions that boost the search for the object, not aimed to find
someone responsible for the wrongdoing.
* Gronroos, C., Gummesson, E. (Eds), Service Marketing - Nordic School Perspectives,
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Research Report 1985, p. 2. Carlzon, J., (1987). Moments of
truth, Cambridge, Mass. Ballinger.

Purpose and Outcome

We believe in designing the sales process by stages and dedicate a time slot
to each of them; keeping the focus on each stage one at a time; reducing the
possibility of mixing up procedures and keeping the quest practice clear. As
we discussed before, experienced salespeople can actually mix everything
up and play it for the best with every counterpart in a unique, dedicated
performance. But, in pursuit of feeling confident and improvising, a good
piece of advice is to master the rules first.* The purpose of planning, then
running a sales process as designed, is to pursue a repetitive, measurable
method that can be reviewed and improved by measurable changes.
* Attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”.
The outcome of the process is to select the greatest number of
prospects/opportunities that only match the capability of the company on
the production of those services/products: opportunities that can create
more added value.
This really works well in theory. Thus, theoretical approaches are the
ones that help to understand what could be done in real life; adopting high-
level standards in organisations helps in the worse to fail to smaller, but
acceptable results, than just setting low standards or not setting them at all.
 Companies in pursuit of winning competitive advantages can leverage
the continuous improvement of their sales processes, while the cost-
effectiveness rate makes clear how the sales process output should be kept
maximised for the sake of economic efficiency. This is why managing by
plan and controlling the sales process matters for the whole business
survivance.
Now readers have become aware of what to do to design their own
businesses’ sales process. Going through each stage depicted earlier, adapt
them to the way each business should really sell, enabling it to match their
prospect’s expectations. Also, and foremost in terms of experience with the
brands, when building their relationship with you, clients have expectations
and biases that come from previous experience and knowledge. Being able
to master the sales process enables everyone to use any CRM tool to design
it and create every control and facilitation that enable each salesperson to
stay with the planned fashion of sale.
The CRM that you use as a tool is the digital extension, or a mirror, of
the sales process, enabling everyone in the organisation to embed the
organisation’s culture, and it is worth mentioning:
We refer to complex sales processes related to mission-critical service or
at least Specialties. For conveniences or not-relevant purchases, the process
is often cut to a fraction of what we describe here.

Summary
The Sales Process is extremely relevant in B2B businesses where solutions
or services are the object of the transaction, but it is also very true for
products of relevant value or mission-critical purposes. In this chapter we
went through the complexity of the Sales Process, and we showed how, in
order to manage it for the best, organisations must carefully design it.

It is important to clarify that CRM can make the difference between a modern, efficient and
fluent management and a confused one.
The Sales Process design implies stages and activities to be performed by people in sales.
Each stage implies a dynamic process to achieve some milestones and tasks to do with and for
the client.
Creating a relationship with clients requires a structured, well-conducted series of actions that,
like a dance, engage the counterpart in collaborating.
 Probably the most important activity to be performed in the Sales Process is the Qualification,
a process of reciprocal understanding that not only provides to unveil if the opportunity fits to
the organisation, but also engages the client in the deal creation.
The job of sales dramatically changed in the last 10-15 years and modern salespeople rely on a
pattern of skills well beyond the eloquence and manipulative art of persuasion.

The role of a CRM tool in sales is to support, guide and measure

salespeople's daily effort in the management of deals and people behind
them. The logic of the CRM as a marketing strategy is to enable the
organisation in its mission in the market; planning the use of the digital tool
very often implies the organisation to rethink its way to sell, define and
declare how its policies can fit into the strategy, create a guidance and a
behaviour control not to punish, but to learn and improve.
No other methods have been able to make it happen as much as a digital
CRM tool implementation can nowadays. Organisations have an
opportunity to grab to stay up to date with the unrested environment.
Chapter 4 Leads Generation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-4

Streaming new fresh prospects into the sales process is what every business
wants, it is vital to nurture client bases to keep businesses afloat. This
function is also part of the purpose of creating, developing and nurturing
relationships with clients even if, technically, it is not part of the CRM as a
tool. Leads generation is about operational marketing: engaging people with
content to attract interest and becoming visible by nurturing brand
awareness. It foster interacting with interested people to pursue sales.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Leads, prospects and opportunities: Marketing

2. What engages people
3. What is Leads Generation
4. The buyer persona
5. Prospects and opportunities
6. From leads generation to CRM

Leads, Prospects and Opportunities: Marketing

Everyone is talking about leads generation; in the last few years, it has
become the mantra for business development. An automated system that is
able to create new fresh leads to whom to start selling is now the holy grail
that everyone needs to make their business thrive. Has anything been
recently discovered or developed by new technology or is lead generation
just a new name for something already in place?
New technology available for the generation of leads is not really about
“what” engages people, but how it is possible to make it easier. Thus,
marketing automations are powerful tools that enable marketers to save
time on repetitive tasks, which means boosting everyone’s productivity.
While social media (would) enable reaching target audiences faster and
more effectively.
In reality, social media have become powerful new ponds from where to
fish out potentially interested people; for quite a long time, it has been easy
to pull out leads using the great new features of digital media. Since the
early stages of the social media era, businesses have relocated their
marketing budgets to those channels getting remarkable ROI. However,
leads generation performed by marketing automation as the solution to the
business problem of engaging more people is not wholly correct. We know
that shortcuts are attractive, while complex solutions are not so easy. Hence,
referring to leads generation is more catchy than just saying “marketing,” as
we used to. It is true that marketing can have a wider meaning, while leads
generation focuses on something more specific, but the result of this
shortcut can be that the relevant role of a wider and more comprehensive
approach over many aspects, which is the kernel of marketing, can get lost.
We suggest that the focus on the leads generation stage makes sense
when a broader methodology of marketing is in place. While imagining that
someone can just drop a hook in the pond to fish new clients would lead to
mistakes, doing that after having nurtured the right stretch of water, as the
final gesture of a well-prepared catch, is the recipe for success.
Marketing may have become a worn-out expression, but it is still the
logic behind the business; let’s talk about how to do better marketing then,
and how to connect people, define prospects and finally build opportunities.

What Engages People

Leads are people, not objects -people who have preferences, thoughts and
necessities-. We believe that taking shortcuts implies risk that does not
value that concept enough. People engagement relies on the capability to
give them a value, something relevant for them, something they would even
be prepared to pay for. The relationship with audiences matters, regardless
of whether we have something remarkable to say or not. In those two
options it is only the outcome that differs.
 The point of marketing is to catch people’s attention and to get
them interested in your product. However, so much of
marketing consists of regular old brown cows; the ads (and
the products) all look the same. They’re not remarkable
enough to pull people away from their busy lives and trusted
products or services. That’s why you need a Purple Cow:
something truly remarkable that will catch people’s interest.”*
* Godin, S., Purple Cow, Penguin Books, 2005.

This is how Seth Godin was intending to be “remarkable” in his 2005 book,
something unexpected, out of the ordinary. And it was a remarkable book
indeed!
I’m sure we all can distinguish between something remarkable, which is
out of ordinary but valuable, against something else which is just out of
ordinary. Well, ok, maybe not really everyone can do that… Ok, let’s skip
that.
Remarkable is something that is valuable and presented in a way that
grabs attention, and in the end it really adds value for recipients. On the
other hand, if it only grabs our attention and leaves us with nothing or, even
worse than before, in the end, it just leaves us with a bad feeling, a bad
taste, it is not remarkable at all.
If we share something truly remarkable, then the outcome can only be
positive: interested people get the opportunity to enjoy the value of it. If
what we share is not remarkable, it may be catchy but not valuable, then the
effect is not that people wouldn’t engage, but rather the ones with whom we
engage are probably people who resonate with that message, maybe not our
best message.
Hence, we have to know who we want to engage first. Mainly we must
clarify and decide about the buyer’s persona, the ideal client we want to
attract, and then operate a fine-tuning of communication according to what
we understand about the buyer persona’s register in our day-to-day
work/learning process.
Although it appears relatively easy to decide what strategy and who the
buyer persona is in order to focus on them, it can be very challenging.
Choosing a strategy, is a pattern of long-term decisions. It is often said that
is like getting married: decide to avoid everyone else and focus on one
partner only!†
† Unknown author.
The same is true of deciding upon the buyer’s persona: to get rid of
everyone else and focus on just one kind of person—deciding, consciously,
to not care about any other opportunities and stay focused on making the
best of that one.

What Is Leads Generation?

Leads generation implies doing what allows us to become extremely
interesting for those personas, for example, talking and discussing on what
they care about, that we also care. Saying something remarkable to them
becomes easier, as there is nothing that can be remarkable to everyone, but
anything can be extremely remarkable for a more focused audience.
Hence, the essence of leads generation is to get in contact with people
who are getting in touch with our brand, the logic behind that is: if someone
is interested in what we propose, specific content of ours among the huge
amount of available content, then he or she could be someone who is truly
interested in the specifics of our own matter. How much and how deeply he
or she is captivated is something that must be unveiled.
The funnel concept can have:

1. A hard approach, which is to get immediately in touch with

that person to pursue a sale;
2. A softer approach, which is to let that person know more,
search more, discover more content that relates to the topic and
then engage him or her in a conversation (often referred as
“marketing of permission”).

None of these two approaches is wrong per se, sometimes we just observe:

The first approach is taken when the audience is smaller, or the business is in its initial stage or
there are survival problems. If the need to sell is higher, then the strategy is focused on acting
immediately;
 The second approach is more common when a business has a wider audience, is much more
settled and focuses on selecting the right clients more than any possible client.

But the job is not done yet. Starting a conversation with someone is just a
first step into the waters of a relationship. With this starts the sequence of
moments of truth, where the relationship matters—sometimes—more than
the object.

How an LG Funnel Works

The person who enters into the funnel of engagement can be led to discover
more relevant content that provides her or him with more valuable
resources, testing and discovering the person’s eagerness on the matter.
The standard methodology of a funnel consists of content anyone can
freely benefit from; it then requires people to qualify themselves, depending
on the relevance of the proposed content but also by the industry habits—
the person’s qualification spans from a simple mailbox address to a more
complete request of details. Lately, the trend is to reduce the engagement
bar, not really to pave the way for more contacts, which is actually against
the purpose of selecting ideal clients, but in the awareness of a possible
disengagement of also perfect-fit prospects. People's habits change, the
trend is to lessen the engagement effort and everyone expects this: even
perfectly motivated, fit-ideal prospects can disentangle themselves from the
engagement funnel if they perceive a greater effort than its expected
outcome value.
Free content can be just the content of a website or a specific topic-
focused document; to proceed further and get something even more
valuable, the qualification should allow the company to collect data and
engage in the conversation.
While keeping the balance between freely available value sharing and
return of information is important, it is actually a fine-line border that
strongly depends on the value perception of the solution. To recall a
previously seen concept: the more mission-critical a solution is, the more
anyone really interested in it will be ready to pay a price for any valuable
information over it.
Pay-in price is a broader concept, it can effectively be worth to pay a
consultancy fee in order to get it in the most suitable way, or just leave an
email address to get access to some valuable information rather than browse
around to search for what can just be found freely.
The less painful the need, the less effort is acceptable to find a solution
that relieves the problem. “Effort” here also means time. How long should
you browse around to collect enough information to make the perfect
decision when a solution ready for you is just one click away? (No matter
if, to get this benefit, you store your credit card data in their system and you
could probably pay a lower price somewhere else for it.)
Once the person engages in some conversation, the two approaches
unleash the potential of the contact, but they also unveil the organisation’s
culture.

Sell Now
“We are sure people that entered the funnel are clients. They are looking to
buy, they need a solution as they have the pain, hence we contact them to
start discussing the deal: we start selling. If we don’t, they buy somewhere
else.”
The approach to sell now has its reasons to still be in place: if it is
designed by a well-aware management who is conscious of the implications
of it and the assumptions behind that decision are all constantly verified,
then fine: it is a working method that serves specific needs of clients.
The organisation’s reasons can include:

Value of the object

Value perceived by clients
Use’s function of the object
Standard of the industry
…

Some of the reasons that can be perceived are:

Pressure to sell
Poor value
Organisational culture sales-centric
...
The first pattern of reasons is totally fine: when they are well controlled by
the management, they imply the use of a sell-now approach.
The second pattern of reasons shows what clients could perceive when a
perfect design of the sales process, based on the previous reasons, is
missing.

Help Now

“Helping is the new selling. As the buyer's journey has

changed, so too has the approach of a today's salesperson.
Though it sounds counterintuitive, make your first aim to help
prospects in reaching their goals, -not your sales goals- a
sales person can achieve both.”*
* Mertes, N., With Buyers in Control, Helping is the New Selling, weidert.com, 2019.

More businesses are now focusing on providing help to customers as a first

move, then customers who would be searching for something more, will be
already well-aware of whom can help them. Likewise, as Jay Baer wrote in
2013: focus on offering free service to everyone with the aim of nurturing
an audience it will support your brand awareness.*
* Baer, J., Youtility, Why Smart Marketing Is about Help not Hype, Penguin Books, 2013.
Under this paradigm, the help-now approach makes sense: let that person
know more, search more, discover more content that matters to the topic
and then engage him or her in a conversation. Let them discover among
your free content anything that can help them in making a step forward. By
doing that you can qualify them, track their journey and pair them with the
Buyer Persona you already defined.
If they match, then they are real prospects with whom making business
will come almost organically.
The organisational culture of a help-now approach can be perceived as:
Valuing the client
Having the mission to provide solutions
Offering value for money
…
An advantage that people can exploit is to get free help and not proceed any
further. On top of it, this method can probably become quite expensive.
People who perceive the solution as critical may wish to get support in
order to learn about the solution itself and they also need to qualify the
provider before proceeding. Once those points are reached, trusting the
provider to put in place the solution will come.
If people are keen to take advantage of the free knowledge, but are not
really committed to paying for it, there isn’t much we can do. Imagine if
you would have engaged them in a sales process, or even worse in a deal,
just to discover that they did not value your product/service enough to pay
for it, but rather they were only there to grab something for free.
Here the qualification is in place. Anyone who just wishes to take free
advantage doesn’t match the Buyer Persona (for now). It would be then
much better to save resources by not engaging that person and focusing on
ones who do. However, we do accept that nobody exactly knows if, over
time, today’s wrong person can change the situation and become the ideal
client we want on board. Hence, offering free help and knowledge is either
a qualification tool to avoid bad resource allocation and an investment in
future relationships that can, eventually, mature.

The Buyer Persona

We can see how all the paradigms depicted till now are strongly based on
two pillars:

The purchasing process modelling

The buyer persona(s) definition

The buyer’s value perspective about the solution matters on the purchasing
process they wish to perform. If the sales process defines the way in which
providers sell, its design is intended for the typical buyer: the buyer
persona. But the same solution can have different values for different uses,
as they totally depend on the client’s purposes, the value/effort perception
will vary accordingly. It implies that buyers will stick to the sales process as
long as they match with the expected buyer persona. If they differ from that
character, they wish to buy following their own agenda.
 Hence, the buyer persona of each product/service is the most important
parameter to take into account when we define either the marketing effort—
what engages people—or the leads generation—how to engage them. And,
last but not the least, how they buy—the sales process.
The process to define the buyer personas is probably one of the most
complex and important duties of marketing. An effective description of the
different buyer personas, as we have just seen, empowers the whole
process: from a greater engagement to an improved effectiveness of the
sales process.
A poor definition can lead to taking onboard problems that cannot easily
be traced back to that strategic mistake.
Some of the issues an organisation can experience when they lack a
proper picture of their optimal buyer persona are as follows:

Lack of engagement

– A high marketing effort that does not create enough traffic.

Poor leads generation

– People do not respond positively either to sell-now or help-now approaches.

Scarce conversion rate

– Among marketing qualified people, the conversion rate is still lower than expected.
Highly troubled sales process

– Salespeople have to apply a massive effort to close deals.

High level of complaints and refunds

– Customers appear difficult to satisfy, after sales complaints are usual, as requests for
refunds or court cases can be above the industry average.
Rarity of reviews and referrals

– Customers who refer to a satisfactory purchase are scattered, the self-started positive
reviews of the experience can be infrequent. While “haters” are more commonly
prone to leave bad reviews.
Economics and financial struggle

– The organisation can experience EBITDA shrinking, a lower ROI and difficulties
accessing investors and funding sources.
As we can see there are many possible effects, it is not a rule that they all
will happen and their magnitude will always be dramatic. But when they are
in place, it is worth investigating in this direction. Also on how are strategic
decisions, including deciding the ideal-client, have been taken?
Businesses that have discovered their best buyers, and can define them
precisely, report a superior performance pattern.
How to distinguish between many possible clients and which of them are
more likely to get your services is “the” business problem. The issue that
every business faces is to determine a valuable and relevant audience, big
enough to be a market but narrow enough to be defined by common
features and needs.
Each time the management describes a relevant feature of the ideal-
client, it excludes a wide chunk of people who do not show that feature.
Any critical need to address excludes anyone who does not feel that as a
critical point. Any function of use relevant for the value perceived erases
dozens if not thousands of possible clients. The more narrowly we define it,
the fewer people will fit into it. Hence, the need to define the relevant pain
that affects a wide-enough audience of people (or businesses) to be a
market.
To lead the process of defining the Buyer Persona in a business-to-
business (B2B) market, we suggest an enquiring method to define what are
the most important client’s traits.
It relies on four parameters that lead to understanding the customer’s
knowledge that are paramount to shape the relationship. We can define it as
the WHWT acronym. That here is not a dog.*
* See West Highland White Terrier.

WHWT is about understanding the client’s specific situation and needs:

What do they do
How do they do it
Why they do it
To whom they do it

Gathering information by this simple method enables us to define how we

can work with that counterpart.
What do they do
It tells us if what they do might benefit from our solution(s).

How do they do what they do

Clarify if their processes, methodologies and beliefs fit with our solution(s)
or eventually they are ahead of it or, instead, far behind it. In the latter case,
it could be more beneficial to adopt our solution, while the former suggests
we can’t add much value to their processes.

Why they do what they do

Here we can grasp their intentions, what do they believe they are good at
and what kind of value they want to bring to their own clients. What their
values are and how we fit into their vision of the world.

To whom they do what they do

If we understand their end-users and their clients, we can better figure out
what kind of value our counterpart can create for them, why they choose
our counterpart and the real positioning our counterpart owns in their
market. Then we can figure how our solution(s) can help them in creating
more value to their users and clients.
To enable your buyer persona definition process, we suggest the
extraordinary job done by Strategyzer, ignited by Alex Osterwalder.*
* strategyzer.com
What we can report is that the concept of the buyer persona is still not
widely adopted nor fully understood. It seems that many organisations are
afraid to cut away wide clusters of potential buyers only because they are
slightly less sensitive to some parameters, like the pain and the urgency, or
they are too price-sensitive, it means those clients are less keen to pay a
higher price for any solution aimed to solve a problem as they do not
perceive such problem as painful. As a result, those organisations are still
engaging many different kinds of buyers by nurturing wider audiences in
the hope of getting more traffic, and they do it by avoiding a focused
communication to one addressable need. Doing so, they also undermine
their positioning and it results as less relevant, first of all for the most
interesting cluster of possible clients, but ultimately for all of possible
clients. This implies that the value perceived by each of them is lower than
what was planned by the organisation, and the solution can result in a fierce
opposition to the pricing. It might result in a higher churn rate than
expected, and a wider request of price reduction, discounts and gratuities
made by salespeople. Last but not least, to make things less easy, we can
have many Buyer Personas for the same product/service, as long as we
differentiate the sales process (and sales conditions) in accordance with
each different buyer persona we are going to engage. It may imply the need
to create different communication registers that should be delivered to the
right prospect.

Prospect and Opportunities

When people, now called leads, are qualified on the marketing funnel, they
pass through to the sales process.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) are
two qualification processes. The first is related to the leads generation
funnel:

“A marketing qualified lead is a lead who has been deemed

more likely to become a customer compared to other leads.
This qualification is based on what web pages a person has
visited, what they've downloaded, and similar engagement
with the business's content.

A company's lead-intelligence is often informed by closed-

loop analytics. Sit down with your sales managers to
determine which demographics, activities and behaviors make
for an MQL at your company.

Based on the lead definitions you create, you can assign point
values for various MQL qualifications in order to form the
basis of your lead scoring system.
 This will ensure your sales team is delivered high-quality
leads so they can improve their productivity, while Sales and
Marketing remain aligned in their goals.”*
* Kusinitz, S., The Definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead, Hubspot, 2018.

We already have discussed SQL in Chapter 3, but it is useful to recall it

here again: qualification of leads is like a fine-mesh filtering where
prospects become the ones who are closest to the buyer persona the
organisation has defined. The output of these two combined qualification
stages are people who are truly interested in purchasing the solution. If the
organisation will be the preferred one, it will probably be one of the sales
team goals. These people are now prospects and they represent “sales
opportunities.” More often defined as “deals,” that are abstract entities that
include the object of purchasing (products or services), value, timing,
participants like stakeholders, nature of the agreement and conditions.
In many CRM the term “deals” is used to refer about entities to which
salespeople address their effort along the sales process management; deals
are folders, containers where data, activities and performance, that are
useful for reporting and forecasting on the sales process itself are recorded.

From Leads Generation to CRM

The output of leads generation are people, qualified contacts: someone who,
at a certain point, has been interested in some content that we proposed.
People who, whether they completed the purchasing process or not, are
still relevant contacts for us. From the leads generation process, they have
been moved into the sales process by evaluating if they were in the right
time and situation to become clients.
Whatever would be the end of those processes, what to do with those
contacts is something the organisation has to define. The CRM, here
intended as the repository of contact information, events and interaction,
now has its full role. Firstly, it is to be noted that each business and industry
has its own habits, style and ways to keep the relationship open between
clients and providers.
 The trend to engage clients in a continuous conversation can be more
successful for some kinds of businesses, whereas it may be totally
unacceptable for others. However, a (possible) conversation is definitely a
valuable point of touch to nurture audiences of potential new or repetitive
clients.

The logic of the CRM is what matters the most: deciding what to do is
the real critical point of a CRM management, not how to do it.

The mission to create segmentation in the CRM tool has no

complications—later in this book we will see it—every pre-built platform
has it included, while CRM developed upon fully customisable platforms
should be planned to include it. Any professional developer who is about to
design a CRM tool knows how to do it.
What matters the most is “why” the process of creating segmentation is
relevant and how we can leverage it.
Let’s start analysing the outcome of leads generation and sales process:

Leads Generation
Leads can be qualified (MQL) or not, qualified leads are contacts that are
hypothetically among the market target, it means they may feel the pain or
be aware of the problem to solve.
Here the decisions tree involves:
Leads not qualified
MQL: Marketing Qualified Leads

– Passed into SP (for instance due to RFM matrix’s fit)

– Aborted

Sales Process
Leads become contacts, and they can be qualified (SQL) or not, the
qualified ones are operators who are in search of a solution to their
problem.
Here the decisions tree:
Leads not qualified
 SQL: Sales Qualified Leads

– Prospect abandoned the process (which stage)

– Prospect not converted (at the end of process)
– Prospect converted

Each of the above can be a segment. To each segment, we can plan a

different conversation according to the business development tactics and the
long-term strategy.
In order to design that, we should place some conditions:

Leads Generation
Qualification rules should be clearly defined, what qualifies a
company/person as a possible client? In the MQL stage is more about
general parameters: if they belong to a certain industry or type of
companies…
If not we better record that data.
Here the decisions tree:
I. Non-MQL

A. Why? What reason to exclude them?

Not
1. users/not buyers

a) Proposing to them a sort of “stay in touch” to learn might be useful? y/n

b) Let them browse around free content knowing what they do (CRM records
the web-tracking)

II. MQL

A. Passed into Sales Process (refer to later actions)

B. Aborted
Why?
1. What made it happen?

a) As this output shouldn’t normally happen

Sales Process
In the sales process the qualification stage (see chapter 3) selects the
contacts that are ready to buy—Prospects—allowing to move them along
the sales process. But it is also paramount to keep the Non-SQL contacts as
an audience in the CRM loop, they might change their situation later and be
qualified as prospects at any time.
Here the decisions tree:
I. Not SQL

A. Why? What excluded them?

1. Not ready to buy now

2. Not in the “ideal-client” group
3. Lack of budget
4. Lack of pain/need
5. Time mismatch

a) Designing proper scenarios can help in deciding what is better to do with

each of them.

1. For instance, time mismatch, as not ready to buy now or lack of

budget/need, are those conditions that might change in future? If
this is possible, then it can be good to keep open a conversation
nurturing these relationships.
2. Did it result in prospect buying another solution in the market? If so,
what can be useful to plan to do with them? Can they come back
later to us? Can they feel the need for a better solution, or, once they
have bought, they will never buy another one?

(a) Delete/disengage
(b) Come back to them in a period of time

II. SQL, Qualified Prospects

A. Why did they abandon the process?

B. What made the deal unsuccessful?
C. What made them buy?

1. For each answer, we can define what to do either in short or in long-term

relationships. Each question opens several options such that each may set a
conversation topic.

a) They abandoned the process as their whole experience wasn’t successful.

When, what, how?
 1. Can we learn from it? Can it be useful to offer them anything that—
helping us to learn—make them feel we truly care?

b) They abandoned it because they found another solution that fits their needs
better.

1. What, how, why? Learn what made them decide to buy something
else that can be useful for us? Are they expected to buy again (...
and again)? Can we keep giving them good qualitative content
waiting for them to make another purchase?

2. If they converted, know why they did it: knowing what the decision driver was is
pretty valuable information to leverage with, especially if paired with the person
(company) profile (what kind of prospect he or she [or them] was?)

Based on the outcome of both the leads generation and the sales process
operations, we collect valuable information to feed the later stage: the
audiences nurturing.

Audiences Nurturing
We can now evaluate the possibilities connected with a growing number of
contacts with whom we had some interaction and we have collected some
interest or needs at a certain time.
Of course, there is the GDPR in place, it implies we can’t keep running
marketing campaigns without their consensus and, eventually, we have to
erase any data we collected about them at any time they express this
requirement.
Let’s say that if it is true that getting consensus to keep bothering
someone is getting harder nowadays, having someone interested in some
valuable information often is not a mission impossible.
Then if it is true that end users can ask to delete any data about
themselves from any company’s database, not only about marketing, it is
also true that it requires them to express that request and, if there is not a
serious reason to ask for it: why should they do it?
Knowing what someone, a person or a company, that came in contact
with us sometime in the past did/didn’t do with us is relevant, not only to us
but probably also for themselves. Knowing for instance the preferences of
returning contacts can be useful to skip part of the qualification, or facilitate
the enquiring process—with clear benefits for both parties. We are talking
about returning contacts, because collecting data of clients is normal, and
accepted by everyone, according to sales conditions. It is a different matter
to have clients’ data and use them for marketing purposes and/or exchange
data with business partners. For that purpose, a specific authorisation
should have been given by each client. (Refer to GDPR rule and Privacy
Law wherever they are in place)
Let’s imagine a business that is able to produce good, valuable,
interesting content. No matter the format—written, video or audio—as long
as it is viable for recipients and it is properly addressed to narrowly defined
audiences, meeting their interests, and is capable of grabbing their interest
and creating value to them when using that content for their personal or
business purposes.
This growing style of proposing valuable content aimed at specific
audiences is a powerful method that allows organisations to nurture market
audiences, keep conversations open and build Brand Awareness, define
their Positioning and act on their Brand Character while offering to help
people with the aim of growing their clientele in number and loyalty.
It is what has also been called segmented marketing, the nurture of
groups small enough to be narrowly defined but wide enough to be a
valuable market segment. Differentiation is created by communication,
hence the same solution can serve many different clusters and many
different buyer personas as long as they truly perceive that unique value
proposition they resonate with. It implies that a valuable market segment
can, eventually, be divided into many smaller groups of interest where
communication can be adapted to their own needs. It means either leads
generation or CRM should be designed to communicate in different ways
according to the audience segmentation.
Here B to B marketing takes some influence from a business-to-
consumer (B to C) approach that opens many possibilities of understanding
and planning a more effective marketing campaign.

Summary
Leads generation pushes contact data into the CRM and then the Sales
Process can be run, thereafter the CRM segmentation and planned routines
enable conversations between business and leads/prospects.
It seems simple when said like this! To make it effective for each business style, following its
register of voice and the different possibilities, but also running qualification and sales
processes for each buyer persona, can be, instead, quite complex.
In this chapter, we went through the leads generation stage as an element of the brand’s
marketing, and we discovered the importance of strategically defining the buyer persona to set
the fine-tuning of the conversation, although the whole marketing approach is focused on
either one client’s type or on many different buyer personas.
About the concept of Valuable Help, we analysed what engages people and how the
connection of new leads can work in its logic approach.
Finally, we have seen how those contact people, at the end of all processes, become audiences
in the CRM, people with whom we can create, build and nurture relationships by conversation.
Chapter 5 Helping People
(Customer Service)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-5

Helping is the new selling. Therefore, providing a good service is

paramount. What does it mean for an organisation, and how can we support
this purpose? How can we leverage digital tools to enable people to work
better?
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. People search for solutions

2. Communicating value through valuable service
3. Customer experience
4. Customer service IT tools

People Search for Solutions

No one wakes up in the morning saying: “Let’s go spend money.” OK,
wrong, a few people may indeed do that, especially if they are married to a
tycoon. But let’s leave this minority aside. We know that everyone has a
pattern of needs to fill, and browses around looking for solutions able to
meet those needs. Therefore, people try to trade off between available
resources that are scarce for definition, and possible solutions, always too
many to be managed.
There is a way to assess whether a possible provider and their possible
solutions can fit the seeker’s requirements: get some initial experience.
Even if it is not directly about the solution, at least the experience helps the
seeker to test the provider.
Here starts the opportunity to help people. Welcome people who come to
us for just one piece of information, maybe a little help. Sometimes people
who just come for a webinar, a video or some kind of content with some
free benefit do not really intend to buy. Maybe they get in touch with us to
ask questions they can’t easily find answers to online. Or that they could
find, but they didn’t.
“Helping People” is more than “Customer Care,” as help is offered to
anyone who asks for it, no matter whether they have bought anything from
us yet.
“Yet” is the point. Of course business survives by exchanging value for
money, thus there is no doubt that the purpose of helping is to “convince”
people to become customers. Every company wants it, but today they can
choose a more gentle approach to drive sales. Even if choosing a gentle
approach actually is not really just an option anymore, what we notice is
that businesses that boost their capabilities in helping people show better
results as a direct effect of their perceived competitive value.
We can go ahead with this simple, globally accepted concept of helping
people by reporting what Jay Baer affirms: “Haters are not your problem,
ignoring them is.”*
* Baer, J., Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, Portfolio,
2016.
Let’s analyse what Jay says:

“There are two types of complainers, each with very different

motivations:
Offstage haters. These people simply want solutions to their problems. They complain
via legacy channels where the likelihood of a response is highest —phone, e-mail, and
company websites. Offstage haters don’t care if anyone else finds out, as long as they
get answers.
Onstage haters. These people are often disappointed by a substandard interaction via
traditional channels, so they turn to indirect venues, such as social media, online
review sites, and discussion boards. Onstage haters want more than solutions —they
want an audience to share their righteous indignation.”

Jay answers a relevant question: why do people express such rage? The
reason is often that they just want solutions. Maybe they paid for a
service/product and they are not getting the expected support. They
probably asked for support many times before the point they got irritated.
Such a reaction can be complex to understand. Let’s try to find the sense
behind it. We all live in an extremely fast and stressful environment; in
some ways it is also a violent time where gentle people are often ignored
and good reasons are trampled on while many people prefer shortcuts to get
answers that simplify the matter instead of dealing with complexity. We
have all learnt that raising your voice to be heard is often more effective
than asking gently. Hence good people can also be tempted to show anger,
hate, because behaving gently hasn’t helped them in reaching the point.
Oddly you will more often find opposite opinions about haters, something
like this: “Haters are your confirmation you are doing something right.”*
* Wright, A., 36 Things I Have Learned About Haters, ART+Marketing, Medium, 2016.
Well, as Jay Baer affirms: “... 95% of customers never take the time to
complain.” What we all know is that this really makes sense. Few people
have time to waste, hence anyone who invests time to complain probably
feels they have a big problem.
Therefore, it is a business problem to ignore complaints but it is clearly
quite a problem even to manage them well. Companies that set a
methodology in place using digital tools (CRM) to enable them in dealing
with complaints can better deal with the challenge to stay up to date with
the social changes happening around them. Nowadays it is much more
socially acceptable when people show hate, anger and attack brands for
their “customer care below the expectations.” This can affect the brand’s
reputation, and knowing this, people use it as a weapon to persuade
customer care departments of brands to pay attention to them. It is a great
opportunity for brands that want to excel in customer service, to develop
better customer care and empower it to deal with clients better than the
level that other brands can perform, this is possible and not too hard to
achieve. Opportunities arise where market expectations change and
competitors do not change fast enough, hence being able to appreciate these
trends and setting out a better proposal in the market may pay off. If
customer care, or our own way to help people, is seen as a marketing
opportunity instead of an unavoidable cost, then its value will shift, and so
will its outcome. When companies embrace the opportunity to help their
audiences, their brand becomes popular as people seek help to navigate the
complexity and chaos of their lives. Even a little help about a product or
service that smooths their day is something that people love.
Communicating Value Through Valuable Service
In fact there is more than that; brands that offer help—no matter what— can
turn annoyed, unhappy customers into advocates. Why does this happen?
People who have a need, who are looking for solutions, get annoyed when
their search is stuck in a dead-end. Help that, resolves their situation,
actually sorts it out, and also redeems the waste of time (hence value) they
placed into what seemed a wrong decision—the decision to believe a
provider and eventually buy a solution, only to find out that not only can it
not solve the problem, but it has now added another problem to their life.
And the more the solution is felt to be critical, the more urgent it is and thus
the more they feel irritated.
Getting value back into their purchasing process, also when it can
actually be much longer than expected, means they not only can restore
their trust in the provider, but they also get more value than expected. They
turn a loss into a winning situation. And even if they can’t achieve the
solution they wanted, at least the help makes them feel the loss as part of
the learning process required to reach the expected solution. The outcome is
no longer a loss, but a learning experience.
A company, a brand, which is able to deliver such value, even if the
problem was not created by a product/service of theirs, is a brand that
demonstrates its focus on the relationship with the audience—not just with
existing customers but with anyone who can become a customer in future.
You have probably heard about the 89-year-old man who was stuck at
home in Pennsylvania due to terrible weather while his daughter was
struggling to find a store that would deliver him some food. She finally
found Trader Joe’s, which took care of the problem and went out delivering
food to her old father. And oddly, Trader Joe’s didn’t want to be paid. The
staff truly acted like any human who cares about other humans. People
experience the company’s own real intentions, hence customers reward
them with loyalty. The story went viral as an effect of the employees’ true
intent; as a result, new shoppers considered the shop. If Trader Joe’s had
done this with the intention of going viral and getting more clients, that
would probably have resulted in other clients forming a negative opinion
about the company.
 “You must think in the language of the problems you solve for
your customers. Focus on the customer relationship, not the
transaction and add value each time you interact with them.”*
* Okoli, A., Helping Is the New Selling – With Buyers In Control, The Definition Of
Selling Needs An Update, ZOOVÜ blog, 2017.

Ada Okoli’s article in the Zoovü company’s blog lists some real gems about
why and how helping people pays off. The subtle secret is that intentions
are not for sale.

Customer Experience
“To create positive experiences, you need to stand up for the
customers and have their best interests at heart. Help
customers that want to be helped.

Even if it doesn’t win you a sale immediately, it places you

high in the customer’s good book.”†
† Okoli, A., 2017, ibidem.

Some entrepreneurs could probably be more sceptical about the pay-off that
nice gestures can really get, while they are scared about losing reputation.
Whether the driver is to not get bad reviews or to get more clients later, the
true intentions are what people will perceive. It can be difficult to draw the
line between charity and real, genuine intent to help while still doing
business.
This is not something that can be planned; the movement should come
naturally inside a proper, healthy business. It can be really difficult to be
helpful when your business is going bankrupt or even when you are just
struggling under competition.
But the service offered, as well as the whole customer’s experience,
become a signal of value that people perceive. Credible businesses are
capable of creating value for their clients. It is something good businesses
are capable of putting in place before it is too late.
In a market where customers are more aware, more educated, more
informed, businesses can sustain and flourish by focusing on the customer
experience, leveraging their CRM to propose content to their audiences that
helps them in their quest for solutions. Creating a unique relationship that
helps create reasonable value even before the purchasing process, and even
in case of a non-successful sales attempt, keeps the relationship healthy is
paramount nurturing people’s experience. As we have seen, unqualified
leads can also come back under a more suitable framework, thereby
enabling both parties to benefit from the long-term relationship.
How to use the CRM tool to provide help and simultaneously to collect
data from contact people and how to leverage it to keep conversation afloat
is something that we will see later in more detail, but under the CRM
strategy it is important that a business that is planning the implementation
of CRM or its revamp focuses on the preparation of the “What we want to
achieve with the CRM.”
Our purpose here is to highlight the possible connection and the value of
“Helping People” as a better approach than just “customer care,” in the
CRM logic, where the effort to help people allows businesses to leverage
their CRM tool while they also enhance their audiences.

Business and Technology Strategies Must Become

Indistinguishable
I’m pleased to ask Omar Fogliadini his point of view: “ - It’s a moment of
truth: technology has sustained us through the pandemic and now it
continues to redefine the way we work, live and interact with each other
and with businesses.
Many organisations appear to be out of sync, sometimes too rigid or
slow moving, at a pace that is definitely slower than the consumer’s
changing pace. Consumer’s expectations have become liquid across
different product and service categories. They appear no longer comparing
their brand’s experiences between two different companies in the same
space. Rather, they make comparisons between their usual day by day
brand’s experience and the mobile service provider with a best-in-class
airline, or even a digital giant, design & tech-driven player such as Airbnb.
Today’s consumers need, and they expect even more of, a simple, fast,
and meaningful experience delivered in a way that is responsive in the
moment they live.
Many companies lack the digital tools needed to deliver on consumer’s
changing needs. They are still reliant on 10-year-old systems and inherently
react slowly with backward-looking and incomplete data. These tools can
be unable to translate the massive volume of customer data and signals into
immediate actions and smart decisions that drive customer acquisition,
wallet share, retention. But probably the need to embrace new tools also
depends on other dynamics that organisations find hard to overcome, the
environment is changing at a speed that giant and slow pace organisations
can’t really face. The more they try to do that by engaging themselves into
big projects to update their digital infrastructure the less they can react fast
enough. This is why medium organisations can actually have a great
competitive advantage: they are not too small to lack in resources and skills
and not too big to be stuck into dynamics that can hold them back from
acting.

Enabling the User-First, Omnichannel Experience

Companies must rethink how and where they connect with consumers. The
most successful companies in the post-coronavirus digital age are
integrating this approach by prioritizing three elements:

1. Availability of online purchasing capability

2. Ease of navigating phygital customer journeys
3. Seamless integration of sales support and advice capabilities.

Experiences must be local, fast and relevant to the moment. By using big
data, predictive analytics, and machine learning, companies can go from
“How are we doing?” to “What do customers want next?” This customer-
focused, data-driven approach will allow companies to unlock efficiencies,
predict customer behavior, track satisfaction drivers, anticipate churn, and
flag opportunities to turn loyalty into profitability.
Sync the Tech, Data and Human Agenda
“Phygital” is poised to take the best components from the digital experience
such as immediacy, immersion, and speed and meshes it with physical
products and personal interactions. Now, with the added need to bridge
social distancing, digital tools can step in to minimise unnecessary human
interactions whilst boosting a sense of connection.
Whilst we may be constrained to social distance, social shopping is
ramping up to transform our retail world into an exciting experience.
Digital marketers can no longer afford to have separate strategies for retail
and eCommerce. The entire shopping experience has to be multi-layered
and interlinked if tomorrow’s consumers are to enjoy an improved user
experience.-”*
* Fogliadini, O., LifeData, 2021.

Customers’ Service IT Tools

If we keep the classic, already well-known, designation of customer service
or customer care to talk about the topic and digital tools that empower this
function, we can better understand the framework. Still, the purpose
remains to help people in their solution search who could, eventually or
possibly, be our customers.
Let’s define two stages:

1. Helping by providing resources for self-service fruition

2. Helping by direct support and assistance

Under the first stage, to nurture audiences, what matters is the creation of
qualitative contents by focusing on the buyer persona’s need and style. Let
the content be available for free for the first engagement, then foster the
next level of engagement by providing even more knowledge-based content
to registered users.
Content is the value, but its availability and searchability are key to
making people benefit from it. No value can be obtained from a hidden
gem, while a lot of value can be derived from a good enough article which
is easy to locate. The real challenge is to stand out from the crowd by
establishing authority, giving the audience confidence about the intrinsic
value.
It has often been said that content should be “awesome,” but probably
more than that the content should be authoritative, easy to find and then
(possibly) good.
The method to make helpful content available is to nurture any media
channel and search engine optimisation so that anyone approaching the
matter will find it.
This is the marketing function that, in the digital world, is run by specific
tools that are the marketing automation platforms. The same kind of tool we
have seen in leads generation, where we mentioned content in a generic
way. Here we join the two: promote contents that help people!
The second stage, that is, helping people by direct support and
assistance, is a much more labour-intensive activity. For this very reason, it
can be a problem but also brings opportunities. One problem comes from
the necessity of running it using personnel, as solutions like using ChatBots
as automatic responders do not seem to have been able to match the human
touch yet. They can support the process, especially leading people when it
comes to suggesting any related content. The function of ChatBots is then
pretty useful when they are transactional ChatBots, as pre-designed
automation that provides customers with a fixed set of choices.* Customers
select a relevant option for what they want to achieve, then the chatbot
guides them through the process. More complex is the case of a
conversational chatbot, designed to understand and respond to a
conversation in a natural, human-like manner—something that seems not
fully achieved—. For this reason, the chatbot experience is debated; it
surely improves speed, but can be not pleasant for customers who can’t find
a solution. Hence, what to choose between machine and human interaction
is the wrong question for a company to ask.†
* Bullock, M., Chatbots, are they the Panacea for Customer Experience?, Medium, 2019.
† Jones, T., Man vs. Machine: Chatbots and the Future of Customer Service, customerthink.com,
2017.
ChatBots would anyway be an improvement on the dreadful, once-
fashionable FAQs page. The idea that someone would be happy to waste
time on a FAQ page is just so old-fashioned, and it can lead businesses to
the bottom of the customer’s experience ranking nowadays.
 The solutions applied till now, the call centre department, didn’t solve
the problem; then it is still clear that call centres run by customer service
personnel can be highly expensive and often demonstrate low levels of
efficiency. Outsourcing those workforces achieved the goal of cost
reduction but, on the other hand, it left this mission-critical function led by
a productivity driver to be managed from outside the business “owner’s”
control, who therefore cannot exert the genuine intention of helping people.
The opportunity comes from the possibility to deliver first-class
interactions, best assistance, valuable support and help to everyone in need,
something that definitely has a paramount impact on the value of the
business. Technology definitely helps: customer support platforms are tools
situated alongside the CRM and the marketing automation, and their role
spans from the engagement stage to the after-sales support stage. And for
this reason, they have a very special role in the business processes. They are
not CRM even if their function can be integrated into a CRM platform, or
they can be run independently by a more specialised tool that does not need
to include the CRM.
The CRM remains at the core of the architecture and is where data are
stored; integrated service platforms use and combine that data, also feeding
the CRM with conversational events.
Technology today allows such an enhancement in service management
that was pretty much impossible in the past. A company like Rapha
Sportswear manages a traffic of 13000+ service tickets per month with 40
agents, while Lonely Planet hits only 5000+ tickets per month with 27
agents.
The solution for a medium enterprise can be to implement a dedicated
customer service tool, integrating it with a CRM that supports the sales
process. Eventually, the organisation can also use a third element such as a
conversational database to store data garnered from the chat, ticketing and
all other conversation channels like text messaging, WhatsApp, Messenger
and social media.
The result will be a system that provides real-time information on any
interaction between each client and anyone in the company at any time. It
tracks the specific client position, such as if he or she is in the sales process
or included in an audience or is a happy client or whatever else. It also
enables developing detailed reporting about the interaction trends and
customers’ journey.
The logic behind it relies on the specialisation of tools and the flexibility
to decide which among all the available tools better fits the business
requirements for each function. We believe among many tools each
organisation should select the one that enables the business to run the
processes in its own fashion and does not force the company to change its
processes to match the tool. Therefore, choosing the right service platform
that enables the service teams in working efficiently on their own processes
can already be a challenge. Then there is the difficulty of implementing a
CRM that fits the business sales process, either a business-to-business,
business-to-consumer or business-to-business-to-consumer business model,
with complex or simple, straightforward sales actions.
After this, we must also consider the complexity of the selection of an
appropriate marketing automation, another specific tool that should enable
the content’s searchability in every channel and support the process of leads
generation by feeding the CRM and taking control of contacts’ behaviour
on the website as well as interactions with proposed contents.
To limit the system architecture analysis just here, we can see how the
complexity of each tool and its mission-critical functions lead to two
possibilities: one big tool that runs everything, or a composed mix of
different integrated tools. We will come back to these options later in this
book, as they entail different approaches and also a complex competencies
pattern available inside the company.

The Customer Service Vision 2020

(Market research from Zendesk)

The Past Year Brought Swift and Unprecedented Change*

* Zendesk, Redefining CX for a New Era, Zendesk, 2021.
Not only did a global pandemic transform the way we live, collaborate and
connect, but economic and social disruptions forced customers to re-
examine their values and what they expect from the companies they do
business with.
 We’ve been on a long march toward a digital-first world. One where all
interactions between company and customer, and company and employee
transcend physical spaces. While the concept of digital transformation is
certainly nothing new, never before has it been so vital for all companies to
push ahead or risk playing catch up. Virtually overnight, shelter-in-place
orders drove commerce almost exclusively online, forced companies of all
sizes to contend with the future of their workplaces and set new baselines
around what customers expect.
Against the backdrop of dizzying change and record high engagement,
companies have had to adapt in ways that they never thought possible, at a
time when the customer experience has only become more important.
Customers want speed and convenience, but they’re also seeking empathy
and commitment to the core issues that they care about. It’s a high bar, at a
particularly challenging time, but companies that invest in solutions to help
them work smarter and adapt quickly to evolving customer preferences will
be better prepared to handle any uncertainty that lies ahead.
More conversation leads to better relationships. † This is true in life and
in customer service. With friends, it’s easy to begin a conversation on
Facebook and to pick it up in person, but in customer service, it can be a lot
more challenging. Multiply the number of customers with the number of
communication channels available and the ease with which customers can
communicate on their mobile devices, and suddenly there’s a lot to track.
Without a unified support system, customer conversations become siloed in
different tools or software, creating a disjointed customer experience. These
days, it is as important to answer customers as it is to track when and where
they contact you, and to pick up each conversation exactly where the last
one left off.
† Zendesk, Better Customer Experience with Omni-Channel Engagement, Zendesk, 2021.

The Changing Definition of Good Service

The digital economy and the rapid adoption of technology have changed
everything about the customer experience. Consumers rely on word of
mouth as much as ever, but often from review sites, from people they don’t
know. They’re also interacting with companies before and after the point of
sale to ask questions before making a commitment. There’s more
information at hand, leading to more informed decision making, which is
great—except that the multitude of consumer questions places a higher
demand for resources on a business. The more a business meets consumer
expectations, the higher these expectations climb. It may sound daunting,
but consumers are raising the bar and helping all of us to provide better
customer service. Research in Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends
Report 2020 revealed how high the customer loyalty bar has become.
Consumers expect to reach brands on more channels than ever and demand
better resolution times across every touch-point of engagement.
While traditional contact touch-points, such as email and the phone,
remain important, Benchmark research revealed that patience for response
times is shortening, as 51% of respondents expect a response in under five
minutes on the phone and 28% expect the same on live chat. The
immediacy of a conversation on new and emerging channels like social
media and text messaging can raise customer expectations for speedy
responses over traditional channels, such as email and the phone. And speed
is an increasingly important factor in how customers choose to contact your
business.
In fact, findings also show that half of customers choose a channel based
on how fast they need a response, and half say that they like to contact
customer service over the same channels that they use to interact with
families and friends. The details are in the data: Delivering fast responses
on your customers’ channels of choice affects customer satisfaction and
loyalty directly.
 Figure 5.1 What customers expect in terms of answering
time.

However, despite customers’ expectations, most companies aren’t

incorporating channels other than phone and email. In fact, fewer than 30%
offer chat, social messaging, bots or communities—key channels for quick
and easy communication.

Help Your Team Meet Customers’ Expectations

It’s possible to give customers what they want, but you’ll need an
engagement model that allows you to move with the customer, and to shift
in time with the customer’s requirements, preferences and changing
expectations. You’ll also need a solution that does more for you. Solving a
ticket is good, but uncovering the root problem is better. Excellent service
isn’t just about resolving a ticket—it’s about getting to know your customer.
 A good way to get to know your customers better is to give them choices
for how and when to interact with your business. It’s not just that some
customers prefer the phone, while others gravitate towards self-service—it’s
more that customers prefer to have options. Based on the complexity of the
question, how convenient it is to find help and the context—who the
customer is, what they’re doing and how urgently they need an answer—the
right channel will often make itself apparent.

Figure 5.2 Trends and existing situation of Customer Care

contact management.

The ability to offer seamless service via all channels, or to turn channels
on or off strategically as you grow, allows businesses of all sizes to meet
consumers’ expectations. The key is to enable your customers to have
natural conversations with your business, regardless of how or when they
contact you.
This involves connecting all channels so that agents can have continuous
conversations, with access to history and context, to give customers the
effortless, fast and personalised experiences that they expect.
Let Customers Say It Once, and Once Only
A hallmark of excellent service is to make it easy for a customer to contact
a business and to get help. However, this is a sticking point for many
businesses offering support across channels. When channels are served by
different agents using different systems, customers have to explain their
problem—and every step they’ve already taken to resolve the problem—to
everyone they talk to.
This has been the way of things for a long time, but it’s no longer the
status quo. In fact, 71% of customers expect companies to collaborate
internally so that they don’t have to repeat themselves.
To deliver on customer expectations, support teams will need a
connective layer of tissue that gives agents the context they need to have
natural conversations with customers, such as the customer’s email address,
account type or the reason why they last contacted you. With this,
customers can get the personalised experiences that they expect, and agents
won’t have to spend time asking the same questions over and over again.
Customers often begin an interaction on the channel that’s most
convenient for them. They tend to start with self-service, by searching for
an answer in your Help Centre. From there, they may initiate a chat.
The agent handling the chat should know which articles the customer has
already viewed so that they don’t offer the same article in response. When
agents are guided by a central source of customer intelligence, they’re
empowered to make decisions based on data instead of intuition.
Similarly, when support is embedded into your app, there’s no need to
ask a customer to tell you which version and which device they’re using.
Agents can get to the bottom of the problem sooner, and with the help of
AI, see how likely the customer is to be satisfied with the interaction, as
well as take steps to ensure a positive experience.
 Figure 5.3 Talking about User’s Experience—and what
customer expect.

Connected Conversations Lead to More Insight

The gains in productivity go far beyond removing repetition. Fostering
natural, connected conversations across touch-points allows businesses to
meet customers where they are and glean intelligence from each
interaction.*
* Zendesk, Better Customer Experience with Omni-Channel Engagement, Zendesk, 2021.

Summary
When we talk about customer care, most managers and entrepreneurs just
link this concept to an expensive army of call centre young people who
have to answer 24/7 to dummy customers who didn’t understand how to use
the product.
In this chapter we discussed a little about the IT matter and how to make
it with a digital tool, but mainly we challenged that paradigm:
People who contact the companies are in search of solutions, they ask for help.
Companies that receive requests of any type have the fantastic opportunity to engage prospects
and existing clients in a conversation, providing support, help and ultimately value which are
more relevant to attract customers than any kind of leads generation.
Boosting the customer experience to retain them is also part of the customer care stage
mission. But it can also be a fantastic channel to test effects on clients’ experience of any
change or improvement.
IT tools that enable omnichannel conversations are now in their early stage, but they become
more reliable everyday. Such tools can be really useful even if they are still complex to
implement.
Among many available platforms that provide “customer care” we suggest selecting carefully
as the implementation is the greatest investment and the functions should be fully integrated to
CRM.
A possible system architecture can be with a conversational database that provides storage and
data exchange with CRM and other software.

Case Study
Giardini, an Italian Case of Success
www.leatheredgepaint.com
Enrico Giardini, Tenente di Vascello, 1976
In 2014 Giardini started producing a brand new product: a leather edge
paint.
Enrico, who joined the family business in 2004, was ready to take care
of it. It was a blind leap as the business was in chemicals for leather,
focused on shoe producers according to the industrial district of Civitanova
Marche.
 Figure 5G01 Giardini website.

The new product was intended to go outside the shoe makers’ market,
providing a growing industry of leather bags and accessories producers with
the value of a better finishing of their products’ edge.

The Story
There was little experience in the company and only a few clients were
active in the leather bag and accessories market at the time. The market was
already served by 5 big players, but Giardini Group decided to take the
challenge and prepared a market test. If you never try, you never fail.
The first website, simple and cost effective, was built by Enrico who has
a background in electronics and served in the army as a navy lieutenant.
The coup of luck Enrico had was to find the best domain name that wasn’t
already taken. The challenge starts. First results are encouraging; search
engine optimisation tests show a high ranking for the search engine word
“leather edge paint.” Enrico decides to embrace a high positioning, high
price for best-in-class customer service.
His preferred readings included Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by
Walter Isaacson. Enrico embraces the “stay foolish” sense of purpose and
accordingly commits himself with addicted attention to a customer-centric
strategy.
His first CRM is a magnetic board where names of prospects are
coloured Post-its, supported by magnets. Stages are vertical columns. The
first year he managed to sell 100K euro worth of the brand new paint. The
growth is mainly organic, later paired with some social campaigning. The
presence in industry fair trades around the world is still one of the main
public inbound media, and Enrico understands the importance of placing
your face on it. He starts acting directly in the promotional video published
on the web; clients who meet him at fair trades recognise him and some
want to take a selfie with Enrico. He becomes a celebrity. While Enrico
understands the importance of data mining and business intelligence, he
also pushes to develop better communication: the challenge is to transfer
the sense of the UX, what the client can expect from the whole purchasing
experience.
Enrico has more luck while interviewing some candidates for the
position of sales assistant. Enrico suddenly understands the great value of a
young graduate when he has already given his word to another, also a very
good one. Enrico takes the risk, telling her: “If you are able to prepare the
HubSpot certification within one day, the job position is yours.” Enrico
knows how hard the challenge is, probably too hard to be achieved in 24
hours. But she made it, in the afternoon she called Enrico and got the job.
Now Enrico found himself with two young, well-educated girls, both
committed to the challenge. It is a bit of a risk to hire two people when you
were planning for one. But entrepreneurs are that kind of people. First
jump, then build the airplane.
One morning Enrico arrives at the office and finds 50 new orders from
50 brand new clients from South Korea. He has never been there and
doesn’t even speak Korean. But someone in that country has posted in a
local social media group a video talking about the Giardini Leather Paint
just the day before. Enrico understands the power of video and invests
resources in that channel with more commitment. Giardini videos explain
how to do it—how to use the paint, what’s the secret for the best application
—for those clients who aim for the best results, they are pure gold. Enrico
is committed to finding the right register to talk to his audience; he is
struggling to define the buyer persona and while doing that he makes
mistakes and takes wrong turns. But tests and trials are the best way to
learn. Measuring it by data intelligence is the key for the learning process
and correcting the direction.
Pricing has been another tough decision as the existing bigger players
offer their products at half of Giardini’s price. To be able to justify pricing
twice the competitors is often felt an unachievable challenge by
entrepreneurs in any industry. Even more so for existing markets with
established competitors. Enrico didn’t start by calculating the production
cost; he set the bar high in order to justify the whole customer service effort
and the extreme attention to every detail. No matter what it requires,
nothing can be left unplanned. Enrico didn’t play to lose, he played to win.
It must be mentioned that the typical costs for the revenue structure of a
small artisan producing £20,000 per year worth of finished goods are
£6,000 of raw leather and £50 of Giardini Paint.

CRM and Leads Generation

Enrico kept the magnetic board as long as he learnt the method, a kanban
visual rendering of the leads generation and sales process. After learning in
HubSpot academy how to run leads generation via marketing automation,
Enrico made the leap of faith in investing in the business. He already had
one-year records that showed him the market opportunity and its trends,
which he decided to grasp. In the Giardini business model, leads generation
matters for the greatest part of the whole process of sales. Of course, it also
requires tracking conversations and stages when prospects are in the
decision-making stage. The great benefit is that human interactions can be
limited and client direct contact is not the most used activity of sales. In this
case, clients mainly get in touch with the mailing automation that has been
set as a human touch messaging platform instead of a fancy template.
The process is not too complicated. Engaging the client with the proper
communication style clarifies if he or she fits the buyer persona, then a
demo of the product follows which provides the client with a free of charge
test. Once the test is over the client is ready to decide. Then nurturing the
contact can be a softer activity; no need to push for a sale.
The great benefit of a reliable, fully customisable marketing automation
was to free up time from repetitive tasks, enabling Enrico and his team to
focus on the harder challenges.

Best Achievements
Giardini in 2020 served 72 countries and even clients such as Google and
Apple along with thousands of small entrepreneurs producing leather goods
on a small scale all around the world. Probably nobody in the Giardini
Group was aware of such a wide production of leather products around the
world when Enrico started testing the market.

Figure 5G02 From the Giardini’s website: the value

proposition.

Turnover hit 300K in the second year, then 450K, 550K, 600K and 800K
in 2019, a steady growth that reveals the stable commitment of the company
around the marketing project.
Among the reasons why it has been achievable, the very first
accomplishment should be attributed to Enrico’s entrepreneurial attitude
and his clear vision that allowed the company to invest resources in the
right actions, facing the decision-making with an awareness of the business
mission.

Greatest Challenges Faced

Among the most important efforts Enrico lists are:
the challenge to define the buyer persona;
creating contents in a stable, methodical fashion to enable a flow of fresh new ideas on a
regular basis;
staying up to date with tech changes; and
developing a team.
We wanted to explore what facing those challenges implies.

1. On the “buyer persona” definition, Enrico affirms that it has

been an ongoing journey, with errors and U-turns, that has
never really ended. Now the definition is pretty much mature;
the HubSpot forms the clients fill in on the website contain a
question that alone can give a highly accountable ranking of
the profile of the buyer and that very question engages them in
different conversational sequences, all done by automated
email messaging.
2. On “Content Creation,” Enrico affirms that it has been the
major effort throughout the many company’s years in business:
it was very hard to find new ideas every day and test them, as
you do not know when they will fail or whether they will be
able to grab attention. You might work for days on the
production of a video that then doesn’t get an audience, and
then you post a stupid post about something unexpected and it
attracts thousands of viewers.

Outcome
Enrico is a positive, proud and happy man; this probably helped him to
keep striving. He has no regrets about the efforts he has made, and he feels
he would do it again if he were asked to. He now serves in the local
community as an elected member of the local administration. Some
entrepreneurs have requested Enrico’s support during their business
development projects. Enrico can tell them the most common errors they
should avoid.
On his personal achievement Enrico has been invited to give a speech at
The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
He only regrets the many errors made: “...if it was not for the many
errors I’ve done, I could live better, being less stressed and, maybe,
achieving more.”
 I couldn’t help myself asking: “Enrico, if you hadn’t made so many
mistakes, would you have been able to achieve such awareness?”

What we can learn

First lesson is for everyone: considering that a small business has been able to achieve this,
there are no more excuses for why medium-size companies can’t make it as well.
Second lesson: even with digital automation in place, the road to success has no shortcuts.
Third lesson: tools are just tools; we can work better with some of them, but if we do not start
from knowing why we want to use them, they won’t add much value to our work.
Fourth lesson: they were right, in marketing there is only one P that matters: People.

Figure 5G03 Giardini website: the qualification process.

Chapter 6 Data Architecture
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-6

What is the architecture of data? Why and how can a set of fields have an
architecture? Are they not all just data?
These are a few questions that often arise during CRM design within
organisations. And it is obvious why people wonder about it, as the purpose
of the CRM itself is not always clear. To have an understanding of why data
need to be organised and planned in quantity, quality and functionality, we
need to start with the purpose of CRM. To enable the CRM tool to unfold
its full potential we need to design its informative scope.
According to the purpose of creating reporting and deploying
information, which is also the final CRM value, we have to decide how
wide and deep the information should be, that becomes a parameter to
define what and how much data we need. In addition to it we must say that
the intrinsic reliability of data implies that we must define how the process
of collecting data should be trustworthy. Generally speaking, a trade-off
between scope and accuracy is always in place under definite budgets. This
is why designing the amount of data required, how the data are to be
collected and their hierarchy and contribution to information building is
important. And this is what data architecture does.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Information and data

2. Data methodisation
3. Collecting data in real life

Information and Data

A CRM is much more than a data repository. Its purpose is to support
business decisions and, in doing that, to smooth the data collection process
within the organisation. Hence defining the scope of the information to
sustain implies the quantity and the variety of data to be collected, stored
and manipulated.
If that concept is easy to understand, controlling the business’s desire to
dominate everything is less immediately straightforward. The deleterious
idea of a client 360-degree view, which has been largely promoted until
recent times, has fed companies’ appetite for knowing everything about the
client, even though it later has been clarified as ineffective.
Business needs information—the more the better. Hence collecting every
available datum is the way. Yes, but again, this is the mainstream, wrong
approach.
The turning point is:
what information each business needs to be effective; and
what data take part of that information and how.

These points are the basis for planning efficient and effective data
collection. Only by having figured out what we need, then we can better
plan the basis to develop it.
We do not deny that the better we can depict the situation of clients,
markets, economics, social, political and scientific trends, the better we can
design the business strategy. What we believe is that there exists a trade-off
between the intent to collect data and the capability of analysing those data
at any level. The chimera of taking everything under consideration is almost
impossible, and for this reason it can lead to mistakes as well as the lack of
information.

“... we are, minute by minute, exposed to a monumental

amount of data. We simply can’t elaborate always, all of them,
it would be even highly costly but essentially useless. On the
other hand, elaborate data serves us to understand things,
their importance, their value.”*
* Testa, A., Il Coltellino Svizzero, Garzanti, 2020.
The balance between the effort and the supposed outcome of a wide range
of data and information management is what entrepreneurs have to decide.
If corporations can generally rely on a vast amount of resources that
enable them in gathering, storing, managing and analyse data and excerpt
information, small businesses are often visionless before big sociological
and macroeconomic downturns, in fact neither type of company is innocent
of wrongdoing. Big corporations fail even if they rely on a much greater
amount of qualitative information. Leaving aside the many fraudsters and
the robbers,* we consider just errors in reading the environment, markets
and technology and how they can be much more common than we are prone
to accept. Hence taking decisions that strike the right balance between what
we can really control and the effort required is an entrepreneurial skill. And
the efficiency and effectiveness of a business strongly rely on that
competence.
* Vermeulen, F., Business exposed: The naked truth about what really goes on in the world of
business, Financial Times, 2012.
All this to say that in order to avoid the temptation of gathering too much
data—data that later we wouldn’t be able to manage, as they can become
really confusing—we must focus on what is really important and actually
required in terms of information for decision-making processes. By doing
that we will be able to better shape the data required and they will probably
be a much more manageable amount.
Then in order to define a data architecture for the CRM tool, we have to
think of its use, and which processes are under consideration and what data
they might require for managing them. The complexity and the kind of sales
processes that need to be managed, affect the type of data, in the same way
a long-term relationship with the clientele can also impact the type and
quantity of data. This is because of the critical role of information required
to manage the relationship in an effective way.
We introduced the WHWT model in Chapter 4; let us use it for an
example of data gathering. WHWT is about understanding the client’s
specific situation and needs:
What they do
How do they do it
Why they do it
To whom they do it
Leading information gathering by this simple method can empower the
relationship with clients. But these questions lead to qualitative information,
not quantitative.
The challenge is to redefine the information in their own basic data to
make it manageable.
Let’s see an example.
General informative description of a business:

They build affordable, high-standard houses.

They use modern technologies and efficient approaches to cost reduction.
They believe they can enable people to live better under a better cost-effective rate.
Their clients are well educated, mainly professionals who appreciate quality and well-being.
To these people, the house is not anymore their life’s purpose.

Unfortunately, this is just fantasy, but you can now imagine the informative
power of this set of information if you run a business focused on builders
active in the real estate market. And probably you can also see how to split
that information into a dataset.
With a general approach it could be split as follows:

Houses
High standard
Cost effective
Medium/high class
Well-being
Minimalist

Among other notable elements we could include a list of types of

technologies adopted. But let’s leave that for now.
This is just a very limited and simple example of what it could look like
when information is dissected into its components: the data.
Why information about clients and markets is relevant doesn’t need to be
repeated, but let’s consider it a bit more carefully as it leads us to the next
stage: under the previous circumstances, what if you run a business that
provides components and technologies to building companies?
Knowing this set of information enables you to define what value your
solution(s) could provide to that company.
 1. If your solutions enable well-being at home and you are
capable of providing them in a really cost-effective way, then
that company will be very sensitive to your value proposition.
2. If your solutions are high level and you occupy the high price,
high standard, high positioning in the market, you will have
some possibilities but your high pricing could be a limiting
factor.
3. If your positioning in the market is focused on best prices, then
you will have limited possibilities to add value to them as long
as they stick with the expressed mission.

We can say that this is not something new; it is what every single
salesperson or business person knows about each client!
The approach we propose here is to formalise it in terms of data and
information. The purpose is to crystallise that data into a dataset, enabling
the most useful data collection into a digital CRM that makes the data
available at any time as well as making it effective to build the information
needed by thus making the information an organisation’s asset instead of
just a salesperson’s personal knowledge. And in doing that, we must
consider how to store data to make them searchable and truly able to render
information.
The digital CRM should be intended as a productivity booster, enabling
faster and better management of a bigger amount of data and being able to
utilise them in useful information rendering, so that processes can be run
more efficiently.
Let’s imagine we want to build an audience of contacts who have certain
characteristics, in order to get into communication with them. The creation
of queries in the database allows us to shape audiences based on data, not
on qualitative information. Consider that qualitative information generally
stored as open text allows people to input any kind of words, without any
specific structure and with no binding on them. If we stored the general
informative description extended as reported before, we would be virtually
unable to select this company by any database query. Because it is a free
text without any structure that can be selected as data.
 Breaking the original extended information down into essential data
allows us to create a dataset of consistent elements, such as the same
structure of the words, numbers or raw data. This will finally enable data
searching.
Let’s check with an example. Here are the parameters with their possible
patterns:

1. PRODUCTION: Houses / Flats / Villas / Hospitals / Shops /

Council houses / …
2. POSITIONING: High Standard / Luxury / Convenience /
Popular / Cost Effective / Lush / Affordable / …
3. FEATURES: High Class / Middle Class / Executive / Blue
collars / Students / Young / …
4. DISTINCTIVE: Well being / Minimalist / Millennials / Aged /
Facilitation

As you can now notice, we reduced the parameters to four and created a
dataset of variables that describe each parameter.
The logic of the query is:
Select:
PRODUCTION = Houses
POSITIONING (contains) High Standard (and) Cost Effective
FEATURES (contains) MediumClass (or) HighClass
DISTINCTIVE (contains) Well Being (and) Minimalist

The audience provided will be a list of contacts; they produce Houses, have
a market positioning of High Standard with a Cost Effective focus aimed at
the middle class or to more affluent clients who care about well-being
without showing off.
We can see how the query works; where there are more variables within
each selection parameter, the possibility to check for all or at least one of
them is the method. For POSITIONING, the query will select contacts that
include both “High Standard” and “Cost Effective,” while in FEATURES it
will select contacts that have “MediumClass” and contacts that have
“HighClass.” This point is central to query settings and it totally depends on
the dataset designed for the database.
 If you have those contacts in your digital CRM, you might have just
created a list of them. You can address communication using laser-focused
messages to engage the specific type of person you wish to target.
This is a multidimensional selection that not only has a more effective
use but also enables flexibility. If your business only sells one solution, sold
in the same way to the very same buyer persona, you can also create a
unidimensional query. Whether you start from the general extended
definition or you use the data that you arrived at through segmentation, it
would be easy to create one single element: YES/NO. Is it a target? Add:
YES. Then select all contacts that have a YES in the field “possible client.”
But when the audiences are numerous and they are more complex, you
aim for different types of buyer persona, to whom you want to send
different messages; then a multidimensional selection enables you to cross
parameters in different ways, shaping different target audiences.
Essentially data are elements of information; they are like components,
bricks, single portions without any value if taken in isolation. But using
them appropriately you can shape a multidimensional body, something that
starts to symbolise, to describe something. This is the information, like a
wall built by bricks. This has a meaning. When you gather additional
information you can shape a more complex matter. This is our idea: a body
of information about a topic creates the context, the meaning. When we
base our understanding upon one single piece of information—just the wall
—we won’t be able to see the complexity of the building. It is only when
we collect more pieces of information, more walls together, that we begin to
see the shape, the structure, we can now outline the building and understand
the whole matter a bit more.
Here we started from the information about what the (hypothetical)
client does, its whole reason for existing, its own role, values and reason
why. We described it along four informative dimensions. Then we broke
them down into components—the bricks, the data.
Labour in the opposite direction, building information upon available
data, is more common, especially when it is required to develop reporting
trends concerning possible clients. Data on a population, collected and
analysed in bulk, produce several consistent audiences.
In the CRM, we—should be able—to split data and aggregate them in
different ways. Combining data along time and space enables to render
structured information about different audiences and trends amid the whole
population.
Information technology in the digital era enables the invaluable power of
digital marketing on social media that fully leverages the capability of data
selection by query and report. Social media platforms own a wide and deep
pattern of data on their users; this feature is used for crafting audiences for
advertising purposes.

Data Methodisation
There are many ways to organise data into a database. What actually
matters here is the inner efficiency of the data structure—the architecture—
that provides the best performance for minimal effort.*
* Stephens, R., Beginning Database Design Solutions, Wiley, 2009.
In building a digital CRM tool we face the very same challenge: how to
design efficient data storage. As this actually seems a tech issue, it is
generally undervalued as a business problem. Tech can do almost anything,
but the question is about what should be done in keeping with strategic
decision making.

Why Data Should Have a Structure

The trap in which many may fall is to build the CRM database along the
way, adding a field to store a datum while they see it. This “building as you
go” style, we can see, has been introduced to ease the user’s control of the
system.
DIY and entry-level CRM platforms mainly support this feature, making
it a market trend that aims to enable organisations to get control of their
systems without excessive dependence on an IT engineer for every little
tweak they require. It implies that organisations can save time and money in
directly managing the digital tools they use, including the CRM. This
opportunity for a more “DIY” approach empowers organisations in many
ways even if it also requires a level of know-how that is still not existent or
“under development” in many organisations. Nowadays companies are
widely adopting digital CRM tools while the world is experiencing a
shortage of IT engineers; vendors are stimulating the market, enabling
organisations to be more independent from the IT service providers. The
result of this is an even stronger boost in the adoption of CRM tools by
lowering their overall cost. But it is a process that requires a significant
investment in knowledge development, understanding what elements are
under the business control and what possibilities are related to the
technology applied. Deciding how to break down information into data and
how to combine data to render information is a central point. In the
previous section we have seen how the function of queries selection works,
hence we can also understand how to reshape information upon a
population, selecting what we need to use in the query. In doing that we can
also see another important task: how to extract the possible interesting
audiences from a wider population.
Let’s imagine we select a list, like Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) or
BoldData. The latter proposes its service as follows:

“....also uses the same financial sources as D&B, such as

local chambers of commerce and financial statements. But we
don’t stop there. We add 200+ extra data fields from other
sources. This results in higher coverage of websites, email
addresses, mobile phone numbers, latitude/longitude, revenue,
employee size, opening hours, geocodes, import/export. These
sources include chambers of commerce, market surveys,
business listings, directories, magazines, public records,
websites, conferences, telephone directories, publishers, social
media and commercial partnerships. All our data is verified
by automated processes and human eyes on an ongoing basis.
Our database is about 341.897.577 businesses worldwide.”

Well, here we are in the opposite situation. We do have a set of data, the
challenge is to create queries that help us in finding, out of 350 million
companies, just a few hundred that will buy our product (!)
The worst idea would probably be to start with 341 million emails or
cold calls. The challenge of digging for opportunities can’t start with old-
fashioned, blunt methods, and the idea of digging out the buyer persona
should remain in place.
This amount of data to explore is just an example of the challenge of
data management in a CRM. In this case, it is quite simple to decide which
parameters to control in order to shrink down the list. The challenge can
become more complex when other elements are added to the dataset. Let’s
say that we select 10,000 companies with some shared characteristics that
fit with our production/service. And let’s imagine we expect several kinds
of buyer persona within that audience, hence we have to profile (see Figure
6.1) them in order to figure out WHWT:
What they do
How they do what they do
Why they do it
To whom they do it

It means adding more fields to store data. Then we will end up with some
very complex queries. That should include many parameters which are
searched for different values. When the system is complex, queries of
multiple parameters become relevant to select out more focused audiences.
 Figure 6.1 An example of a query on many parameters
(30).

Now everyone can see how important it is to control the content which is
allowed to be stored in each field to be able to select the right data and
records when creating queries.

Data Optimisation
There are some simple rules that should lead the data architecture design. It
is all about constraints; here we can list them:

Selection Parameters (data fields) should always be “single choice” or “multiple choice”
avoiding free text.
Constraints should be on numbers and values.
Constraints should also include phone numbers under the standard E.123.
 Mailbox structure, mostly called “email” or “email address” the mailbox should provide a
check on the format of the input, an example is xxxx@xxxx.xxxx where the @ and the dot are
the constraints.
Physical address should be linked to Google Maps and confirmed.

But what is paramount is the control on what each dataset allows for each
multiple or single choice. When we get a list of marketing contacts or we
integrate or download data from apps, those data are often text or integer. It
is our recipient system that should control the data allowed. Let’s have a
look at a very common and ordinary issue: the phone number. Many
systems allow free input. Some include the idea (or more probably lack of a
clear idea) that users can also use Skype names there. Well, let’s analyse the
effect of this decision.
Possible problems:
Lack of the E.123 standardisation makes it impossible to use VoIP systems.
Different types of data can create problems in using any phone technology: impossible to link
the field content to the phone for a call.
Different types of data cannot be recognised by integrated apps.
Often data can go missing: including instructions in the very same field puts things out of
control (office, home…, wife’s number…).
Digit errors cannot be checked.

Possible Benefits:

Fields may be filled easily

Fields can contains different type of data: it get faster to fill them in
What else?

A similar pattern of problems can be considered for any kind of data. While
the field “Phone Number” is a quite trivial example, so is the field
“Address,” and everyone can see the risks of leaving those fields open for
free text.
Being able to see the risk in theory does not always help to prevent
misuse of fields. Many databases and CRM are still weak or lack controls,
and they allow users to set the data “as they like,” It often seems the
simplest and fastest way to enable users to set their own way. Unfortunately
people are not used to thinking strategically with data, and the use of free
text makes them feel enabled to use the fields for more purposes, avoiding
the annoying limitations that constraints imply. The power of a structured
dataset is not immediately clear if we do not think strategically. Some
questions that help to guide and nurture awareness of the problem could be
as follows:
What information do we want to build using that data?
How will they be stored?
Who will input them?
What queries are we going to create?

A more comprehensive approach might suggest that some limitations that a

constraint system in place implies will pay off in terms of efficiency of data
management later.

The Kernel of Data Architecture

The essence of Data Architecture is that a lot of data can be treated like the
phone number above:

1. Consider the benefits and risks of each option such as using

free text or a locked-in selection.
2. If the free text is not beneficial, then plan a pattern of
constraints and guidance that limit the input errors and also
improve the rendering of more reliable information.
3. Consider the relationship between the datum in that field and
its use to define what “shape” the allowed contents can have.

But what really matters for efficient data architecture is the methodology
for working with the data pattern as it can be done with an architectural
design. Architects design objects that should be beautiful, useful and
efficient. “To build a pillar 2 metres wide I didn’t need an architect!”* The
concept is simple: make things work within limited resources, efficiently.
* Bovio, P., About the value of an architect, public speech, 1995.
In Information Technology, there are no bricks and mortar pillars, but
there are many ways to make things unintentionally worse, and when it
comes to data it can be easy to lose control of how information is built and
upon what data. Essentially losing data can lead to information loss and,
eventually, business opportunities losses. In the example at the beginning of
this chapter, under “Information and Data,” we had six elements taken out
of the general extended description.
We then included them within four different parameters, with a process
of deciding and including descriptive words in one parameter instead of
two.
This process can be seen as a simplification of the parameters to control:
nesting data into a lower number of parameters to better control both their
input and output.
When a database contains dozens or even hundreds of data fields, this
reduction is not trivial. What can be input and where, for what reason and in
which format becomes paramount to controlling the efficiency of the
system.
If the labour of extracting an audience in order to analyse a trend is done
over dozens of data fields where we can’t be sure they have a systematic
dataset, the effort required to extract reliable information can be not
appropriate for the outcome.
Other approaches can be to create a dataset of six words to store in one
data field, or six data fields with one for each dimension, or even as many
data fields as possible allowed words. The point is that there isn’t one
correct solution but the solution should be designed in line with the
informative purpose of the data and the needs and importance of the dataset
itself.
Data architecture implies thinking in terms of a comprehensive
approach: systematic thinking that encompasses sources and output,
resources and outcome, behaviour and confidence. Decide what to do in
order to control how data affects the expected outputs is the final purpose.
Bad outputs due to bad data are more common than they are generally
thought.

Collecting Data in Real Life

Effects and Risks
Collecting data to develop a clear, unique and complete view of the
audience has been found to be ineffective mainly because of two reasons:

1. Collecting all the possible data is arduous.

2. Even if someone can achieve it, the view developed about a
“living being,” either a consumer or a company, is just a frame
in the movie of life. The very next day it will be something
else.

It would be fantastic to know as much as possible about an audience with

whom we want to communicate, as we would like to engage all possible
prospects. But what would be the marginal value of that dataset compared
to the effort required to collect all those data and use them, not to mention
keeping them up to date?
What we believe is that there exists a balance between effort and
outcome where data are enough to build useful information to make
decisions.
As we know, perfect decision-making is a chimera and the process is
based on some clear characteristics where deepening data and velocity are
inversely related.
Each purpose and scope has different patterns of those two attributes. It
is thus the data architect’s duty to guide the business in defining the dataset
and the quantity and type of data fields to use in accordance with the type
and class of data to store.
In real life when people have to deal with data input or data
manipulation, the lack of a correct structure of data leads to inefficiencies,
wasted time, loss of data and money and, even worse, disheartenment for
people.
When salespeople are expected to spend an excessive amount of time
gathering data and managing administration duties related to that data,
probably something can be changed. Information technology systems that
smooth processes and make people work better are great, while digital
solutions that are felt as worsening working conditions risk sinking
organisations and businesses.
Summary
In this chapter we walk through the obscure matter of data management,
something that is clear to data scientists but not so much for business
people. Becoming aware of the effects of the data collection process to the
business performance can enhance the care for this matter.

We highlighted how data and information are related, how the latter develops the former, and
how qualitative information strongly depends on the quality of quantitative data.
In order to reach efficiency in the data collection we propose a method of collecting data,
define a structure of them, pursue their optimisation through a proper design of data
architecture.
Design the data collection matters in terms of facing the challenge of real life data processing
management. Considering how and why errors in data processing can happen explain why we
have to create boundaries on it to enhance the quality of data.
Chapter 7 Reporting and
Forecasting
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-7

We are now able to blend data from different sources and shape trends,
figure out the details as well as the overview of the whole population or
split it into different audiences. The informative power of a CRM tool
includes reporting of processes and sales forecasting. These two decisive
tools enable the organisation to pursue control over processes and plan
improvements by tracking the effort, checking results and shaping the
upcoming trends.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Process Reporting
2. Reporting and Forecasting in B to B, complex sales processes
3. Pipeline Analysis
4. Opportunities Analysis
5. Activities Analysis
6. People Analysis
7. Financial Analysis
8. About Metrics
9. The Survivor Bias
10. Sales Team Surviving Strategy
11. About Today’s Reporting
12. What is Expected to be Foreseen
13. Reporting and Forecasting Tool Choice
14. Some possible tools
15. Summary
Process Reporting
Reporting and Forecasting are valuable features for complex processes that
manage worthwhile outcomes. High-valuable business processes such as
leads generation, sales and customer care are both costly and revenue
generating, hence they are worth to be tracked, to plan improvements for
and finally measure them. Digitalisation of processes creates the capability
of tracking performance and productivity and, on top of that, analysing
them and plan for possible improvements. In reality this can be done with
almost any digital tool, even Excel spreadsheets, but issues on how to do it
and mostly the mismatched balance between the effort required to design
and implement a reporting on spreadsheets and its reliability, may
dramatically shift this critical activity of reporting into a lack of action.
People who can’t rely on strong, reliable and steady platforms may allocate
time inefficiently by doing that.
Adopting more sharp and comprehensive tools facilitating the setting of
those valuable features for the best results and getting reliable information
by measuring the effects of any alteration will instead be of paramount
importance for any business, hence creating the best tech environment for
that is still of primary importance.
We have seen in previous chapters the process of leads generation, sales
process and customer care, as well as the way to track activities within
them. Here we will list some tips and approaches to Reporting and
Forecasting, mainly concerning the sales process as this is the process under
more relevant impact of the CRM and ultimately generating revenues.
Reporting on the sales process is relevant not only to improve the
efficiency of sales, but also to bolster the effectiveness of the business as a
whole. Enhancing efficiency in sales has also the effect of enabling
salespeople to work better and be happier about outcomes, and everyone
knows how that can improve effectiveness in sales.
Efficient planning and reporting of the sales process implies a reliable
and steady data input. This is why we stressed the importance of data
architecture settings, as according to the garbage in/garbage out (GIGO)
rule, if we want to get sense out of the database, we need to feed it with
clean and correct data.
Reporting and Forecasting into B to B, Complex
Sales Processes
The decision of what to report can be drawn down at the CRM design
stage. Of paramount importance is to take into account that technology can
enable any kind of data management, thus the problem must be seen as:
what will be useful to know. This concept stresses the matter of the purpose
of information. Knowing what to measure is a business decision, not a
technical one.
In a long sales process, it takes time to complete the cycle; this means
that each deal can sit for weeks or months in the process, and a lot of things
can happen in that time frame as well as decisions being made on the basis
of what has been done or not done. But even sales processes of just a few
days are worth tracking carefully to improve what is going to happen.
Hence reporting becomes vital in planning and controlling when the
complexity is high. According to the previous view, organisations should
carefully plan the information pattern to boost the informative power of
data, something that is not always so straightforward as we might think. As
Eric Ries pointed out, defining the trends to measure organisations can fall
into the Vanity Metrics* pattern: the tracking of events that are only a little
or not at all useful to improve. Different businesses may have completely
different metrics that impact on their growth. Even then, generally
speaking, we can develop a taxonomy of key performance indicators (KPIs)
that are always relevant for sales process performance in business-to-
business.
* Ries, E., The Lean Startup, Crown Publishing, 2011.
Experts in performance measurement have identified a significant
barrier to improved measurement: the need for senior management to agree
on the business performance model for their firm before a comprehensive
system of performance measurement can be developed.†
† Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, Elsevier, 2005.

Sales process KPIs

Pipeline: Performance, Sales Cycle Time
Opportunities: Velocity, Conversion, Value
 Activities: Open, Done in time, Overdue, Done per Deal won, Done per Deal on average,
Done per Deal lost

People KPIs
New Contacts Growth
MQL growth
SQL growth
New Customer Growth
Churn Rate
Nature of audiences
CS
SLA compliance

Financials KPIs
CAC
Opportunities Profitability
CLV

The list can be extended according to each business’s needs. Let’s analyse
the function and use of those parameters. As everyone can clearly figure
out, the sales process is the centre of the analysis, and contacts as well as
financials are also related to it.

Pipeline Analysis
Performance is mainly a measure of effectiveness: the number of deals
managed by time period versus the rate of closure per period, that is, input
versus output. The more deals are opened, the more deals are going to
close, but how this rate changes with time and through quantities is an
indicator of the efficiency of the process.
Adding an X quantity of deals on a sales process that is managing a Y quantity of deals
producing a Z number of closures should add a [Z/Y * X) more closure.
But it can also happen that adding the same quantity of new deals to the same sales process in
different periods may produce different outputs.
Sales Cycle Time is the average time from entering in the sales process of
each deal and its outcome, either won or lost. The average Sales process
Cycle Time and its standard deviation may be a relevant parameter that
defines how the sales department works as a whole. Tracking the average
time’s trend can highlight the financial needs of the business.

Keeping these parameters trend under control may tell us

quite a lot about the sales process health and business
tendencies.

Opportunities Analysis
Going into details of sales by analysing the journey of opportunities gives
more insight into the sales process. This is probably the most common area
of analysis and it can be overvalued if it isn’t properly balanced by other
metrics. This is why multivariate analysis should be taken into account by
starting in-depth analysis on these metrics:

Velocity is the speed at which an opportunity moves through each stage of the process, how
long it sits in each stage, if it jumps stages or if it is closed before the expected stage. Velocity
on average from the point of entering to the closure of the process matches with the Sales
Cycle Time, but it is the behaviour between stages that matters here.
Conversion is the trend of opportunities that have been going to closure. A quite obvious
parameter as long as we consider closure as the deal being won; slightly less obvious if we
want to also track lost opportunities’ trend and each reason why they didn’t close.
Value of opportunities as a trend and its standard deviation may say quite a lot about the
attractiveness of the business with regard to the expected characteristics of clients’
requirements.

These parameters make even more sense when analysed in conjunction with
variables like:

type of opportunity
type of buyer persona
geographical areas
products/services involved
markets served
and more...
A multivariate analysis will highlight the subtle trends that can empower
sales managers to focus on priorities and understand different cohorts of
customers.

Keeping Velocity and Conversion parameters in control

provides insights into the sales process health and its
improvement areas, while their variation over time following
the sales process changes may unveil market risks and/or
opportunities, it may also reveal sales team efficiency trends.
The Deal Value trends analysis may reveal either an effect of
the brand’s attractiveness of the right dimension of
opportunities or how markets respond to the brand’s
positioning journey.

Activities Analysis
Activities that are done during the sales process matter as they measure the
effort of salespeople in running sales. This parameter is not as popular as it
deserves to be, even if the Activities Based Selling methodology
highlighted it long ago. The idea is to develop awareness on what serves to
close a deal in terms of average effort and its standard deviation in order to
plan the sales team’s capability.
Open: how many activities are open at any time can show how managing sales effort is
moving over time.
Done in time: each activity should have a deadline, and the ability to hit the deadline regularly
is a parameter of workload and smoothness of the process.
Overdue: if and when activities remain overdue and for how long is a parameter that deserves
deeper analysis; its trend should be under evaluation regularly.
Done per deal (average per won/lost): according to the conversion trend, the trend of activities
done can unveil subtle information about how deals are managed in relation to the win-loss
ratio.

A multivariate analysis with the sales team members, markets, buyer

persona type and dimension of deals will help in understanding differences
between outperformers and underperformers. Planning team alterations and
outputs in revenue is also strongly related to measuring the job.
 Trends of activities parameters provide an overview of how
sales are managed, the effort they require and the use of
resources along the process. The amount of output the sales
team is capable of, is directly related to the effort applied in
deals management but inversely related to the effort required
by each deal.

People Analysis
Audiences of leads, prospects and customers and how they change along
the leads generation stage and sales process journey can reveal a lot about
the effectiveness of sales, the brand character and the type of buyer persona
engaged.
New contacts’ growth rate is a parameter of the leads generation stage
but can be relevant to grasp the overall attractiveness of the brand,
especially when compared with resources invested in marketing or actions
on customer retention and satisfaction as they can report their experiences
and thereby can influence new clients.
Marketing Qualified Leads growth rate highlights the capability of the
marketing effort to engage the right targeted audiences. Especially in
organisations that perform qualification of leads after the first engagement,
this parameter can help to clarify how many of the interested people
entering the funnel are effectively qualified to become a client.
Sales Qualified Leads growth rate works in the same way as the
previous one, but this rate can be less dependent on the marketing effort and
probably more related to inner trends of markets.
New customers’ growth rate is a clear KPI which can be valuable to
track over types of customer separately, especially when it comes to
recurring clients.
Churn rate shows the trend of clients who halt the service or do not buy
anything else when they instead could buy more, seeing this way can be
relevant to investigate why they don’t proceed or they abandon the brand.
Ultimately how good the business is perceived by clients.
Nurture of audiences is a metric about communication with different
audiences of people, ranging from unknown to established clients. Typical
indicators span from number of contacts engaged in communication, to
number of contents reshared, number of quotations and referrals. The more
the brand awareness grows, the better the brand is perceived and the more
contents developed are able to provide value to its audience, the better the
audience growth and so do the market opportunities. This is the typical
digital marketing area where metrics are well known and sometimes over-
considered,* but in terms of a holistic approach to the brand’s presence in
the markets, they can provide trends that may be useful to keep under
control.
* Kernan, S., The campaign that got Taco Bell’s CEO fired, Medium, 2020.
Customer Care Cases trend and Service-Level Agreement compliance
are two KPIs that detect the level of customer engagement and the
smoothness of the user experience. Customer engagement is a side effect of
the user experience; if clients accept to buy notwithstanding imperfections
in the usage of the product/service, it may depend on the level of
engagement they perceive for the brand: the less the brand is beloved by its
clients, the more the complaints can be harsh, and people are less likely to
accept low levels of user experience or performance.

Analysis on contacts enables the sales process analysis on a

different level: the people. Why and how people react or they
engage with the brand, what actions impact on trends, how
audiences grow and how profitable they are, are just a few
questions that facilitate better decision-making.

Financials Analysis
Reporting on financial performance is an important area and generally very
well governed by CFOs. We do not need to go through that area here, but
just recall some relevant KPIs more closely related to CRM.
Customer Acquisition Cost is a typical metric of digital marketing, but
is a parameter that we all can measure either on and off-line. Generally it is
calculated per average cost where the numerator is the marketing
investment and the denominator is the number of new clients won. The
trend of CAC among its different dimensions for different populations of
buyer personas and different channels or media adopted is a pattern of
metrics that can tell quite a bit about the effort a brand needs over time and
between different channels and different types of customers.
Opportunities profitability is a less easy-to-use parameter when
dealing with complex services, much easier instead when dealing with
products. This KPI shows the gross profit margin contribution and, by
knowing that, decisions can be made on where efficiency could be
introduced to extract more value or about how to create more value that
clients are keen to pay for.
Client Lifetime Value is a well-known metric, but it is often considered
below its possibilities. It remains an extremely relevant parameter when
considering the value creation process and the relationship between client
acquisition costs and sales process management costs. The limit of this
parameter relies on its formation, which may be strongly based on
assumptions, something that happens very often in the early stages of the
business. To collect more reliable figures some businesses might have to
wait quite a long time, but it is the proper tracking of events and
interactions over time that empowers this dimension to unleash its full
potential.

Financial reporting is nothing new, but what matters here is

its close connection with other data extracted within the
relationship with clients that empowers multivariate analysis
capable of providing important correlations and enabling
better business decisions.

About Metrics
There are two approaches to consider when designing a business reporting
system that we care to highlight here. The first is focused on the start-up
time, but with some adapting, we believe it can also be relevant for
established companies. In fact the learning and innovation process is always
in place in healthy businesses.
What Eric Ries formulated is a milestone in measuring business trends,
as he included the idea of “innovation accounting” to enable deep analysis
of the capability to track what progress an organisation makes along its
innovation pathway.

“I recently met with a phenomenal startup team. They are well

financed, have significant customer traction, and are growing
rapidly. Their product is a leader in an emerging category of
enterprise software that uses consumer marketing techniques
to sell into large companies. For example, they rely on
employee-to-employee viral adoption rather than a traditional
sales process, which might target the chief information officer
or the head of information technology (IT). As a result, they
have the opportunity to use cutting-edge experimental
techniques as they constantly revise their product. During the
meeting, I asked the team a simple question that I make a
habit of asking startups whenever we meet: are you making
your product better? They always say yes. Then I ask: how do
you know? I invariably get this answer: well, we are in
engineering and we made a number of changes last month,
and our customers seem to like them, and our overall numbers
are higher this month. We must be on the right track.” ...

“Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a

startup is making progress. How do we know that the changes
we’ve made are related to the results we’re seeing? More
importantly, how do we know that we are drawing the right
lessons from those changes? To answer these kinds of
questions, startups have a strong need for a new kind of
accounting geared specifically to disruptive innovation. That’s
what innovation accounting is.”*
* Ries, E., The Lean Startup, Crown Publishing, 2011.
Eric focuses his approach on start-ups, but we wonder: how much could
established companies learn from that?
The second important contribution that Eric Ries developed in his book
is the concept of “Vanity Metrics.” This concept highlights the importance
of focusing on certain, less evident, measurements instead of just measuring
what is easy to track. Good metrics are often not immediately clear for
managers, where easy metrics are, instead, straightforward to acquire and
they often show good trends, but they always mislead business decisions.
Relevant metrics are sometimes painful, while vanity metrics aren’t:

“For a report to be considered actionable, it must

demonstrate clear cause and effect. Otherwise, it is a vanity
metric. Take the number of hits to a company website. Let’s
say we have 40,000 hits this month—a new record. What do
we need to do to get more hits? Well, that depends. Where are
the new hits coming from? Is it from 40,000 new customers or
from one guy with an extremely active web browser? Are the
hits the result of a new marketing campaign or PR push?
What is a hit, anyway? Does each page in the browser count
as one hit, or do all the embedded images and multimedia
content count as well? Those who have sat in a meeting
debating the units of measurement in a report will recognise
this problem.

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness

of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go
up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions,
by whatever they were working on at the time. That is why it’s
so common to have a meeting in which marketing thinks the
numbers went up because of a new PR or marketing effort and
engineering thinks the better numbers are the result of the new
features it added. Finding out what is actually going on is
extremely costly, and so most managers simply move on, doing
 the best they can to form their own judgment on the basis of
their experience and the collective intelligence in the room.

Unfortunately, when the numbers go down, it results in a very

different reaction: now it’s somebody else’s fault. Thus, most
team members or departments live in a world where their
department is constantly making things better, only to have
their hard work sabotaged by other departments that just don’t
get it. Is it any wonder these departments develop their own
distinct language, jargon, culture, and defense mechanisms
against the bozos working down the hall?

Actionable metrics are the antidote to this problem. When

cause and effect is clearly understood, people are better able
to learn from their actions. Human beings are innately
talented learners when given a clear and objective
assessment.”*
* Ries, E., ibidem.

Another author who has portrayed metrics about CRM in a relevant fashion
is Adrian Payne, in his Handbook of CRM:†
† Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, Elsevier, 2005

“The identification of appropriate metrics is another

challenge for companies seeking to evaluate and enhance
their CRM performance. The main problem lies in
determining the critical measures of CRM-related activity that
are most appropriate to the organisation and managing them
effectively. It is important at this stage to note the distinction
between metrics and KPIs. Metrics involve all those CRM-
related activities that should be measured.
 Key performance indicators are the high-level measures that
are critical to the success of the business and that should be
monitored closely by the Board and top management.

We consider four main categories of CRM metrics are

especially important:
customer metrics
operational (employee and process) metrics
strategic metrics and output
comparative metrics.

These key metrics represent the ‘vital statistics’ of healthy

CRM, signalling the strength or weakness of the underlying
CRM processes. Other more specialized metrics may also be
needed to meet specific company requirements. In any event,
these CRM metrics should be applied regularly to provide an
overall appraisal and monitoring of CRM effectiveness.”*
* Payne, A., Handbook of CRM, ibidem.

The concept of what to measure in order to shape information that is truly

useful to decision-makers is a relevant theme. The logic of CRM can lead to
the understanding of what is relevant for the clients; meanwhile CRM as a
tool enables that. Adrian’s contribution clarifies how complex is the choice
of metrics to design effective reporting. While not all metrics are useful,
some are specifically relevant at operational levels and others have impact
at the strategic level.
What Eric Ries reported was a learning process upon which they were
educated to measure and what they discovered was painfully relevant for
their business survival. Eric says: “When numbers go up, everyone is ready
to take accountability of that, when numbers go down it is always someone
else’s responsibility.” And it was when numbers went badly down that Eric
Ries’s team had to discover how to measure where they were and what
direction they should follow.
Quantitative versus Qualitative Information Reporting
Reporting is often expected to be a comprehensive tool able to tell the story
of the content: numbers do not talk, explanations are required to be added
on top of them. For instance, a company’s profit and loss sheet reports
numbers and qualitative explanations of decisions taken or
recommendations that serve to guide the understanding of trends and
results.
Well, this is an interesting point about reporting that should be
highlighted properly: automated reporting on data is not yet featured by AI
to develop automated clarification of trends and meaning over data
tendencies.
There is the possibility that someone will develop it soon, but we would
wonder about the benefit of a feature like that. Hence when qualitative
reporting is expected, we suggest designing business processes where
automations provide the analytics of the data and, using that, humans can
thereafter develop the qualitative information that would be useful for
decision-making.
At the moment, expecting an automated procedure to add qualitative
information is something that would require a lot of effort for a probably
limited value delivered.

The Survivor Bias

The last point about reporting is a warning about what we have to watch:
what we are tempted to analyse is not always what helps us to improve.

“The US army inadvertently bumped into survivorship bias

when they considered how to reduce airplane losses during
WWII under enemy’s fire. Examining the airplanes’ damage
they decided to add armor to the most damaged areas that
logically were the most hit by enemy bullets.

Abraham Wald at the Statistical Research Group at Columbia

University contradicted the US military’s conclusions. Wald
 noted the military only considered the aircraft that had
survived their missions; any bombers that had been shot down
or otherwise lost had logically also been rendered unavailable
for assessment. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft, then,
represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still
fly well enough to return safely to base. Thus, Wald proposed
to reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were
unscathed, as those were the areas that, when hit, would cause
the plane to fall.”*
* Wald, A., A method of estimating plane vulnerability based on damage of survivors.
Statistical Research Group, Columbia University, 1943
[https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a091073.pdf].

This small story tells us that in order to improve something we need to

focus on more complex and, sometimes, sorrowful metrics: it is great to
celebrate successes and they can teach us quite a lot when properly
analysed, but what we can learn in more depth is from the analysis of
reasons of explicit failure, which can sometimes be even more relevant to
avoid the same issues again and find new ways to improve.

Sales Team Surviving Strategies

If this approach is absolutely crystal clear and well known in the
management community, what is less clear is what holds organisations in
the survivor bias, at least in sales. What we believe is that the sales role is
quite different from other roles in the organisation; the salespeople have the
responsibility of money generation, their capability impacts on the clients’
engagement, on the income and ultimately on the business success.
Organisations are more keen to accept mistakes when it comes to product’s
development or project management; while mistakes in sales are too often
considered a lack of salespeople capability, even because they have a direct
impact on the income generation. Mistakes in sales happen no matter if the
product is absolutely fine and the marketing is correct, hence they really
burns opportunities that were there ready to be yielded!
 A mistake of a salesperson is often blamed for diminishing all the good
that has been done to prepare the sales. We all have heard statements like
these: “Once we have done everything right, salespeople haven’t been able
to convert,” or even “Our problem is on sales, if we only had capable
salespeople …”.
Of course salespeople may often be not capable, they often fail, they
might lack core competencies. Oddly enough they do this exactly as much
as everyone else does. But they are responsible for directly generated
income and this is a burden that no other role of the organisation takes on
its shoulders. Hence it is easy to overvalue salespeople and celebrate them
when they win and even easier to blame them when they don’t.
Then, of course, organisations complain they can’t find good
salespeople, but great organisations invest in salespeople to grow their
competencies, creating environments where they are able to track their own
effort, their own achievements and their own failures in the confidence that
mistakes are unavoidable for everybody, and a learning process for this
organisation’s role also includes, painfully, income losses.
Furthermore, and because of that responsibility, salespeople are not often
keen to discuss or analyse their failures. Very probably as nobody else
really enjoys it either, they are not the first who will dig out the missing
point of what they have done. Especially when they operate within an
organisation that is not keen to track “innovation accounting,” the learning-
by-mistakes process that Eric Ries introduced.
What, instead, becomes the mainstream is to keep measuring what is
going well, for them but eventually bad for others: number of leads-in for
instance, taking for granted that the conversion rate is stable, the focus has
to be shifted on the need to receive more fresh, well qualified leads? The
customer experience appraisal can be another example; is it the constant
rate of reported bad experience due to the product’s low performance or to
customer’s expectations setting during the sales process?
These are only two examples of many possible questions that consultants
often place over the business processes as a whole. Not blaming anyone.
In reality, to be able to face our own failures and mistakes we all need to
feel comfortable, and accepting the mistakes of anyone in the organisation
is a basic setting to make people feel comfortable. Where organisations take
on board methods like the Celebration Grid* also in the sales team
management, then the organisation’s capability of facing failures improves.
Mistakes are seen as an unavoidable part of the process and the focus is
placed on the need to measure correct metrics than develop adjustments at
any level, accounting it as a learning process to hit better outcomes. Not just
survive the storm, avoiding responsibility, but engaging with positive
improvements for the whole organisation.
* Appelo, J., Management 3.0, Pearson Ed., 2011.
The CRM is the tool that may support organisations to enable those
kinds of positive environments. The ability to focus on errors as well as
successes, to dig out information on what hasn’t worked in prospects that
didn’t convert (which are always the majority) is the essence of
improvement in sales and management.
Reporting is the CRM feature which strongly supports that, and to
achieve it there are no shortcuts but only a focused journey to experiment
and learn what works.

About Today’s Reporting

Reporting in business is a vital duty, nothing new. What is still happening in
many companies is that they perform it using Enterprise Resource Planning
systems. Which is fine as long as they reach their goals. What may be
relevant is to clarify that ERP has different purposes from CRM. They can
share some data, but what is useful on the ERP sometimes doesn’t really
matter for the CRM purpose; most importantly, what does matter for the
CRM is not really useful for the ERP purpose. They have two approaches to
business management that go in pairs but are not the same.
To clarify it, let’s analyse the two acronyms:
Enterprise Resource Planning
The focus is on resources involved in the business processes. ERP enables analysis of
processes upon employed resources to highlight the value created by the whole business
process.
Customer Relationship Management
The focus of the CRM as a tool is to support the process of nurturing the interdependence with
the market through company’s stakeholders relationships, namely the ones that are, have been
or can be clients, supporting better connections and more clear comprehension of trends and
feelings.
We can see that the two uses of them involve different datasets.
To make it simple let’s say that:
in the ERP we track the output, and how we create it using available resources, then eventually
resources received in exchange of it
in the CRM we track how we interact with the counterpart of the business, the people who
receive our production, then eventually how they behave, what they choose and why they like
us.

This is the reason why ERP is not enough for reporting other than financials
and absolutely not useful for forecasting when it is not based only on the
projection of the past into the future.
Let’s clarify that the CRM tool may create better projection of future
opportunities when used in B2B business models with complex and long
sales processes. When the sales process is short and/or the clients are
consumers the CRM tool may mainly contribute with past trends analysis:
moods, feelings and behaviours tracked that may also provide a support to a
better analysis.
In the end, CRM tools can help R&F in different ways in line with the
business needs, style and ways to make business. That’s why today the
decisions on adopting CRM tools are now largely mainstream around
companies all over the world. The matter is not whether or not to
implement a CRM, but what tool would be right. We would like to
contribute to the public discussion by moving the debate beyond the tech
tool. Organisations that implement the tool should proceed from the logic
they want to pursue. We will discuss it later, but it is important to set it as
the foundation of further considerations.

Forecasting on Sales Process

“Sales Teams Aren’t Great at Forecasting: Here’s How to Fix That.”* The
title of the Harvard Business Review article by Bob Suh, published in
March 2019, didn’t leave much to guess. But Bob doesn’t place full
responsibility on salespeople; his contribution actually takes account of the
human nature to whom we all are submitted. What is absolutely important
is to know that, and design environments and systems that allow people to
get benefits of more reliable behaviours aim to reduce personal accountancy
for the good as well as for the worse and ultimately keep control of any
possible and always easy to adopt, opportunistic behaviours.
* Suh, B., Sales teams aren’t great at forecasting. Here’s how to fix that, HBR, 2019.
Bob ends his article with a clear warning: “More accurate predictions of
sales are important for individual businesses and for our economy. If we do
encounter more volatility, forecasts which have historically been inflated by
8% could soon be off by as much as 20 to 50%. Leaders owe their
shareholders a better method of predicting revenues.”
Forecasting, more than reporting, has an extremely critical function for
any organisation:

“When I arrived to be promoted to sales director, I was proud

of my career, I went around to talk to different people in
different roles in the organisation and everyone was keen to
support me. Then the board asked me my plan and forecast for
the year coming revenue. I went down to the organisation
asking everyone their budget, and everyone asked me how
many of each product we are expected to sell. Anxious and
distressed, I went back to my office: everyone’s budget
depends on the sales forecast, but to whom I could ask for
sales prediction wasn’t clear. It was a guessing game,
speculation about the unpredictable as I didn’t have a clue of
what the client would have bought the very next year…”*
* Specchia, A., Interview to sales directors, 2003.

Not only the company production’s plans and the sales team’s evolution
depend on sales forecasting. Also, economic performance and financial
needs rely on sales forecasting and, among financials, capital investors also
look at sales forecasting with care.
Saying that, we have set up the basis to discuss what forecasting into
CRM tools aimed at sales process management is, and before listing some
possible tools that can empower R&F into any type of CRM, let’s have a
look at methods and know-how that can be useful to rely on at the design
stage to enable better forecasting later.
 Designing Data Architecture is paramount to prevent data input issues.
The more data are standardised, the clearer is input and thus the better any
kind of analysis later developed. Improvement of outputs definitely relies
on a controlled and well-planned data input. When datasets are designed
properly, developing analysis will be possible using many options and
different Business Intelligence tools; by contrast, when datasets are
inaccurately designed, input gets affected by uncertainty, there is lack of
clarity on the data pattern or content of each field, and thus the data analysis
becomes more complex to develop and any prediction of future revenue
will be less reliable.
Designing the information required to feed decision-makers.
Information is developed upon data and it is all about the intelligence of
data trends and aggregated meaning. Have a clear understanding of what
kinds of information aid in developing reliable predictions of the future.
The focus should be on the flow from the data, the basic bricks, and how
they will compose the wall of information, and how that information should
support the rendering of an overarching comprehension of the situation, the
building, around us.
Decision-makers are the recipients of information. Design the
information building process about forecasting, having in mind who the
recipient will be, who would benefit from the information we are going to
develop and how they will better understand them. Whenever we create a
message we are already used to shaping it according to the recipient’s
perception. This is even more necessary when recipients have limited time
available and strategic decision-making to accomplish. Hence, information
has to be concise, direct to the point, and being able to create value using
the informative power of the best possible tools becomes a must, not a
choice.
Time is a vital factor. We all know that accuracy of information is an
essential feature, without which the value of information decreases. But
today’s challenge is more to rely on real-time information than exact data.
The final goal would probably be to gather the most accurate information in
less time, possibly with zero delays and 100% accuracy. But the correct
balance can often be slightly suboptimal, hence organisations should design
their own balance dynamically: planning how much effort to deploy on
improving the development of accurate information and how much effort to
improve the matching of expected time for decision-making. The subtle
value lies in the improvement process.

What Is Expected to Be Foreseen

About this topic we will limit the discussion to what everyone knows about
forecasting: the process of seeing (something) fore, to see something before
it happens. What would be useful to know about the future for a business?
Nothing more than how many people (or businesses) around it will become
paying customers and how much customers will pay. Not much really, is it?
If only it was so simple we all would be rich by now.
The reality is that to make conjectures about it may require lots of
elements and some of them can be only guessed: “The real challenge in
crafting strategy lies in detecting the subtle discontinuities that may
undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no
program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.”*
* Mintzberg, E., Crafting strategy, HBR, 1987.
More than 30 years ago Henry Mintzberg highlighted the importance of
human business acumen in depicting the future. He was right, and even if at
that time information technology was almost in its Stone Age compared to
today, his thought’s contribution remains relevant to this day. But we
shouldn’t take it wrong: great minds, great leaders are the ones who stay
informed every second; they eat information, data, opinions, outlooks,
feelings, as any form of available perspective. They watch macro and micro
trends, relentlessly. They are the “...sharp minds in touch with the
situation.”
Sales reports are so vital. Well beyond revenue projecting, sales trends
are part of the strategy development process. Even if most of the time they
remain at the operational level or they are taken with care, the view of the
sales department is always an element that supports long-term decisions.
Hence organisations are in need of better forecasting; when talking about
CRM, the role of this tool becomes cardinal.
In B to B markets with long, complex sales processes, the forecasting
can be based on opportunities going to close as per (a) timing, (b) expected
value and (c) probability.
Reporting and Forecasting Tools Choice
Some CRM platforms offer integrated features to cover this area while
many others don’t. This is the domain of business intelligence tools where
CRM vendors offer some capabilities related to their tool and based on their
own perspective. Even if the trend shows that many CRM tools try to
include reporting features as part of their value proposition, quite often
those features have limited capabilities. When organisations need to
improve their analysis performance, the way is to adopt specific Business
Intelligence tools.
Here we will list only a few of the most common tools for BI connected
to CRM, on a limited but considerate inventory. It would be clearly
impossible to list even an acceptable fraction of the 2000+ BI solutions
available in the market. We strongly suggest that any organisation
investigates the market deeply before committing to any vendor. Too many
proposals with different approaches and pricing may really be confusing.
The good thing about markets with many competitors is that clients may
find a solution that fits their needs even if it will also be a long and tedious
selection process. One typical error companies make when approaching
solution finding is to consider the different solutions much more similar
than what they really are. A realistic consideration shows important
differences that should be carefully evaluated before starting to use any
solution.
It is also important to know that many solutions can also be easily
substituted. The tech issue in substituting a BI tool is not relevant; it will
mainly affect users who will be required to face a learning effort. Let’s see
two foundation methods to guide the selection of tools.
Starting small, thinking big: it is always a great piece of advice. It is
easy to commit to expensive tools that promise to take your business to the
next level. Then someone has to make it happen. Lean methodology has
taught managers to start with minimal resources, testing them and
improving them once the learning is achieved.
But ‘minimal’ is not a unique dimension, any organisation should
develop an idea of what is minimal to them. A one-man-band-company can
have limited resources (but also very limited benefit) to invest in R&F,
while middle-sized enterprises not only can manage more resources, but
they need, and deserve, tools that enable them to produce a remarkable
outcome. The critical level of their decision-making necessitates the use of
reliable, powerful tools. But even for this approach, the cost of different
solutions may vary significantly.
What has been observed is that managers who make considerable
investments in the early stage of the business do not always get that value
back. Management that tests scalable solutions learns how to benefit from
them faster; then improving them and eventually changing them is a process
that not only enables management to reach a better ROI, but it also nurtures
the learning process in teams, so that the whole outcome of the R&F project
may improve.
Starting with the final output in mind: BI tools can be very flexible to
support data mining in many different databases, but some are less
developed than others on the data rendering. Some are better than others at
creating complex analyses on many parameters and some others are easier
to set up. Everything depends on the purpose the company needs to achieve
in terms of reports. It must be taken under consideration that if the tool has
lean capabilities, the rendering of data trends could reach a limited
informative power. Hence the support of decision-makers would be weaker.
Clarifying what is expected and why is one of the parameters for deciding
the tool features and performance.

Some Possible Tools

Tableau
Probably one of the most relevant BI platforms that is (almost) ready to use,
flexible and powerful for medium-size enterprises. It requires a specialist
with a sharp knowledge of the tool and a clear understanding of the
organisational requirements. Its pricing is within the market average.
As Gartner Magic Quadrant reports:
It offers a visual-based exploration experience that enables business
users to access, prepare, analyse and present findings in their data. It has
powerful marketing and expanded enterprise product capabilities, but the
integration of Salesforce Einstein Analytics, now renamed Tableau CRM,
remains a work in progress.
 In 2020, Tableau enhanced its data preparation and data management
capabilities. For data preparation, it released enhanced data modelling
capabilities, which make it easier to analyse data across multiple tables at
different levels of detail by building relationships between tables with a
simple in-browser visual experience. For data management, Tableau Prep
Conductor and Tableau Catalog offer a cohesive experience for operating
and automating data management and understanding data lineage. An
Einstein Discovery dashboard extension, the first integrated product to
bring the predictive modelling capabilities of Salesforce Einstein Analytics
to the Tableau platform, is scheduled for release in March 2021.

Strengths
Analytics user experience: although Tableau keeps adding new capabilities, it always
maintains a sleek experience for users, so they can perform analysis seamlessly. Although
visual-based exploration is highly commoditized in today’s market, Tableau can still
differentiate itself by offering an intuitive analytics experience with richer capabilities based
on its patented VizQL engine.
Customer enthusiasm: many customers demonstrate a fan-like attitude towards Tableau, as
evidenced by the more than 145,000 people who attended its 2020 online user conference.
Tableau Public, a free platform on which to publicly share and explore data visualizations
online, has over 3 million interactive visualizations. A user-experience-focused design means
that, particularly for users in analyst roles, Tableau’s offering is compelling and even
enjoyable to use.
Salesforce opportunity: the Tableau Viz Lightning web component offers a low-code
experience to simplify the task of integrating Tableau visualizations into Salesforce. Work.com,
Salesforce’s cloud offering to help organizations reopen workplaces safely and efficiently, uses
the Tableau Viz Lightning web component to add a global COVID-19 tracker dashboard to the
Workplace Command Center. The deeper integration of the MuleSoft data connector
capabilities and a newly acquired Slack collaboration tool means that Salesforce clients have
a strengthening set of reasons to consider Tableau.

Cautions
Not cloud-native: Tableau offers cloud-hosted solutions (Tableau Online and Tableau CRM),
but the company’s heritage is in on-premises deployments, for which it has a massive installed
base. Tableau does not have a cloud-native architecture for on-premises customers to embrace
the cloud’s full benefits. Deployment of Tableau Server in a containerized infrastructure is not
currently supported (but is planned for 2021). As such, beyond Tableau Online, it cannot
utilize the cloud’s elasticity to automatically scale out in order to handle dynamic workloads.
 Premium pricing: Tableau’s pricing is an issue raised by users of Gartner’s client enquiry
service. Compared with some of the cloud vendors in this market, Tableau is expensive. The
addition of Tableau CRM for a list price of up to $150 per user per month may well increase
the concern of customers who are considering scaling their deployments or acquiring new
functions.
Integration challenges: as is to be expected, the integration of Salesforce’s ABI capabilities
with those of Tableau is taking time. Currently, users face a fragmented experience if they
want to take advantage of the augmented analytics functions of the former Einstein Analytics
while using the Tableau platform. Einstein Analytics’ strengths in automated data stories, key
driver analysis, custom automation and explainable AI are not yet integrated into the Tableau
user experience.*
* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, 2021.

Power BI
Probably the most interesting tool ever made by the company based in
Seattle. Its full capability outperforms the needs of a medium enterprise.
But in the single-user tier it is a low-cost tool. It requires a well-trained
specialist.
It has massive market reach through Microsoft Office and a
comprehensive and visionary product roadmap.
Microsoft offers data preparation, visual-based data discovery,
interactive dashboards and augmented analytics in Power BI. This is
available as a SaaS option running in the Azure cloud or as an on-premises
option in Power BI Report Server. Power BI Desktop can be used as a
stand-alone, free personal analysis tool. Installation of Power BI Desktop is
required when power users are authoring complex data mash-ups involving
on-premises data sources.
Microsoft releases a weekly update to its cloud-based Power BI service,
which gained hundreds of features in 2020. Notable additions include more
augmented analytics in the form of AI-infused experiences, including smart
narratives (NLG) and anomaly detection capabilities for out-of-the-box
visuals.

Strengths
Alignment with Office 365 and Teams: the inclusion of Power BI in the Office 365 E5 SKU has
provided an enormous channel for the platform’s spread, making it “self-seeding” in many
organizations. The increasing integration of Power BI into Microsoft Teams, with its tens of
 millions of daily active users, will further increase Power BI’s reach in the world of remote
working. Power BI is now often the option that organizations have in mind when using
Gartner’s client enquiry service to ask about ABI platform selection—“why not Power BI?” is
effectively the question most are asking.
Price–power combination: the influence of Power BI has drastically reduced the price of tools
in the ABI platform market since its launch. In this case, though, low price does not equate to
limited functionality. The Power BI cloud service is extremely rich in its capabilities, which
include an enlarged set of augmented analytics and automated ML capabilities. AI-powered
services, such as text, sentiment and image analytics, are available within Power BI Premium
and draw on Azure capabilities.
Scope of product ambition: Microsoft continues to invest in a broad set of visionary
capabilities and to integrate them with Power BI. It now claims to have 80,000 customers
using AI services in Power BI deployments. It continues to encourage usage at scale by, for
example, applying ML-driven automatic optimization of materialized views on Azure Synapse
(and soon other data sources, including Snowflake and Redshift) to autotune query
performance.

Cautions

Functional gaps in on-premises version: compared with the Power BI cloud service,
Microsoft’s on-premises offering has significant functional gaps, including in relation to
dashboards, streaming analytics, pre-built content, natural language question and answer,
augmentation (what Microsoft calls Quick Insights) and alerting. None of these functions are
supported in Power BI Report Server, its on-premises offering.
Azure only: Microsoft does not give customers the flexibility to choose a cloud IaaS offering.
Its Power BI service runs only in Azure. However, customers that utilize Azure can take
advantage of the global reach offered by Microsoft’s cloud platform. Power BI Premium
enables customers to enable multi-geography capabilities in their Power BI tenant, and they
can deploy their capacity to one of 42 globally available data centers.
Content promotion and publication process: the way in which Power BI handles the promotion
and publication of content can lead to a significant administrative overhead for customers.
The fact that there is a one-to-one relationship between published Power BI apps and
Workspaces (Power BI’s collaborative “development” environment) means that organizations
may face a situation in which they are manually managing many hundreds of Workspaces.
Retroactively fixing this issue is a complex task. How to govern self-service usage is perhaps
the most common question asked about Power BI by users of Gartner’s enquiry service. The
Power BI team is, however, investing in governance capabilities to help customers manage
their Power BI environments better.*
* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, 2021.

SAS
Probably the most relevant player in the BI arena. It is considered like the
Ferrari of the BI domain.
SAS offers SAS Visual Analytics on its cloud-ready and microservices-
based platform, SAS Viya. SAS Visual Analytics is one component of SAS’s
end-to-end visual and augmented data preparation, ABI, data science, ML
and AI solution. SAS’s extensive Viya-based industry, forecasting, text
analytics, intelligent decisioning, edge analytics and risk management
solutions use SAS Visual Analytics on Viya.
In 2020, SAS introduced a unique market capability for report reviewing
that analyzes reports and suggests good visual design, performance and
accessibility practices. It also released SAS Conversation Designer
(included with SAS Visual Analytics) for building customized chatbots
through a low/no-code visual interface. From a go-to-market perspective,
SAS and Microsoft formed a technology and go-to-market partnership, with
Azure becoming a cloud provider for SAS Cloud and plans for future SAS
integration with Microsoft’s cloud portfolio. SAS also introduced new
competitive, revenue-capped pricing for SAS Visual Analytics.

Strengths
End-to-end platform vision: SAS offers a compelling product vision for customers to prepare
their data, analyze it visually, and build, operationalize and manage data science, ML and AI
models in a single, integrated visual and augmented design experience (with progressive
licensing). Moreover, with Visual Analytics, SAS is the only vendor in this Magic Quadrant to
support text analytics natively in a core product.
Augmented analytics: SAS is investing heavily in infusing augmented analytics across its entire
platform. This includes investment in automated suggestions for relevant factors, and in
insights and related measures and forecasts expressed using visualizations and natural
language explanations. Automated predictions with key drivers and “what if?” analysis are
supported in SAS Visual Analytics. The platform also features AI-driven data preparation
suggestions, voice integration with user devices, chatbot integration and NLG capabilities
developed by SAS, rather than an OEM.
Global reach with industry solutions: SAS is one of the largest privately held software vendors,
with a physical presence in 47 countries and a global ecosystem of system integrators. SAS
Visual Analytics forms the foundation for most of SAS’s extensive portfolio of industry
solutions, which includes pre-defined content, models and workflows.

Cautions
 Market perception as outmoded: although SAS now supports the open-source data science and
ML ecosystem and has introduced a new SDK for SAS Visual Analytics, there remains a
perception that SAS is expensive and proprietary. This perception has obstructed
consideration of SAS in this market, beyond SAS’s installed base. It also impacts the number of
new data science and machine learning students that choose to learn SAS, as most focus their
studies on open-source platforms.
Inflexibility at contract renewal: despite new capability-based and metered pricing options
introduced in 2019, and new, attractive pricing of SAS Viya in 2020, most SAS customers are
on older contracts. Gartner enquiries suggest that these customers often perceive SAS
contracts as being high-cost and inflexible and as involving difficult renewal negotiations.
Migration challenges: SAS Viya provided a new open architecture and brought modernization
to SAS 9 customers, and it is still evolving. However, although SAS has continued to improve
its utilities to make migration from earlier releases easier, Gartner enquiries suggest that
customers continue to view migration as a challenging undertaking.*
* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, 2021.

Qlik
It offers augmented ABI functionality fully integrated within the SAP
enterprise application ecosystem.
SAP Analytics Cloud is a cloud-native multi-tenant platform with a
broad set of analytic capabilities. Most companies that choose SAP
Analytics Cloud already use SAP business applications. SAP Analytics
Cloud offers an add-in for Microsoft Office 365 on-premises or in the cloud.
In 2020, SAP enhanced its automated insights capabilities by adding
new “How has it changed?” and “How is it calculated?” explanation
functionality. Also, it rearchitected the self-service user experience
workflow to apply augmentation across the data-to-visualization process.
Finally, enterprise reporting was updated to add scheduled publication of
data stories or PDFs, although it has not achieved parity with SAP
BusinessObjects’ capabilities in this area.

Strengths

Unmatched SAP connectivity: SAP Analytics Cloud is primarily of interest to organizations

that use SAP enterprise applications. Seamless connectivity to those solutions is therefore of
critical importance. SAP Analytics Cloud has native connectivity to SAP S/4HANA and is
embedded in SAP cloud applications, including SuccessFactors and Ariba. Further, despite
being cloud-only, SAP Analytics Cloud connects directly to on-premises SAP resources (SAP
BusinessObjects Universes, SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA) for live data, with no
 data replication required. Direct data connectivity to non-SAP sources still lags behind that of
competitors, however.
Differentiated augmented, closed-loop capability: SAP Analytics Cloud’s integrated
functionality for planning, analysis and prediction differentiates it from almost all competing
platforms. Its ability to conduct “what if?” analysis is combined in SAP Analytics Cloud with
a strong, multi-year focus on augmented analytics as a core design tenet. SAP Analytics Cloud
offers strong functionality for NLG, NLP and automated insights.
Breadth of capability and content: SAP Analytics Cloud is part of a wider data portfolio that
includes SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud offers a library of pre-built content
that is available online. This content covers a range of industries and line-of-business
functions. It includes data models, data stories and visualisations, templates for SAP Digital
Boardroom agendas, and guidance on using SAP data sources.

Cautions
Lack of large community: SAP’s platform has less market momentum than the ABI platforms of
some similarly sized vendors. Judging from public job postings, few organizations are looking
to hire staff with skills in, or familiarity with, SAP Analytics Cloud, which is surprising, given
the size of the BI installed base that SAP could cross-sell to. This means there is a relatively
small user community for SAP Analytics Cloud, at a time when community size is a key driver
for selection and adoption because technologies are only marginally differentiated.
Perception by potential users: Given its BusinessObjects heritage, SAP has been associated
with report-centric BI, and the legacy of this is a perception among potential users that does
not reflect SAP Analytics Cloud’s modern, self-service capabilities. The need to convince
potential users that SAP Analytics Cloud is worth considering puts SAP at a disadvantage to
the competition in selection processes.
Cloud-only offering: SAP Analytics Cloud is cloud-native and not available on-premises
(although it can query on-premises data). It runs in SAP data centers or public clouds (on
AWS and Alibaba, with support for Microsoft Azure planned). It is currently available on data
centers in China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Europe, the United
States, Canada, Australia and Brazil. For organizations that want to deploy an ABI platform
on-premises, SAP’s answer is to offer the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform.*
* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, 2021.

Sisense
Sisense provides an end-to-end analytics platform that supports complex
data projects by offering data preparation and visual exploration
capabilities and augmented analytics. Over half of Sisense’s ABI platform
customers use the product in an OEM form.
Sisense 8.2 was released in September 2020 with NLQ capabilities
powered by a knowledge graph and Sisense Notebook, which provides
code-first augmented Insights.

Strengths

Composable architecture: Sisense has a microservices-based architecture that is fully

extensible. Sisense is commonly used to embed analytics capabilities such as interactive
visualization and NLQ within a composed analytic application experience to enable better
decision-making.
Comprehensive product capability: Sisense’s platform is functionally comprehensive, enabling
both business users and expert developers with different skill levels. Cloud and NLQ
capabilities are particular strengths.
Open platform: Sisense is cloud-agnostic and multi-cloud-capable. It has deep partnerships
with AWS, Google (GCP) and Microsoft, along with strong cross-cloud analytics
orchestration. A robust cataloguing capability supports other analytics vendor assets via APIs.
Sisense also offers extensible connectivity to other reporting tools. An analytics marketplace in
which to publish and build third-party analytics capability is on Sisense’s roadmap.

Cautions

Lower market momentum outside core use case: Sisense has built a successful OEM business
with its strong partner programme. This helps it avoid direct competition with Microsoft
(Power BI) and Tableau, which are dominant in self-service analytics use cases. However, this
strategy means it has less momentum in the wider ABI market. Organizations choosing Sisense
for non-embedded use may, therefore, need to work hard to present its platform to their user
communities as an attractive alternative to better-known platforms.
Product packaging complexity: Sisense offers a broad set of capabilities, but in three different
product packages: Sisense for Product Teams, Sisense for Cloud Data Teams, and Sisense for
Business Intelligence and Analytics Teams. While indicating the width of Sisense’s overall
offering, this approach entails complexity for organizations considering the vendor. Sisense
plans to simplify its product packaging in 2021.
Less consumer-focused: Sisense’s new knowledge-graph-enabled NLQ feature offers new
consumer capability, but the platform is generally focused more on the development ecosystem
and personas. Sisense for Product Teams, an API-first platform, is its best selling product. A
new Sisense DevX Portal is intended to empower developers to build analytics applications.
This vision aligns with Sisense’s overall OEM strategy but may not resonate with potential
adopters looking to address the needs of ABI consumers first.*
* Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, 2021.

Jupyter
This is a data-scientist-only, open-source freeware tool. What makes this
different from any other tool is its capability to support notebook page
creation. Beyond just dashboards with charts, Jupyter Notebook pages can
include qualitative information and charts with real-time data. Imagine you
need to prepare a paper on some relevant trends or forecastings where you
have to share concepts, reasons why, postulations and you need to put all of
them in a document that includes data, charts and graphs using real-time
data to support the outcome of analysis.
Jupyter’s notebook pages allow you to keep the charts and data
connected to your data sources and show powerful data trends in real time
(see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 A notebook page from Jupyter.

Summary
The BI area is a valuable market as it is perceived to be relevant for
businesses. It has been estimated that more than 2.000 vendors operate in
the market. It means that it can really be difficult to choose the right
solution at the right price, not because it doesn’t exist, but rather because it
is hard to evaluate even a small portion of all of them and find the proposals
which fit better to your specific requirements. In this situation, big players
may have the great advantage on the brand: to avoid risks, managers just go
to a handful of big names.
We also listed just a few of them, probably the most known. Actually,
there are a plethora of vendors out there; sometimes very small companies
are capable of offering pretty interesting solutions aimed to solve some
specific problems. If your need is about an engaging rendering of some
trends to be shown to an audience, then there might be a small Finnish*
company that creates wonderful renderings with a simple and easy-to-use
tool that anybody can implement on their own CRM. If your needs involve
creating a number of dashboards for different audiences, maybe also
connecting different database sources, then a small American company †
might have a low-cost solution that can be easily set up by a consultant in
outsourcing in a few hours.
* Dear lucy (dearlucy.co).
† Slemma (slemma.com).
If you need more complex information rendering, of geolocated data,
between many branches or business units, then a proper analysis should be
put in place as this could be another type of project to deploy, a bit more
complex than just a plug-and-play tool.
Chapter 8 Implementing a CRM
tool
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-8

This chapter is aimed to provide a framework to organisations that are about

to plan an implementation project. In analysing the procedure for deploying
a customer relationship management implementation project we will go on
general terms considering what should be taken into account no matter the
digital tool chosen.
Because no two CRM projects are the same, the involvement of an
experienced project manager able to empower the Project Steering
Committee is strongly recommended. The team of management who should
be able to engage all the stakeholders to smooth the way.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Starting a CRM Implementation Project

2. Implementing a CRM Solution
3. Reasons Why CRM Implementation Projects May Fail
4. Summary

Starting a CRM Implementation Project

Everyone knows how implementing a project to develop a custom solution
is rarely completely straightforward; even in the most simple cases, the
requirements can change along the way and the overall complexity is often
underestimated, firstly from the buyer. This is even more true when
information technology is involved. Here we believe it would be beneficial
to notice how CRM projects are more complex than people generally
believe as they mix technological and organisational challenges. What too
often happens is that organisations may consider the CRM implementation
project just as a tech matter, giving tech people guidance on how it should
work, but they are not prepared to check neither the sales processes nor the
strategy execution, something that would help in order to clarify the project
purpose. This approach can unfortunately mislead the project: in fact CRM
should empower the organisation to execute long-term decisions and not
just support a process or collect data. Whether we face a green field
adoption or a substitution of an existing solution, it is always the ultimate
purpose that should define the requirements of the project.

“Systems follow the strategy! A successful CRM system

implementation can only occur if the commercial strategy has
been well defined in advance. It is not the CRM system that
helps in developing the strategy while a correct system can
bring it into life making the strategy execution even more
transparent and scalable.”*
* Guethoff, A., Next Level! 8 Elements for the Development of an Integrated Commercial
Strategy, Springer Gabler, 2021.

In fact, when it is expected that the CRM system will help in selling more
or, even worse, support sales in lack of any structure or formalised process,
the project inevitably fails.
Anne Guethoff reports that organisations need external help to define
their sales strategy before they proceed to engage in any CRM decision.
Because nowadays tech is not the main problem anymore, the issue shifts to
business logic and to the expected outcomes instead. Then CRM projects
may be more expensive because of that; there are many non-tech costs
related to it and organisations are not always prepared for such investment.
In any case, technology is there, ready to do anything we would like to
achieve. But how to make it happen could be a topic that would be
beneficial to clarify in advance. This is the reason why this book only
discusses implementation in the last two chapters: before starting to plan
implementations we believe every stakeholder should develop a clearer
picture of the complexity behind it. When organisations redefine and
formalise their business strategy before placing any effort to implement a
system, the outcome is significantly better.
Before even thinking about which vendor, and what tool to buy,
organisations have to clarify to the Steering Committee how they describe
their market presence, what is their sales strategy, how their sales process
flows, what the salespeople are expected to do, what metrics they want to
measure… Something that too often managers take for granted and do not
even enquire about.
Hence we have the first takeaway

Before engaging in a CRM implementation project,

organisations should take care to define the purposes and
decide how the processes will execute the strategy.

Define a Project Deployment

Projects are often defined by three elements: Time, Budget and Scope. The
usual approach is to define all the three in advance and try to stick with
those values—an approach that never really worked. One of them usually
slips away, sometimes is the Budget, sometimes is the timing, especially
when the Scope changes along the way, but not rarely all the three slide out
of control. When it happens the management puts a stop-loss to the budget,
it affects the time and the scope inversely.
For definition a waterfall project considers Resources and Scope usually
fixed, while Time becomes dependent. The Agile approach reframed this by
setting Time and Resources as fixed parameters and letting the Scope
depend on them. In Figure 8.1, we can see the Triangle of Project
Management.
 Figure 8.1 The triangle of Project Management.

To clarify it in a CRM implementation project it would be beneficial to

set the Budget and the expected timing, sticking with them and adapting the
number and nature of features and functions (Scope) to the effective trends.
The reality is that projects are unpredictable per definition, and IT
projects can hide complexities that require extra effort from what was
planned, and it happens for many (good) reasons. In practice: the Scope of a
project concerns how many features and functions can be added to the
solution, having made clear that the core purpose of the project is what
should be delivered anyway. Hence a project is about resources, time and
core deliverables, while the extent of the Scope (nature and number of
deliverables) can vary accordingly with the effort effectively spent on the
execution. This approach implies a trade-off between Resources, Time and
Scope. What the most relevant of those parameters is, has to be an
organisational decision. Some projects need to be closed in time, while
others can extend the scope. Is not mainstream but there are also projects
where budget is not the limitation.
Let’s consider this: CRM projects that cost millions of dollars are not so
rare while companies that engaged themselves in those projects were not all
of them really keen to invest as much. The Waterfall project management
model shows limitations that probably only SAFe is capable of beating.*
* Pereira, D., Be Careful! SAFe May Be an Undercover Waterfall Agent!, Medium, 2021

Takeaway
 In planning the CRM project deployment, organisations have
to define the main parameters they want to stick with and what
will be an acceptable balance of the project’s outcomes.

It doesn’t matter if your company is small and the CRM tool you think you
need is not that huge; what really matters is the difference between the
planned budget and the final cost. Is your company keen to face a 30%,
50% or even 100% increase in the cost of the project? If so, your main
parameter can be Time: getting the project done in time is the goal. If the
answer is no, then it will be better to put the right effort into analysing and
planning carefully before even embarking in the project.
Generally speaking, the features and functions that can be added into a
CRM tool can be many and quite complex according to the users’
processes, and even a perfect design can be challenged by many requests of
additional features that some organisation departments can introduce in the
project. On top of that it remains true that availability and quality of
features and functionalities can vary between tools. Then, even well-
established products may change, or their inner solutions change more often
than you might expect. It means that when a CRM architect designs a
solution relying on different available solutions for the feature, at execution
it may happen that some adjustments will be required. It can be found faster
procedures, with less effort, but more often the effort is greater than
planned.
On top of that let’s include the possibility that the client can adjust or
redefine the requirements, maybe include new ideas, or didn’t place enough
attention on some kind of data the organisation actually needs, or to the
need to shape some information. Or it didn’t create issues with data
structure that may undermine the output or, last, doesn’t make mistakes
during the process that require effort to be fixed.

Takeaway

Designing everything perfectly before starting is a chimera. It

simply doesn't work this way in IT. Being clear about it may
 help in being prepared for changes that can largely affect the
project outcomes.

But we should also be absolutely aware that an issue can also be the
opposite: information technologists are professionals that can rely
excessively on the flexibility of the software. At one time it became a quite
common procedure to zeroed planning and transfer the clarifications to the
execution stage. This happened because it has been perceived that planning
is far from perfect, and along the way to execution there are tons of new
things that are going to be added. Hence it seems more efficient to just start
building and be prepared to adjust everything along the way. But actually
this is a false myth that can mislead the project with a critical execution
stage in lack of planning. In these cases time becomes a pressing issue as
nobody has really assessed the required effort at the planning stage by
performing the user’s requirements analysis the right way.

Takeaway

The right mix of capabilities in planning carefully and

deploying safely for a flexible execution is vital in project
management that involves software.

While it can be frustrating when requirements change constantly, the

approach to be prepared in tracking those changes, as well as the
development of new constraints, is a crucial capability to achieve a clear
project outcome that preserves the client’s investment and the provider’s
integrity. Flexibility shouldn’t mean chaos and unpredictability. This is the
reason why Agile methodology was developed.
There are many outcomes that a CRM implementation project can
nurture, even well beyond just the digital tool in place (the output) that
enhances productivity. There are other areas that can benefit from the
project: it may also offer the opportunity for a strategic alignment. This
outcome can have wider implications for the organisation, as it enables a
rethinking of how different areas comply with the business strategy.
 Any organisation that engages itself in a CRM project can strongly
consider it as a breakthrough in its day-to-day operation. A project with a
strong impact that creates more problems in the short term may strive to
turn it later into a positive impact by enabling more productivity and better
control.

Defining What, How and to What Extent

Actually it is the preparation that opens a space for the most relevant
opportunities and decisions for the long term, as once the project is
launched there will be less time to engage in speculation over what could
be. Hence, the time to discuss and make strategic decisions is when the
execution is not yet on the agenda.
Deciding what will be the situation once the output is in place can be an
exercise of imagination for many organisations; for this reason it can be
useful to break the process into small chunks, each of them defined into
clear boundaries: what should happen and what would be possible to be
done, when and how the process can run automatically and when operators
should decide over the process.
Sometimes managers tend to approach the process in its completeness,
while operators may have more awareness of its components and the
different possible options. It would be useful to describe the process in
written form, slicing it into its components, then reviewing them with each
stakeholder. Different reviews can alter the single perspective, and even if
they confirm it, the process of sharing responsibility on “what” the solution
will be has a paramount value. The Steering Committee is responsible for
the design process, and every department and each stakeholder should
contribute to it.
While deciding what has to be done, designers are also involved in
verifying how things work. More specifically, what data are collected and
how, whether that information has options, structures or formats and how it
links into other types of handlings. This verification has an effect on the
future use of the fields and how they will interconnect in the system. We
can recall that the Data Architecture implies a structure, and fields should
be controlled for their possible dataset in order to avoid errors. If a field is
designed as a container of numbers, it controls the input that will be just
numeric. If later on someone discovers that it would be useful to also
include letters, the nature of that field should be changed and its control will
be excluded or it will have to be redesigned with a specific format. Hence it
is important that the analysis specify the use of the fields to support the data
architecture design.
What has to be the data input and the output as information can be
simple in its first analysis, but it should also be ready for further uses that
are not included in the project scope in the beginning. The easiest way
many people use to avoid trouble is to use fields as open strings (Text 255)
with no control. In that case any later change won’t create problems, but in
fact this nullifies the function of data architecture, as it is a total avoidance
of rules over inputs. A lack of rules that makes the expected outputs
impossible to take under control.
Sometimes organisations fail to realize to what extent their digital
infrastructures can affect clients’ experience. Broken functionalities,
missing periodical testing, slow processing can be perceived as out-of-date,
a lack of attention to the customer and a reduced customer centricity that
can be more damaging than what the organisation can possibly anticipate.
For this reason, planning and executing a proper data architecture can affect
not only the efficiency of the data management, but it will also have an
impact on the way in which operators use the system, the usability that later
will impact how much and how well people will use the system.
One of the greater issues for any CRM digital solutions, especially in the
sales departments in business-to-business companies, concerns salespeople
who are prone to avoiding using a system as they perceive it as
overcomplicated and that requires an extra effort for just admin duties.
Salespeople may be more keen to spend extra effort on dealing with client
requests than hitting keyboards for the benefit of someone else or to enable
the company in tracking their job. Avoiding that perception is paramount.
For this reason a great outcome of a CRM implementation project would be
to help salespeople in falling in love with the CRM as it effectively
empowers them to regain efficiency, get control on their activities and track
their own effort and results, first and foremost for their own control. This
outcome, as you can see, is not a tech issue, it is mainly a logical approach
on how to plan the What and How of the solution. Technology is not an
issue, it is the design of the solution that matters. Knowing the problem to
tackle and addressing the right solution is a way to help people feel
empowered when using the CRM.

Takeaway

Engaging all parties in the organisation in the design process

can allow designers to unveil hidden issues by gathering
everyone’s expectations. Therefore, well beyond just reaching
a solution that can fit everyone, the design alignment may
support the correct expectations setting.

What makes this process difficult to accomplish, in general, is time. When

faced with time pressure to meet deadlines, designers may find it difficult to
interview each stakeholder appropriately and collect data that impact on the
system design. Most of the time rushing to complete the process’s stage can
frustrate the information gathering. Sometimes well-experienced designers
are able to enquire in a more effective way by going straight to the point,
grasping untold views and issues, and figuring out what would be the most
appropriate design. For this reason, the designer’s effectiveness really
matters for the process result; while some can rapidly develop a picture,
others may miss that efficiency, they would require more time and several
interviews on the same subject to shape the system for the better. It is in this
area that the opportunity to work as a team enables the Project Steering
Committee to support each other and improve total effectiveness.
Sometimes the issues of the design process can be influenced by the
organisation, when either the management or the employees find it difficult
to transfer correct information or knowledge on the sets of data that may
help the designers to grasp the picture. This knowledge alignment problem
may imply a greater effort of designers to reach a clear understanding, an
effort that must be taken into account from the Steering Committee. An
effort that, if spent properly, will improve the managers knowledge about
the importance of data and how to treat them with care.
Other times there are organisational culture issues that can be hidden
behind rules or regulations like the privacy law. In some cases, data privacy
barriers can be legitimate, especially in industries like healthcare or
banking; in that case a tool that enables data masking technology may be
useful during the project deployment, but it is never a good reason to ban
designers or IT developers from having access to datasets and procedures.

Takeaway

While the value of the analysis is paramount when it is

properly run, it can be seriously damaging too if badly
handled. And this may be a skill-pattern issue. This would
suggest that teams can better organise the analysis when they
work efficiently, but also a strong passion for organisational
enhancement is strongly required.*
* Mintzberg, H., Why Analysis Is Not Enough and Passion Is So Important, by Karl
Moore, McGill University, Forbes, 2013.

Big Bang or Lean

Organisations can find themselves launching projects upon the CRM when
they are already experiencing difficulties: they need a tool in place to
organise, smooth and improve complex processes that are already
overloaded. And they need it immediately. As everyone knows this is not
something odd, or avoidable in any way, it’s part of how we work. It is
mainly a component of entrepreneurial risk management: picking the
chance when it is the right time to invest, avoiding it when the time is not
yet. Anyone who is involved in managing at C level knows and understands
how difficult it is to hit the fine line between too early and too late. When
an organisation decides to launch a project it is often into a complex time
already (too late), hence time to analyse, decide and share in the team can
be scarce. Then keeping the implementation project as fast as possible is
also a way to bear up with the investment.
What can be useful to evaluate then is a different approach from the
classic waterfall big bang. What companies often expect is to buy a solution
able to fit all their needs. Depending on the organisational complexity the
approach can be to deal with the need to find a solution capable to support
the whole digital infrastructure of the company. It is often believed that
once the implementation stage of a solution is reached, it is better if it
includes everything, as that creates an advantage in cost. For this reason
people generally think: “Engaging in a sequence of several small projects
brings more trouble, it can be more risky, have long delays and there is less
confidence in getting the final integrated outcome”.
This is an approach that pursues the best from any project, looking at the
benefits of a fully comprehensive system deployed in one single project.
And it is often among the reasons why organisations very often decide to
follow the approach of a “big bang” release. They are all good reasons as
they try to save money and pursue an omni-comprehensive and quicker
result. In a few words, a better investment.
The counter-intuitive approach, better known as Lean, takes risk
management into consideration from a different perspective: how
sustainable would a project failure be if it involves the whole organisation?
Under this perspective, the Lean approach suggests undertaking smaller
projects, reaching their results, evaluating their outcomes, then adjusting
and finally launching the next one. From the cost perspective, this way is
obviously not cheaper than a single big project. But the benefits are in other
domains. First and foremost, risk control is achievable over each small
project that only involves just a portion of the organisation and a small
amount of resources while its outcome, mostly the learning achievement, is
impactful on the sequential strategic decisions.
Everyone who has already applied the Agile methodology is aware of
how impactful this method has been for business management at many
levels. We can affirm that software and organisational projects are the kind
of projects that include many variables and can be easily altered along the
way; for this reason applying the Lean and Agile methodologies to them is
the best way to go. It helps to avoid embracing investments that could be
severe for the organisation in case of failure; instead the recommendation is
to proceed by smaller, more suitable steps, measure the outcomes, fix
problems that arise, adjust the output and mark the project done. In this case
if the project fails it won’t hit the organisation badly. If it brings trouble
they can be faced and resolved with limited resources. If something isn’t
what is expected, that is an opportunity to learn while facing a lower level
of stress. If the project at the end goes well, everything learned can be
applied to the next project. If the project goes wrong, or it fails completely,
learning what and why went wrong is essential to avoid more failures. As
we all know, projects do have a rate of failure for definition; otherwise they
are not projects but processes.
How high is that rate of failure depends on many factors, but in the CRM
industry the rate of “unsuccessful” implementations seems to be quite high:
some reports consider it well above 65%.* To be fair we should go into
detail of that frightening high rate, as Edinger says:
* Edinger, S., Why CRM projects fail and how to make them more successful, HBR, 2018.

“Those failures can mean a lot of things: Over-Budgeting,

Data Integrity Issues, Technology limitations, and so forth.
But in my work with clients, when I ask executives if the CRM
system is helping their business to grow, the failure rate is
closer to 90%”

Nobody would engage themselves in a project that has such a failure rate,
but companies nowadays are embracing CRM at the highest rate ever, in
accordance with their marketing needs to reach a competitive advantage by
differentiating their markets’ approach, and the trend seems not to be going
to end any time soon.

Takeaway

We believe that the alarm should be given: it is not something

to undertake easily, underestimating the complexity and the
risk, but it is about learning how to sit among that 10% of
successful organisations!

It has to be said that the literature about information technology failures is

quite dramatic. In a study from Accenture titled “Digital Value or Digital
Vanity,” the authors are definitely direct in their warning:

“It is hard to believe that any company would invest millions

in a major transformation without a clear picture of the value
 delivered. Yet this is happening every day when it comes to
digital.”*
* Campagna, C., Arora, S., and Delawalla, A., Digital Value or Digital Vanity, Accenture,
2018.

We can then assume that is not a problem of CRM tools implementation,

but this risk seems to affect the whole IT industry. But again, many fail but
many don’t; we should pursue the strategy to succeed, not run away from
risk.

Takeaway

A great way to face high-risk projects is to slice them into

small, easily digestible chunks, and manage them for the
outcome of learning, while we seek the goal of the correct
output. If we do not hit the goal immediately we can then alter
it, adjust it or eventually discard it entirely. And the last thing
will be more difficult to do if the weight of the investment on
the company’s balance sheet is too big.

Implementing a CRM Solution

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.*
* Attributed to: Eisenhower, D.D.
This statement also aligns with the Agile methodology where outputs
can vary, but it is still important to create plans to design the roadmap.
Digital solutions on CRM are also very much that way. Planning doesn’t
mean having figured out the perfect solution in every detail, but the
developing of a quite clear design which is useful for:

1. understanding what is required and what can actually be done;

and
2. clarifying how to proceed with stages and milestones settings.
Pre-Setting
A plan starts with an As Is evaluation:
Where are we and what are we doing right now?
How do we do what we do?
Why do we do what we do?
What are the issues we are stuck with?
Where are the major bottlenecks?
What do they affect?
What is the level of productivity right now?

Organisations that realize they need to change their CRM digital tool can
improve their effectiveness by using the process described here. We are not
depicting it for consultants or solution providers as they all know how to
proceed. Here we focus on managers and entrepreneurs who are keen to
learn how to deal with a CRM implementation project even before engaging
a consultant or a solution provider company to deploy it. The more the
client is aware, educated and conscious about the project and its
management topics, the better the client can lead the relationship with all
providers and professionals involved in it. The better the client can
understand the project issues and problems the better they will be able to
avoid them or to solve them in the smoothest way. But mostly, the client can
develop, together with all the stakeholders and providers, a better outcome
that can fit the organisational expectations.
Here we are going to see things from the client’s point of view in order
to clarify why some stages are important and what they can lead to when
they are properly deployed.
“As Is evaluation” means consciousness. If we want to start with a wider
approach we could think of how many times we, as persons, believe we
know ourselves, who we are, only to discover later that we are not fully
aware of it. This happens even more to organisations where the alignment
between departments and managers may be missing.
Let’s say that the As Is evaluation required to run a CRM project is not
about the deeper level of “who we are” but is more about “how we work,”
how we do what we do and why we believe a CRM tool can help to do it
better. Hence starting by sketching down the main points related to our
issues and feelings around the area of relationships with clients and how the
organisation controls, manages and ultimately leverages them to thrive, is
the very first brick of the new building.
The As Is evaluation stage empowers the organisation to establish what
can help in improving the situation by setting a difference between a “To
Be” description and the initial stage: “Here We Are.” But well beyond it,
starting by sharing views between stakeholders and highlighting what
works and what doesn’t, or what can just be improved helps the
organisation tremendously in setting expectations and clarifying the real
value of each part of the change and which processes are under
improvement. The management should leverage this stage by setting five
awakening outcomes of it:

1. Setting a better awareness about today’s situation. It highlights

limits and benefits.
2. Clarifying what should be prioritized with the project. It
enables us to define milestones and timing better.
3. Clarifying what works in processes and routines today as it is.
Then decide that it should be kept with no changes.
4. What to expect the change would be and in what timing. This
may help to figure out either the effort and any second best
outcome.
5. What the impact on the organisation will be during and after
the change. Set how the organisation may deal with the
disruption, reducing people's fear and define better
expectations.

Once the pre-setting, the As Is evaluation, is completed, the organisation

should be able to define what has to be changed, and how it should be done.
In both ways, decisions have to be made as to what works and has to be
kept as it is, eventually just transferred into new tools, and what needs to be
redesigned thanks to the new tools. Process redesign should be independent
of the tool; instead it should lead to a decision about which tool would fit
the requirements at the best. Eventually, once it is decided which tool fits
better, it can be analysed how what has been planned should be twisted to
match with the tool’s capability; not everything imagined is convenient to
be put in place that way, sometimes, it can be more efficient to alter the
design a little to be able to fit the technology.

Takeaway

Most of the time managers first buy the tool, then they try to
figure out how to design the processes leveraging the tool
templates, schemes and capabilities. This approach seems
logical as it is mainly by doing that you can understand how
you should do it, but in fact it is limiting as people just stick
with the tool approach. They learn what the tool gives them.
Design should be independent of the tool, and organisations
should choose the tool accordingly.

When companies define their requirements before the tool selection, they
generally make a better selection and achieve a most satisfactory project
outcome.
It should be clear that nobody would start building a skyscraper by
linking pillars and beams to see how to do it. Information Technology has
given too many possibilities and that flexibility can lead to seeking
shortcuts that allow us to directly build something, supposedly enabling the
learning-by-doing.

The Lighthouse
The setting of a project always includes the “To Be” evaluation, only that
sometimes it is just taken for granted and the project purposes are set as:
“change the CRM to improve our business;” or
“change the CRM to create better relationships with our customers.”

Both are dreams without measurable goals. They are not SMART. Without
the possibility to clearly define them it won’t be possible to measure how
much of them we achieved and if the effort, the investment made, was
correct to achieve that.
 Let’s consider this:

The project output, the “To Be”, is where we want to go, the lighthouse of the journey
The project purpose, the “What we want,” is the reason why we want to engage in such an
effort, the strategy that will lead the journey.

Playing with a little bit of neuro-linguistic programming we would say: “we

want to be at the lighthouse by midnight, as we want to spend the night in it
to enjoy the experience of hearing the waves and the wind around the
building and the rocks.”
OK, perhaps it matches very little with a CRM implementation project,
but it is the procedure that readers already know to define a goal with the
SMART methodology that matters. Why don’t we do it all the time? Well,
managers are required to deal with many issues and many instances arriving
to them from everywhere. This is even more the case for entrepreneurs, as
they have their own priorities patterns, in which they rarely list those
projects at the top. Hence there can be a focus issue and a time issue; the
lack of focus and time can lead people to shortcuts, taking for granted that
we are all on the same page.
Let’s say that a company always has in place a CRM, even if they may
not call it CRM. As we have seen at the very beginning, the CRM is first
and foremost a way to be in a relationship with stakeholders. And for it you
just need commitment. CRM is the idea and the strategy to be in
relationship with clients, either existing or to be.
For that we can consider that an organisation is never deprived of a way
to stay in touch with customers. The way in which an organisation achieves
that vital duty of the business is what matters, while what enables that
relationship is the tool that may probably be not the right one or it can be
blunt.
Hence a project around the CRM is one part redefining the strategy, and
one part tool definition, design and implementation.
Having this concept clear can definitely help in defining the purpose and
the output that a company has to set. If you like you can make an analogy
with the mission and vision setting:

The Vision is what the organisation sees around itself now and then, and that justifies its reason
why.
 The Mission is what the organisation wants to achieve in that environment in conformity with
the reason why the organisation exists.

Setting vision and mission is less fashionable today than it was years ago.
We cannot judge if this is good or bad, but what we do know is that having
something clear to share inside and outside the organisation can only help
and, in the same way, having something clear to share about and around a
project can also help.
Setting a purpose that fits with the organisation’s strategy, adding value
to it is what makes a purpose engaging and valuable for everyone.
The output should be the situation where the organisation will find itself
when the project will be completed, in terms of tools and methodology of
work, which will greatly enhance its effectiveness and then the business.

Planning the Project Deployment

Once the project is set, it will be time to decide what technology to involve,
if it is to be a scratch development or a platform, a LowCode platform or a
CRM platform, that enables the development or even a pre-built
framework.
Technology matters in terms of planning; when and how each
component should be developed can definitely change when using different
technologies.
Let’s leave aside what matters for each single project development
planning; let’s analyse what is always true, in the confidence that every
project manager will lead the technology adoption for the best. We will talk
about solutions in the last chapter.

Data Architecture
Working on the dataset can be the very first task to set in order to clarify the
next stages. Facing how and where the data are displaced into the existing
methodology and tool matters to redesign a dataset that will fit into the new
technology. Each solution has a way to displace and use data. It is partially
a technology legacy and partially is due to the methodology applied to it.
Anyone who has experienced dealing with the migration from spreadsheets
into a digital CRM platform knows how the use of a spreadsheet can be
tricky in terms of fields and dataset.
To clarify: datasheets are composed by the first line of columns’ titles
(field names) and each row is a record which stores the data of each
contact/element.
When people create a database on a spreadsheet, what they do is name
each column with a title and store in the cell the unidimensional value.

CLIENT = YES/NO
DATE OF CLIENT = 01/02/2020
PURCHASE = ITEM A
DATE TO PURCHASE = 03/02/2020
PURCHASE 2 = ITEM B
DATE TO PURCHASE 2 = 08/08/2020
PURCHASE 3 = ITEM C
DATE TO PURCHASE 3 = 03/02/2021
ADDRESS = 20 Manchester Street, DE22 3GB Derby, United Kingdom
COUNTRY = UK
REGION = ? ROW

(this is just a simple example to highlight the type of issue)

As you can see there is a redundancy of data even in this simple, short
dataset. Let’s try to explain: here the origin of the data was to enable the
selection of records (contacts) that show existing clients, excluding anyone
who is not a client. Then the idea was to know when a contact became a
client to be able to separate them by the length of the relationship. Then
having the information of the purchasing history. Then the full address. And
just to make things “simpler” a field for the country and one for the
geographical region.
Now let’s consider some issues:

1. Is the field “client” really necessary? No, as there are

purchases done with the dates.
2. Is the date becoming client necessary? No, as purchasing
history has the dates (first purchase matches the change of
 status: client yes)
3. Is the field “country” necessary? Nope, as that information
already exists in the address
4. Is the field “region” necessary? No. OK, the UK has just
changed its status from a European country to a Rest Of the
World one, but this information can be set dynamically in a
different way: let’s imagine that the purpose of the creation of
this field was to select marketing areas as EMEA, the fit of UK
into “EMEA” or even into a “Europe” group can be done by a
query that selects the list of countries that match the group. To
clarify: a query capable of selecting all the records that have as
country in the address any country that matches with the group
selection (“Europe” or “EMEA” in this case). Is it definitely
more complex but when something changes you have to
change only the query one time, not every record that has the
unidimensional data in (Europe). But even more important is
the reduced input effort that also impacts on errors reduction.
5. Is the list of purchases necessary? Nope. Instead of setting a
list of (eventually manually managed) items in a spreadsheet, it
would be much more efficient to create a system of related
tables: something quite common indeed.

Now, if you think that medium-size enterprises do not use spreadsheets

well, forget it. Medium-size and small enterprises often use similar
approaches, because at the end of the day medium-size businesses were
small companies not long ago.
This was only an example, a very basic one, made using the spreadsheet
as the basis of data, but the problem is not limited to spreadsheet use.
Notwithstanding how much people keep using spreadsheets, namely MS
Excel, as databases, it can be quite impressive to learn that the problem of
bad data management is everywhere. Database logic and know-how is
something not widely shared, while shortcuts such as using a simple
spreadsheet to collect data is what people have often accepted as a standard.
But even when a database is in place it is not guaranteed that its design is
effective and efficient, or it strongly depends on its first stage development.
To understand why the data architecture must be reviewed not only
primarily, but every time the technology changes, we should evaluate its
impact on the effectiveness of fields’ usage. On top of that let’s think about
the legacy of the previous data architecture design: who did that? Why? For
what specific use was it built at that time? What changes have been applied
since? Who did them?
The result is often a cluttered dataset that requires to be redesigned not
only because of the new technology, but also because over time it became
so cluttered by adding unnecessary fields and so full of bad data that its
usability can be crippled.
Then we should consider the available dataset: the importance of what
can be stored in the fields for boosting efficiency in the system
management. An efficiency that can be achieved by leveraging on the
design of the data architecture (see Chapter 3).
Let me be clear: even dirty data can be used in a business intelligence
tool and, by that, develop a rendering of useful information, but mounting
an analysis of a cluttered and dirty database is much more difficult,
complex and time consuming than reaching an even better output by
working on a cleaner dataset in a well-designed database.
Unfortunately, working to clean databases of bad data is not perceived as
valuable, and its marginal value is probably not really sensible for some
businesses, but the importance of redesigning the data architecture for a
new approach when the technology changes should be clear to everybody.

Takeaway

Less is more. This is true also with the number of fields of a

database. Information is not better shaped by a plethora of
fields, and the best way to build information rendering over
data includes: reliable and unique data collected within
parameters clearly defined and easily adjustable. There is an
optimal quantity of fields for each database purpose,
everything more than that creates a problem.
Dirty Data
One example of bad data for databases (CRM) can be reported from
booking platforms. You can imagine how many transactions are recorded on
a standard platform, how many records about hosts and guests are
continuously updated from many different sources: payments systems,
registration forms, hotel databases, social media, travel agencies and the list
can go on as long as you like.
Let’s imagine all these databases. How many times do they have the
same person or the same hotel (host) listed in, and how many different
denominations can they have? For one single person, for instance, how
many email addresses can be registered, some also wrongly copied, how
can we check that person is not the same one that booked last year in that
very same hotel? Or maybe the one that left unpaid damage in another hotel
two weeks ago?
And the list of hotels is not much different: hotels can be denominated in
many ways—The Franklin Hotel, Franklin hotel, The Franklin London
Hotel, Starhotels Franklin, etc., and also their addresses: /24 Egerton
Gardens, Chelsea, London SW3 2DB / Egerton G. London / Egerton
gardens 24, Chelsea / etc.
OK, now you have just put a foot in the water: data management is very
complex even at this very shallow level.
The complexity of data is also related to the data life: for how long are
some data still valid? What changes take place and how can it be possible to
match previous data with new, changed ones?
For this purpose there exist some specific software that can match entire,
even huge databases, and enable data matching, data analysis and updates
that would be simply impossible to manage by hand.
But plan data architecture is something that can’t be delegated to any
software: designing how the new dataset should be organised is mainly a
human know-how (still), while organising the previous data for the new
architecture is a task that some software can support.

Takeaway
 GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out, is a golden rule. If an
organisation is about to invest in a new CRM, it should also
imply a data review. The data architecture and the database
cleaning are investments that can pay back later while using
the new technology.

Data are the kernel of the CRM, both as a tool and as a strategy. But the
quality of data represents the backbone of the information that can be
shaped around the environment, the markets and the organisation’s
performance.
It is often wrongly believed that a base of data is something just stored
somewhere and useful to pick up when required. This conviction can
dramatically limit the capability of the organisation to leverage its own
asset: the ownership of a base of data achieved along the way with years of
interaction with clients and creating value to them. If data is the major
valuable asset nowadays, taking care of them should be an obvious
consequence of the process of enhancing our own capability to nurture the
business through the relationship with the markets.

Process Workflows
Workflows are the sequence of steps involved in moving from the
beginning to the end of a working process.* A workflow is the execution,
manual or automated, of (business) processes, in which tasks, information
and documents move from A to B as the consequence of actions under a set
of procedural rules. It can involve work done or decisions made by people
or it can be fully automated, and its purpose is to transform materials,
information or services.
* Definition from Merriam-Webster.

A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern

of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources
into processes that transform materials, provide services, or
process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of
operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an
 organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex
mechanisms.*
* Definition from Wikipedia.

Essentially the CRM tool’s design involves the detailed design of business
processes, in which the digital tool plays an important role: enabling,
controlling and verifying each workflow and the whole process. The tool
should also be capable of facilitating speed enhancement and error
reduction, and ultimately producing reliable results in a more productive
environment.
Each process design covers each workflow design; a process can contain
many sub-workflows, each with a start and an end. Starts are triggered by
an event or an input while the end defines a new state, as an information
update or a service provided. An end of one workflow provides an output,
and that output can produce a human decision or action, generally outside
the organisation, that induces a new trigger. The new event triggers the start
of another workflow. This circle of workflows, triggered by events and
producing outputs that cause new triggering events, leads to the creation of
the final output of the whole process.
This is the case of the sales process (see Chapter 3), where different
stages are enabled by some events and they lead into a new status. The
design of the sales process includes a preview of triggers and outputs: what
can happen and what should be the effect.
In terms of micro-details, at the design stage the main purpose is to know
how the workflow should work, if that can be done by a click or by drag
and drop or even by an automated procedure. This is something that can be
decided at the digital tool implementation time. At the design stage, it could
be useful to know what would be useful to automate so that the selection
will shortlist tools that can provide that capability.
The most important workflows are in vital processes like Sales and
Customer Support but also Marketing and Administration. According to the
type of business, the production can include processes controlled or that
include some CRM functions. CRM implementation is about creating all
those workflows that compose each process.
Takeaway

Organisations can pursue more successful projects by

planning CRM implementations sliced into sub-projects for
each process, focusing on making all its workflows work. Then
move to the next process.

Making automation work is great and the more automations are in place the
more each workflow can save time for people, and enhance productivity. At
the beginning of the implementation it could be beneficial to apply an Agile
approach: first deploy the process with a minimal—safe—degree of
automation, then run it manually to observe and learn what works and what
could create issues. Once this knowledge is acquired, one automation can
be introduced and tested on a larger, fuller scale. Then the next setting
begins, a new automation is introduced, tested and deployed, and so on.
Working incrementally strongly boosts the organisational know-how.

Takeaway

Incremental building is like constructing a means of travel,

starting with assembling a bicycle, then a moped, after that a
motorbike and later a car. Trying to build a car in the first
place can be an excess of effort and, in lack of an effective
know-how, probably also too risky.

Processes and workflows are the basics of any digital CRM and their
perfect execution allows organisations to pursue a productivity
enhancement. To avoid failures while implementing automation in
workflows, companies can proceed by stages allowing the right time to
reach the final status, because embracing shortcuts can create issues that
later won’t be easy to detect where they originated from.

CRM Outputs
Every process involves inputs which are intended for creating outputs. The
CRM is a complex of processes, each of them with different outputs, which
all converge into one main output: the business.
Each business is a process where resources are collected, utilised and
transformed into products or services that create and deliver value to
customers. CRM as a tool can govern a portion of the whole process or
even a big part of the processes that together compose the business process.
Hence defining what the outputs of each process are, is a design matter that
finds its final verification at the implementation stage. Outputs are generally
information, bearing the shape of documents, either digital or solid, or
services that can include goods.
On this basis, the team working on the implementation stage should take
care that the outputs planned at the design stage are effectively delivered in
time and consistency as expected.
Outputs are not set in stone; flexibility on how they should be composed,
what they should contain and how they should be delivered is important as
the requirements can vary depending on the business stage. It can also
happen that outputs’ requirements vary along the implementation
deployment, and this can’t be dismissed by the implementation team. But
on the other hand changes shouldn’t be easily adopted, because of a lack of
clear requirements’ change they can lead to confusion. The result in that
case could be a chaos where nobody is able to decide if the failure is
connected to the system, the design or something else.

Decision-Making
Among outputs are also included all the information rendering that the
analytics over the CRM tool can provide. In Chapter 7, we read about the
reporting and forecasting that the implementation team should develop over
the course of the CRM implementation project. Due to the specific essence
of information rendering, it is a good practice to collect a quantity of data
that can support enough charts and reports before even starting
implementing the analytics tool.
The selection of the right analytic tool and its implementation can be a
quite specialised task as such a tool can differ a lot from the CRM tool. This
stage is a project in itself and can be standing alone independently.
 The importance of providing reliable and accurate information to
decision-makers relies on the quality of the tool and its internal algorithms
management: a tool where users are supposed to trust what happens inside
without being capable of control is not acceptable ever. But it is also very
much dependent on the implementation of the stage in terms of plan and
settings. Engaging a BI team when the project is big enough can generate
better results than trying it in-house.
A rule is always remarkable: Less is More.
Develop renderings and charts incrementally to help control the results and the processes
behind them.
Decide what metrics to track to build the information pattern that will provide concise,
concrete dimensions to operate on.
Develop dashboards with a few coherent charts about a cluster of metrics related to each other
instead of putting everything together.
Create dashboards for different users and recipients using different methodologies, which will
be concise and plain to financial staff, clean and straight to sales teams, engaging for investors
and the external stakeholders.

Takeaway

Working on information rendering is not just about presenting

data; the data collated into charts should be able to tell a
story, to explain from where to where the business is moving.
Data scientists generally focus on rendering stories accessible
and understandable by non-technical people. It is important to
think about recipients and what they expect to find from such
an abundance of data. The capability to reduce them to a bite-
size quantity without changing their nature or meaning relies
on a fine line of know-how, intentions, business knowledge
and ethical behaviour. This is why a heterogeneous team can
achieve it better.

Reasons Why CRM Implementation Projects Fail

Project Management standards consider that any project can fail, and the
rate of missing success can vary according to the domain of the project. It
also depends on the evaluation parameters: if we strictly consider all the
parameters as constraints then probably 99% of projects don’t produce the
expected results. If we consider the whole outcome of a project, including
the learning achievement, then probably that rate drops to 1%.
Is it then only a matter of requirements settings or flexibility in
evaluation?
Of course not. Very few people will be happy, and no CFO will, if an
expensive project fails to deliver anything useful, even if the learning
account records massive inbound. Nurturing the learning accounting is
great; it is something that every organisation should do. Unfortunately, it
just can’t be done any longer, only burning resources. Some complete
failures are part of organisational life, but they are still painful and not in
the scope of any organisation. We can be happy to learn that something
can’t work that way and test some other way to make it work, but that is
different from accepting a complete failure.

“However, the price tag for the project has exceeded the $1
billion planned and significant damage was done to the
company’s reputation and its financial performance.”*
* Bligh, P., and Turk, D., CRM Unplugged, Wiley, 2004.

Setting requirements, constraints and expectations is still important;

knowing how to play with them by bending them according to changing
situations and chances can be extremely important to set the basis for
success or failure. On one hand, this defines the evaluation framework ex-
post: the stricter it is, the less variance in defining what can be successful is
allowed. On the other hand, this approach can affect project management
and people’s decision-making by introducing fears and rigidness that quite
often mislead the choices. It can also induce a risk-averse mode that can
frustrate the project’s amplitude and output.
The case of big failure quoted before from Bligh and Turk’s CRM
Unplugged † includes “However…”. In the end the company achieved the
goal of speeding up processes and reducing errors that were in place before
the implementation; they managed to achieve better customer satisfaction
by speeding up processes, but it did cost them much more than expected,
both in direct cost and in revenue loss, without mentioning the loss of
reputation.
† Ibidem.

Takeaway

This tells us that having a big budget in place cannot ensure a

company's ability to avoid dreadful failures. It only tells us
that most of the time big corporations can cope with huge
losses better than medium-sized enterprises, but no one is
shielded against big debacles.

Moreover, there are specific elements that impact CRM implementation

projects and that it would be useful to be aware of, learn how to control or,
even better, entirely avoid. They are related to four main areas:

Mission Setting
Design and Planning
Leadership Commitment
Implementation Undertaking

Mission Setting
Under this class fall several items that matter for the definition of the
project’s
Purpose
Scope Width
Expectations Setting

To avoid issues with the project mission’s setting, the project Steering
Committee should take account of needs and requirements of the
organisation, run an As-Is analysis, depict the solution and then come back
to the “client” with a clear view of what can be done and how the output
will be. Explain how the output will fit the needs and requirements
(Purpose) and to what extent the solution will cover the needs (Scope). This
procedure engages people in getting responsibility of it (Expectations).
In the absence of a project scoping document shared with stakeholders,
each new requirement would be considered as part of the project and added
without an evaluation of its impact on the project itself.

Purpose
The project’s Purpose concerns the clarification of what is expected “To
Be.” What should be the situation after the implementation. This picture can
often be defined vaguely or in lack of measurable metrics. Having a
SMART goal in mind can help to share clearer milestones and deliverables
and develop awareness on how much still left to be done. If the output is
not clearly defined anything that comes across can disturb the perception of
the match between the expected result and effective output.
Even more importantly, it has been hypothesised that the greatest
number of failures happen due to lack of alignment between project purpose
and strategy.

Scope
The project’s Scope also falls in the previous category: lack of alignment.
What will be included in the project output and why, what can be added or
removed to stick with the budget or timing are part of the initial settings
about the output.
Scope also governs the control of a tendency to just try to automate
existing processes without addressing redundancies, outmoded practices
and problems that stick into the business processes sometimes due to lack of
awareness of them.*
* Bligh, P., and Turk, D., ibidem.

Expectations
The organisational Expectations settings has a double function that needs to
be properly clarified. First, we can set them around the imagined output and
the benefits of it; second, we can shape expectations to fit with the output
under design, avoiding paving the way for excessive, unreal expectations
beyond the actual benefits. Controlling Expectations is an essential part of
the design process, and its roots are entangled in the As-Is analysis.
A lack of a proper process of shaping expectations where designers enter
into details of processes, can affect whether possible changes and
improvements will be considered part of the project (and its budget) by the
client.

Design and Planning

Designing the solution in detail is probably the simplest part of the project.
If the client requirements’ collection has been run rigorously then the
design should flow. It requires deciding what technology to involve, which
of the existing platforms to use or if the solution should include
development from scratch (and if so in which coding technology). In both
cases, it will be relevant to rely on technology experts who can provide
clear answers on how the technology can fit the first draft. After having
achieved some clarity about the possible technologies’ pros and cons, the
selection should be discussed by the Steering Committee who will approve
the most balanced choice. Only then a proper design will take place and the
planning of what elements, features and functionalities should be developed
by their dependencies and interdependencies hierarchical priorities.
At that point the plan of what and when takes a direct value on cost
control. The client would need to activate some functions in order to take
advantage of an earlier delivery time and start using them. Only if the
planning is done correctly will it be possible to answer in terms of possible
options. Some functionalities can be developed before others, some can’t.
Some features require a hierarchy.
To take control over possible issues designers should be able to stick to
an exasperating attention to detail and a tedious precision on process
analysis and description to be able to depict each designed stage. Something
that always pays off in IT, where if it is true that the execution can vary and
find better solutions to what has been conceptualised, it also should start
with some solid roots on what is expected. Then enabling the executors in
finding a different fit to the requirements can be valuable.
A risk would be to fall in the false Agile approach that only relies on the
executor to find a solution to any requirement. The idea is that because the
executor can use flexibility in developing the solution, it would be
convenient not to bother too much in the planning phase with what should
be done but, instead, let the executors interpret what the client needs. This
approach, indeed very common in small projects, actually introduces
uncertainty and unattended effort for back and forth communication that
can frustrate decision-making and ultimately produce a different output
from what could be expected.

Leadership Commitment
This area includes leadership on the project as well as organisational
leadership. If the first one matters for the management of the project, it is
the second one that gives power to the project management and down to the
organisation to endorse and support the project. In fact the company’s
leadership can easily ditch the entire venture just showing lack of interest in
the project purpose.
Purposes and strategy misalignment is probably one of the most relevant
causes for failure in CRM implementation projects. It has been reported that
the overwhelming majority of organisations fail in keeping their goals
aligned to strategy. In missing alignment compromises arise and decision-
making becomes difficult, projects delay and they just crawl to the end
unable to meet the stakeholders’ expectations.
The whole management should be involved in the CRM project, even if
it is deployed in smaller chunks and is not yet extended to the whole
organisation. The role of the Steering Committee relies on its composition:
stakeholders from every department and key executive should contribute to
the decision-making with no exceptions. A Steering Committee crippled
can provide choices that are not balanced and they can be felt as a sub-
optimal compromise. Contributing to the Steering Committee is a long
marathon, not a sprint. To avoid the committee getting stuck or losing
influence it is important that members remain in charge at all times and,
mostly, they keep engaged and motivated to bring the project to life. This is
an effect of creating smaller projects, per stage, that are easy to deploy.
After each stage delivery the team can have a break and members can focus
on other priorities to be able to come back later recharged and with new
ideas. If the substitution of committee members or line managers should
happen along the way, the top leadership should ensure that the new
executives engage themselves into the project even better than the previous
ones.
It can be too easy for new managers to dismiss former decisions with
good reasons; they may have a better background or even just the need to
prove themselves to be better. If that happens, the risk of failure increases
dramatically as a direct effect.

Compensation and Rewards

Rewards and compensations are also extremely important for the project’s
success, and they rely on tracking performance. Measuring the project
trends using its main metrics is the procedure that often lacks firm
implementation. Even if everybody knows that it is possible to improve
only what we can measure, that great formulation is often bypassed. If a
measurement of outcomes is in place and the Steering Committee’s
members and anyone else involved in the project are properly compensated,
the project deployment can move towards the end with more confidence.
Rewarding people is a matter well beyond just the financials and it belongs
to each organisational culture archetype; how it impacts on project
failure/success rate is probably not appreciated enough. Using tools like
“The Celebration Grid”* can enable management to publicly distinguish
behaviours that produce positive outcomes and have to be recognised and
rewarded (Figure 8.2).
* Appelo, J., Managing for Happiness, Wiley, 2016.
Reward for successes and contributions can be a tricky aspect of
management and leadership. To ditch any project is enough to reward
people just on success no matter how. Opportunistic behaviours are
extremely common and supporting them by wrong compensation is even
more common in organisations.
 Figure 8.2 Jurgen Appelo, “The Celebration Grid,”
Managing for Happiness.

Business Units CRM

In Chapter 3 we already mentioned that each type of business has its sales
process. The sales process is what matters in order to design the CRM
pipeline. If a company includes several branches or business units that have
different ways to serve markets, then their requirements will differ. The
holding should ensure that every system in use, wherever and whatever it is,
can report adequately and be able to transfer data and information to its
central business intelligence. Or ensure that the tool chosen is flexible
enough to work with different pipelines and manage different sets of data
and approaches.
Deciding centrally one platform, one tool designed as corporate to fit
everyone can frustrate the needs of some business units, reducing its
acceptance and usage by people in sales.

Salespeople Engagement
Keeping the focus on the purpose that effectively creates value for
customers is an organisational commitment. To be able to truly get the
benefits of the effort spent in the CRM project, organisations should stick
with a clear mission to bring competitive advantages to the business;
investing in wrong areas can reduce the focus on what is truly important for
the business growth.
When the CRM implementation includes procedures and routines that do
not add any improvement to the customer experience or do not enhance the
value delivered, probably it wouldn’t move the salespeople. If a fancy
layout misleads the team from a correct evaluation of its value in terms of
changes of pre-existing, often out-of-date, procedures, the project will fail.
Organisations can find themselves spending effort on just re-automating
practices that do not provide any competitive advantage for the business.
This can lead to over-customizing the features of the CRM, bringing on
technical challenges, reducing the usability without getting the expected
outcomes.
Salespeople need tools to simplify their job, make them work smarter,
enable them to be more efficient in managing their deals along the sales
process, and not provide this as part of the CRM will determine a reduced
usage and, when possible, avoidance.

Execution Failures
Also well-planned CRM implementations can face unexpected complexities
comprising many issues and unforeseen problems. Some problems arise in
managing resources related to the project impacting on risk reverberation,
finance... Use of the standard of methods like Project Management and
Agile, adequate analysis and planning, interferences on the scope planning
can help to mitigate problems.
If the Steering Committee is not adequately balanced between
departments, namely when there is too much influence in place from one
side to the detriment of others, or when the tech department becomes
central to the project.
Technology is generally not a problem per se, but when the project is
driven mainly by IT specialists an excessive tech-confidence and a lack of
“reason why” and purpose focus becomes the risk. Unbalanced power in
the management team can steer the project in favour of the more influential
one.

Key Points
Compose a remarkable strategic mission that impacts the bottom line and engage the whole
organisation with it.
Avoid time shortcuts that lead to inadequate design, planning and missing of scope setting;
keep the design, the planning and the scope always clear.
Reduce the scale of each project, slicing a big one into sub-projects, and apply the Agile
Project Management method to ensure a controlled flexibility.
Avoid siloing the decision-making process by engaging everyone in taking part in the
outcomes and the change management.
Empower the leaders to improve the organisational culture and the management methodology
to facilitate the pursuit of better results.
Stick with designed and planned features and functionalities to avoid extending or changing
the solution during the execution.
Allow time to warm-up the organisation in using the tool; offer proper training to people and
support the transition for an adequate time frame.
Avoid over-invest in non-strategic processes; this is the key to keep focusing on value creation.
Be careful not to miss the opportunity to review processes if that will arise as a need even if it
is considered slightly out of scope.

Conclusion
Surveys on CRM tool success continue to show a high rate of misfit in
organisations. On the other hand, surveys on the benefit of digital
transformation show that 85% of US companies report digital tools helped
their businesses in some way.* What is remarkable now is that actually
Digital Transformation is becoming a Digital Journey where organisations
are involved with their entire being. Some minor fall is part of every
journey, but the competitive advantage that a company creates by running a
conscious learning process on deploying an implementation project of the
CRM is paramount.
* Deloitte, The Performance of Small and Medium Sized Businesses in a Digital World, 2019.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/es/Documents/Consultoria/The-performance-
of-SMBs-in-digital-world.pdf.

Summary
In this chapter, we went through the implementation of the CRM as a digital
tool, converging all the approaches and methodologies listed in the previous
chapters. The idea of starting with a proper design, then planning the
deployment and finally starting the implementation is like a journey: when
well prepared and considered in all its risks and opportunities it can be
amazing, fulfilling and inspiring; if not, it can turn into a nightmare.
Organisations should be aware they can make it great when:
They do not underestimate the effort;
They have a clear, viable, sustainable and valuable purpose;
They consider carefully the ROI;
They are not keen to embrace shortcuts to save time and effort;
They support the project under a solid organisational culture;
They are ready to engage a Steering Committee, delegating to it enough power;
Possibly they are not in rush to finish the project;
Eventually they can afford a failure and to ditch the project (or parts of it);
Leadership is committed and confident in elevating the organisation to another level.

In wondering if implementation issues can be controlled, a contribution

arrives from Michael Muse, a Texan operations software consultant, who
wrote about struggle in CRM adoption:

“Why is This Happening?

You should approach software adoption problems like a

Product Manager. If the team isn’t using something, the user
doesn’t understand or appreciate its value.

How do you fix that?

Market the utility to the end user.
Make it easier to use and quicker to reap said utility.

Easier said than done, right? “You don’t know these people!”
Wrong. Try this:
Do Some Beta Testing
Isolate a team that will give thoughtful and direct feedback. Have them do two or three
practice runs, and write down what they say. Did they groan while putting in a
particular piece of information? Press on, find out why.
Diagnose and Solve
Did they just find it pointless to put in the data? Write a short, articulate sales pitch of
how it’s going to help them later. Note: if you can’t do this easily, they’re probably
right and you need to kill the feature. Even if a process mostly serves their manager,
figure out how to connect their manager’s success to their own, their team’s, whatever.
People like to understand why they have to do things.
Avoid Common Pitfalls
It’s easy for even a veteran to make common adoption mistakes. When I’ve hired for
Sales Ops in the past, I inevitably ask about a time where adoption was poor, and what
the candidate did. The worst answers involve making validation rules, required fields
or other quality of life sacrifices. Even worse: “if they don’t do it, they don’t get paid,”
The best answers are user-centric.”*
* Muse, M., 100% CRM adoption never struggle again, Medium, 2018.
Chapter 9 How to Select a CRM
Platform
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-9

Technology is not the problem once it is correctly defined. The issue with
customer relationship management digital tools, and probably with many
digital solutions that companies can decide to adopt for their business, is
rarely just a tech issue. Most of the time an unsuccessful outcome, and even
more a successful one, can be related to the pattern of choices, behaviours
and organisationational culture in place. Either as drivers of the decisions or
as parameters to adapt the selected tool upon them, the role of the
leadership can be paramount.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

1. Introduction to the Selection Process

2. Selecting the Technology
3. CRM Platform types
4. Vendors List
5. Summary

Introduction to the Selection Process

Most of the time organisations need to learn by experience, starting from
using something, then improving and adapting to evolved needs and
purposes. In this final chapter, we will develop a thoughtful guide to help
management to define the technology and get oriented among the jungle of
possibilities. We do not suggest any specific solution; rather our purpose
would be to guide everyone who is interested in getting more aware and
performing more conscious decision-making. Let’s clarify that the best
solution doesn’t exist, this is per definition. We just offer to the readers
what we learnt along the way and our limited point of view on the
possibilities around.
Anyone who has reached this point already has an idea of what is
relevant for running a successful CRM implementation project based on
what has been outlined in the previous chapters. Now is the time to provide
just an overview of some solutions that can serve as a comparison to
everyone’s self-orientation in order to develop better decision-making. We
are also confident that every project manager experienced in CRM
implementation projects can develop a more tailored selection of possible
solutions based on the specific client’s requirements. Here we rank a short
list of solutions, to figure out some main differences. The list is totally
arbitrary and incomplete as it is intended only to give an idea of how to
proceed in a selection process.

Selecting the Technology

Believe it or not, the first choice is about technology. Having cleared the
pros and cons of CRM platforms and low-code platforms is the first step.
We are not considering here the third option, a development from scratch,
which even if technically possible may be in fact absolutely not useful to
consider. Using a low-code platform is like starting from scratch, all
possibilities remain achievable, but requires some knowledge and quite a lot
of work in developing every detail, while a CRM platform can be less
flexible but provide an initial framework to support further development.
Low-code technology can be good for creating something that is not
available in the market, like some processes that are very company-specific.
Even if the use of flexible, open platforms of low coding is growing lately,
we will refer mainly to CRM platforms that represent the most common
technology for the industry nowadays. When people refer to “CRM” what
they really think is a digital, off-shelf solution that functions as a CRM.
Among CRM platforms we can divide the used approaches between a more
flexible one, where more customisations are easily available, and a more
rigid one, where customisations are limited or achievable only by deep
coding. Almost all the entry-level tools have limited customisation as they
are conceived as off-the-shelf products in pre-built frameworks.
 Pre-built frameworks are essentially products ready to use that reduce
the implementation effort. Users are facilitated working into a framework of
processes and features, interacting with pre-defined, almost rigid user’s
interface. These products rely on a structure, a layout and their preferences
to focus upon one (or several) process(es). Their limitations are always
annoying clients, but in some way they are part of the “convenience” of the
solution, and those limitations can be considered as elements of the design
that are possible to overcome. It is interesting to see that those can
sometimes be limitations only under a certain point of view. These ready-
to-use tools offer affordable pricing, especially for their entry tier. A
different story can be when performance, features and functionalities are
required to perform a complete process management. For some vendors
also API use is not for free, creating a hidden cost on future development.
In the market it is easy to find solutions proposed as completely ready to
use, they claim a sort of “plug and play” for their solutions. This is, in our
point of view, quite an issue: the message that an organisation can install a
software and go, is a strong, probably imprecise but catchy, marketing
message. Some types of entry-level CRM tools plug-and-play are gaining
popularity as they allow significant saving either in the set-up and in
running costs. There are also solutions among them that, often positioned as
easy to use, could be appropriate also for companies with more complex
requirements.
Also, being entry level doesn’t necessarily mean bad, often limited; if an
organisation doesn’t necessarily need to use such a complexity in its
processes, probably a simple, basic and easy to use CRM can work even
better than complex, extensive platforms. It is only a matter of selecting the
vendor with care, as said there are in the market many, maybe too many,
vendors. What makes the difference, easy to say, is their “reason why”. If
they know what they do (the founders’ story matters) then probably their
solution can be good. If they add CRM to their solutions just because it is
fashionable, then better to stay away. Some small and also medium-sized
vendors could run the risk of having developed their solution upon a limited
know-how of the real use, then they should prove that their product matches
real-life organisational needs.
Decision-Making about CRM Platforms
Entry-level CRMs are also very useful when an organisation focuses the use
of the CRM on one or few processes. It is the case in sales in which a lot of
vendors offer tools for sales process management, and sometime just for
that. Those solutions can also be decent on that specific process. As long as
they can be integrated into a system infrastructure that enables data transfer
to other organisational functions’ tools, they can be useful with their focus
on one single process. Often a focused tool may give even better results
when developed upon one specific process: a vendor that places all its
efforts focusing on improving one process, it is committed to create value to
a portion of the whole business process, can be able to reach a remarkable
outcome. These laser-focus solutions can be extremely well developed
around the end users’ experience and they may recognise it as useful for
their needs.
This may be an ecosystem approach where a central focused solution
runs very well just one part of the whole business process while work
integrated with other vertical solutions shaping, this way, the whole
company’s digital infrastructure. This has been even easier nowadays with
the tremendous growth of cloud computing, which has simplified the
development of connectors.* Cloud computing is creating huge
opportunities for customers and vendors, in terms of possible process
control that were almost impossible before. In particular using Application
Programming Interface (API) between virtually any software.
* Goss, K., Automate It with Zapier, Packt, 2021
When we talk about CRM tools, we only discuss cloud-based solutions,
on-premise solutions still existing, but they are out of the scope of this
book, and honestly we do not believe there is any good reason to pursue
that technology nowadays.

“I’ve never been a fan of the all-in-one CRM tools that have
tons of features you’ll pay for but never use and fulfill 80% of
your needs and still don’t move the needle for your business.
Most people say they need a CRM because all of their
competitors have one, because their sales team is
 overwhelmed, or because they heard a sales pitch about a tool
that was going to 10x their business (who doesn’t want their
business to be multiplied by 10?) So, why do you need a
CRM? You want to increase sales, make customers happier,
and make things easier for your team, right? I want to show
you how you can build your own super-powered CRM that
will serve your needs and no one else’s, will cost next to
nothing, and work the way you work.†
† Meisel, A., You don’t need a CRM, Medium, 2018.

Not all the needs can be met by off-shelf solutions. As mentioned, it is true
that almost anyone can build a CRM digital solution; starting from scratch,
hard coding, or using low-coding platforms, anyone has to decide the
strategic value of the tool and primarily the value of their own time and
resources. Just the point often undervalued: “cost nothing” is only possible
when your own business values nothing. In any other cases if someone uses
time to make it, that time is either paid or stolen by probably more efficient
and more valuable allocations. This decision is completely up to each
entrepreneur and their own idea of time value.
Personally I’m not passionate about free-stuff anyway, if nothing else
because I have never been able to find the answer to a simple question:
“Why would someone give anything valuable away for free?” Of course
anyone would enjoy a free meal, but if you want to be in charge of your
own choices (and your own diet), then you probably would prefer to pay
than just take what is given to you for free.

“I can’t tell you how many times a customer would call me

saying a vendor announced they are going to End of Life the
current version of their cloud offering and now the customers
are forced to migrate and absorb the expense or kick off an
RFP process to evaluate new vendors. Most, if not all, of these
cases resulted from the customer not doing the proper due
 diligence on the platform during their initial evaluation
process.”*
* DeSisto, R., 4 must-ask questions when choosing a grief-free CRM platform, Medium,
2016.

Luckily the larger market demand is not from companies that seek to build
their tools for free. Of course anyone who loves the idea of paying nothing
may pursue it and probably, sometimes, in some particular business stages it
might also be the right choice. If later on, the business’ growth will show
that choice limits they will be always able to migrate to a more professional
tool. Something that also makes sense if conscientiously using a Lean
Approach. In that case most of the tips we provided earlier in this book take
an even more remarkable value: being aware of developing your own,
maybe temporary, solution, being able to set the data architecture carefully
in the most correct way, enables you to reduce migration’s headaches later.
The learning achievements that are possible by that experience are also very
relevant, the next solution that will be chosen will probably be developed
inspired by a greater know-how. The greatest decision-making about it is to
decide, not really if you have got the right skill for it, but first and foremost
how much your own time values (even more as allocation opportunity).
Everyone as a business person should be aware of the golden rule to
delegate tasks that are below the value of their time. Delegate or outsource
them to specialists that can be more efficient and/or less expensive. † As
time value is not just about being paid for it, but also includes its allocation
opportunities: what would be the long-term outcome of its allocation.
† Dill, S., Three Tips For Valuing Your Time As An Entrepreneur, Forbes 2019.

“But you must know that 48% of all salespeople never follow
up and 64% of companies admit they do not have any
organised way to nurture a lead.

Follow up is one thing every company I have ever worked with

agrees that, “We could do a better job with follow up.” How
do you get a customer back into your sales funnel? Don’t feel
 bad if you aren’t doing an excellent job of follow up because
the reality is none of us are taught creative ways to follow
up.”*
* Cardone, G., Do you know WHY you need a CRM?, Medium, 2017.

Grant Cardone wrote this in 2017. Since then the situation has improved
and many CRM vendors and marketing scholars have helped the public to
discuss Relational Marketing which ultimately is the real kernel of the
CRM know-how.
For this reason, if we look at the resource-allocation strategy point of
view, the decision about selecting a CRM solution may be crucial for many
businesses. In this perspective, vendors that introduced entry-level solutions
have created benefits to the industry helping companies to start with little
then grow.
On one hand, the risk that companies, left alone just with entry-level
CRM tools, may face is that they often struggle to identify the problems
they meet: which of them are just tool’s limitations and which of them are
know-how impediments? People may develop the belief they are limitations
of every CRM, and that a CRM tool is more a hassle than of any help.
Entrepreneurs may become accustomed to cheap prices, and instead of
wondering why such differences in price, they just develop low price (low
value) expectations. On the other hand it is a human attitude and an
entrepreneurial mission to seek resource savings. The industry commitment
should be to enhance the culture around CRM beyond just the digital tools,
it would help people in getting more confident and try experimenting in a
more open way. We should all be involved in seeking ways to enhance the
industry instead of levelling it to the bottom.
If the industry is capable of better supporting independent voices and
more knowledgeable approaches for the benefit of everyone, the presence
of low-cost solutions will be then more beneficial to everyone. And this
enhanced know-how will overcome the issues created by cheap, very
convincing vendors who promote the idea of Do-It-Yourself with just a few
dollars per month, leading to wrong assumptions the end users.
Buyers should also make an effort to educate themselves about the topic,
the market trends and their own needs. When good providers meet buyers
who know what they want, everyone works better and projects succeed
more often. It can be complex to become knowledgeable about the whole
perspective of CRM if you are not dedicated to it (isn’t the same to
everything?). Entrepreneurs and managers already have a lot to look after in
their own businesses, developing in the first person a digital tool should be
on their top priority or can they delegate it?

CRM Vendors and Platforms

Here we are going to list some of the most relevant vendors and their CRM
solutions. To do it we will use the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report 2020
about CRM. We selected, in a totally arbitrary mode, just a few of them that
we consider most relevant for the market as a benchmark. We do not
endorse them; we simply believe they all have some good reasons before
being so popular. We will add some tools not included in the Gartner
research, a work we appreciate, even if we do not really always agree with
their conclusion or with their selection of tools.
It follows an extract from Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM
Customer Engagement Center 2020.*
* https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3991199/magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-
application-platf.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; the same as last year. It offers
CEC capabilities via its Dynamics 365 Customer Service solution (v.9) and
in its Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights, Power Virtual Agents, and
Power Automate applications. Collectively, these apps unite the standard
functionalities of a customer service solution—case management,
knowledge management and multiexperience engagement—with AI-driven
insights built on a single platform that unifies tech stacks and customer
data. Microsoft offers its service worldwide, mostly to enterprises. Consider
Microsoft if you are looking to provide multichannel support for your front-
office customer service teams, or if you are looking for a more standard
back-office case management or ticketing system for internal or external
service needs. Otherwise, consider it if the use of related apps such as
Microsoft 365, Power BI, Power Apps, or other Dynamics 365 apps are key
to your customer service strategy.

Strengths
Advancing platform: The Dynamics 365 CEC offering builds on the same codebase as the
Microsoft Power Platform, which is a low-code platform that spans Microsoft 365.
Intelligent customer service: One of Microsoft’s focus areas is on bringing AI capabilities like
Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft Bot Framework and Power Virtual Agents together to
provide more intelligent customer service experiences for both customers and agents.
Integration and automation: Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides extensive support for
the integration of multiple line-of-business applications. Customer engagements are
supported by a unified agent view and rich RPA capabilities for end-to-end customer
service.

Cautions
Digital engagement capabilities: Microsoft has made strides over the past year to reduce
dependency on third-party integration for digital channels, but the feature set is new and not
market-tested. This year, Dynamics 365’s digital engagement capabilities received the
lowest scores out of all vendors evaluated.
Support team synergies: Reference customers reported that Microsoft appears to be siloed and
resource-constrained between the Azure and Dynamics teams. Companies that are
shortlisting Microsoft and expecting greater synergies between its offerings should fully
investigate what these component capabilities actually bring.
Solution layering: Reference customers gave the Dynamics 365 solution layering a low score
because of application lifecycle management practices for migration of customer solutions
between test, UAT and production environments.

Oracle
Oracle is a Leader; the same as last year. For this Magic Quadrant, we
evaluated Oracle CX Service—a set of customer service applications that is
part of the Oracle CX suite. Reference customers identified Oracle as one of
the three vendors most commonly mentioned by those looking for a
customer service solution. Primary enhancements in the past year have been
to channels, digital assistants and embedded service experiences. Oracle CX
Service should be considered by B2C organizations that have complex
processes and require strong integration capabilities. It is also used by B2B
organizations, most notably in the high-tech and manufacturing industries.
Oracle operates worldwide.
Strengths
Vision: Oracle demonstrates continuous delivery of innovations, with a focus on predictive
service in the CEC market. Its channel proliferation and convergence, ability to connect
visual experiences and commitment to digital customer service are leading edge.
Oracle Intelligent Advisor (OIA): OIA (previously known as Oracle Policy Automation or
OPA), paired with strong integration capabilities, provides smart advice that determines and
delivers the right decisions to its users with self-service and new conversational channels.
Knowledge management: Oracle offers one of the most scalable and functional knowledge
management solutions among service suite vendors. In 2019, Oracle continued to innovate
with an emphasis on how knowledge is consumed by both human and automated
conversational agents.

Cautions
Licensing and contracts: Reference customers said that they found Oracle’s license structure
and matrix complex and their entitlements difficult to forecast. They also said that Oracle
could be difficult to contract and negotiate with because its processes are stringent and the
approval for contracts is lengthy.
Chatbot automation: Oracle scored low in the automation of engagement category in the
reference customer survey. Clients admitted to finding the technical migration to the new
Oracle Digital Assistant challenging.
Migration: When trying to migrate from Siebel CRM to Oracle Service Cloud, Gartner clients
reported insufficient clarity of communication about how to do so, both from Oracle and its
partners.

Salesforce
Salesforce is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; the same as last year. About
two-thirds (64%) of prospective CEC customers with whom Gartner has
contact shortlisted Salesforce Service Cloud as their first, second or third
choice (its nearest competitor in this regard was shortlisted by 35% of
customers). Over the last 12 months, Salesforce has added more than 125
new features and enhancements to Service Cloud, including WhatsApp,
real-time AI-based case classification, skills- based routing and next best
action. Worldwide, both B2C and B2B midsize companies and large
enterprises should consider Salesforce for its CEC solution.

Strengths
Vision: Salesforce’s global presence, market impact and vision to transform customer service
is unmatched so far by other vendors in this market.
Voice services: The introduction of Service Cloud Voice (general availability planned for
3Q20) will give customers the option to bring new, pre integrated voice services through
 Amazon Connect. This will be in addition to the vendor’s ability to integrate with other
contact center voice offerings.
Platform add-ons: Being part of the extensible Salesforce platform, complemented by the
AppExchange marketplace, the Ignite customer innovation program and the Trailhead
learning platform and community, helps Salesforce differentiate its Service Cloud product
with more features and functions.

Cautions
Diffuse products: Customers continue to struggle with the lack of native integration, and with
the architectural differences between the different Salesforce Clouds.
Inconsistent service providers: Service providers implementing Salesforce functionalities show
inconsistent capabilities, which leads to troubled implementations and loss of agility in the
speed of deployment.
Prices and contracts: Reference customers for Salesforce expressed concerns about high prices
and vendor lock-in after integrating multiple Salesforce components or adding third-party
components for industry-specific implementations, interactive voice response and
telephony infrastructure.

Zendesk
Zendesk is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; the same as last year. Zendesk
Support is part of the Support Suite, which combines a customer
communication hub strategy with engagement orchestration features to
form the basis of the vendor’s CEC application. Zendesk acquired Smooch,
now Sunshine Conversations, a messaging platform for conversational
business, and launched Zendesk Gather, a community experience product,
and Zendesk Duet, a combined sales and service offering. Zendesk works
globally, often with midsize customers and increasingly with enterprises.
Consider Zendesk if you expect user adoption to be a particular challenge,
if a SaaS-based application is the most suitable, or if an industry-specific
solution is not essential.

Strengths
Innovation: Zendesk continues to innovate at a significant pace. It launched several key
products and features in 2019 like Zendesk Duet, Gather and Sunshine Conversations.
Easy to use: Reference customers continue to appreciate the ease of use of the product and find
benefit in the fast time to value and agility it delivers to customers.
Public cloud: Zendesk offers a public cloud solution, Zendesk Sunshine, with an extensive
application ecosystem. Its app marketplace offers over 950 easily added apps.

Cautions
Enterprise customers: Zendesk has made strides toward meeting the needs
of true enterprise customers but is still continuing to develop its solution.
Reference customers said that the solution is inconsistent, particularly when
it comes to stability and quality.
Need for complexity: Zendesk’s focus on simplicity has resulted in large customer service
centers finding its interface less intuitive when trying to manage significant numbers of
advisors. Only a small percentage of Zendesk’s customers have 500 or more seats.
Pricing and contracts: Zendesk’s complex and inflexible pricing and contract options concern
Gartner’s enterprise clients.

SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; the same as last year.
Its primary CEC solution is Sugar Serve, part of the Winter ‘20 release,
which was introduced for the first time mid-2019 as a stand-alone offering,
breaking out of Sugar Enterprise. SugarCRM strengthened its ecosystem
portfolio with integrations with the likes of Genesys, 8x8 and Amazon
Connect to enhance its customer service proposition. Seventy-five percent
of Sugar Serve customers are from the Americas and 16% from EMEA.
Consider SugarCRM if you represent a midsize support organization
looking for a capable customer engagement solution, or if you are already
using, or planning to deploy, sales automation.

Strengths
Simple to use: SugarCRM is easily configured and customized. No special training or
proprietary scripting languages are needed to achieve results.
Integration: SugarCRM demonstrates focus on the ability to integrate with contact center
platforms and legacy contact center environment technology.
Customer support: Reference customers showed consistent satisfaction with the vendor and its
dedication to its customers during deployment.

Cautions
Growing pains: Sugar Serve is a young solution that needs to be expanded, as currently several
gaps can be identified in digital engagement and case management capabilities.
Small marketplace: SugarCRM’s application marketplace offers very few technology partner
solutions. Sugar Enterprise will not meet the needs of customers that require a robust, self-
service-based CRM application ecosystem, as provided by some other CEC competitors.
Customer support: Reference customers reported that SugarCRM could improve its
capabilities for maintenance and customer support.
Zendesk Sell
We would like to clarify that Gartner only considered Zendesk Support and,
strangely enough, they didn’t write one single word about Zendesk Sell
(previously named Future Simple, then PipeJump and lastly as Base), the
sales-oriented CRM that the company bought in 2018. Base CRM was a
Polish-born, Californian-established company that has been recognised by
many publications for its intuitiveness, mobility and clean design. In
February 2013, Base was recognised by Forbes as one of 10 Mobile Apps
to Organise Your Business. In October 2012, Fortune positioned Base as the
next major disruptor in the CRM space.*
* Savitz, E., Revolution: A New Era In Software For Small Businesses, Forbes 2012.
Zendesk Sell has become then a powerful platform that strongly benefits
from its full integration within the impressive Zendesk ecosystem.

Strengths
Direct native integration with a powerful customer support (Zendesk
Support) tool and a strong cloud app for omni-channel conversational
platform (Sunshine). Great looking UI, light and professional.

Limitations
The CRM is well designed but lacks of some basic tools in the data
management, it may imply users have to download data in csv files to
manage bulk alterations. UI with some arguable choices in terms of
information rendering.

Pipedrive CRM
This tool has been developed with business-to-business sales process
management in mind. The Estonian-born New York-headquartered
company has quite powerful marketing strategy that enable its tremendous
growth. This is now one of the most appreciated CRM tools among start-
ups and micro- and small business.
Pipedrive is rated as the most popular CRM and awarded as the most
easy-to-use solution for salespeople. It is specifically designed to help
SMBs efficiently manage their sales processes. The company has been
recognised as the “Best Overall CRM Solution in 2020” by MarTech
Breakthrough † and “Easiest to Use CRM” by Motley Fool. ‡ Since 2018,
Pipedrive has been included in the highly competitive Forbes Cloud 100
list, the definitive ranking of the top hundred private cloud companies in the
world, published by Forbes.§ Probably the most relevant innovation that
Pipedrive has introduced to the market is the Visual Sales Pipeline
Management that is considered to be its core and the most user friendly
approach to sales process management.* Another relevant innovation relies
on its embedded Activity Based Selling methodology, which was developed
to enhance the salespeople day-to-day routine and engaging them in their
commitment.
† https://martechbreakthrough.com/2020-winners/.
‡ Cision, PRNEWSWIRE, Pipedrive Awarded “Easiest to Use” CRM by The Motley Fool, 2020.
§ Madiya, N., Pipedrive Reserves Its Place Again In The List of 2020 Forbes Cloud 100,
https://emergingcloudtech.com, 2020.
* https://tech.co/crm-software/crm-best-salesforce-alternatives.

Strengths
Intuitive UX, easy to use visual pipelines settings, fully integrated with
hundreds of solutions, open API for developers.

Limitations
While its core feature work fine, many collateral features are not as good as
its core, it lacks of a master control: settings of users, features, functions
and integrations must be done one by one.

HubSpot
The third relevant player that Gartner didn’t include is the Cambridge
(MA)-based vendor, HubSpot. Its solution, born as a marketing automation
is still strongly focused on the leads generation stage. Established in 2006,
the company has grown solidly. Since 2012 it has made progress and the
suite is now stable and stronger. Probably not as “easy to use” as someone
still labelling it, but in its focus on online marketing and leads generation, it
has won a solid position in the industry.
 HubSpot has been described as unique because it strives to provide its
customers with an all-in-one approach. A 2012 review of CRMSearch said
HubSpot was not the best business solution in each category, but that, taken
as a whole, it was the best “marketing solution” that combined many tools
into one package.

Strengths
The sophistication of its Call to Action tool, its broader control of the leads
journey and content management, what has been described as Inbound
Marketing.

Limitations
Described as more breadth than depth, is reported very complex to set and
run and its pricing is also considered a premium positioning.

CRM Platforms Summary

In the Gartner report, the majority of vendors are mainly focused on the
corporate market, while medium-sized companies may find them a bit less
right for them, owing to their complexity and the impact of those tools on
small businesses, their application is a strong business decision. Gartner
also included some tools better balanced for medium enterprises, probably
none for small businesses.
An approach would be to analyse those tools as reference of the market,
and after clarifying the magnitude of the project and the subtleties of the
business, entering into an effort/benefit evaluation stage with care, the
outcome would be a considered selection of tools that may fit better the
organisational requirements.
Dynamics is a debated CRM from the brand of Seattle. Its power is
beyond question as well as its strong capability to work on the marketing
side, especially in business-to-consumer frameworks. To whom who loves
the vendor Dynamics is a clear way to go, when the business magnitude is
big enough to sustain this complexity and benefit of it. Clients report a high
complexity in the set-up and probably overall a not quite easy-to-use
system; the use in B2B seems less remarkable as salespeople management
has been reported less stable than clients would expect it.
Oracle and Salesforce are two of the most advanced and widely used
CRMs for the corporate segment. This kind of tools require a substantial
investment in design and implementation, in some way they are quite
flexible to operate in B2B and B2C business models but their best return is
probably on B2C as it is a model where fragemented, multiple interaction
with thousands of contacts to lead them across complex contents and
marketing messages really requires a powerful platform. Users are reporting
the need of a long learning curve before to become productive.
SugarCRM, Zendesk and HubSpot are more focused on the midsized
enterprise market and they tend to be omni-comprehensive tools. Even
though Zendesk and HubSpot developed (or bought) separate apps for
CRM and they can run either independently or integrated into their
ecosystems, while SugarCRM is mainly a strong CRM platform with
capabilities of flexibility into a structured framework. Since HubSpot has
been ditched from Salesforce as their preferred marketing automation, they
are actually proposing the CRM as a entry level freeware solution, their
marketing strategy aimed to attract clients has been quite successful.
Pipedrive is a completely different tool. The market main focus was
since the beginning on small and micro-businesses; lately also midsized
companies are started using it benefitting by the laser-focused approach on
sales process management for B2B. For a tool positioned in the entry-level
segment Pipedrive shows a quite good powerful core system and a plethora
of integrated, third parties solutions - its ecosystem. The segment where
Pipedrive sits is notoriously crowded, and becoming relevant among so
many competitors is a remarkable achievement. In this segment, many
solutions lack investments to become good enough or their companies often
may lack vision, therefore they tend to remain small software houses with a
single product. Even worse, many vendors risk developing just “another
digital tool” with few or no differentiation idea on what pain they really
want to solve: in the absence of a specific mission-oriented proposal they
end up staying in limbo.
Some vendors are also trying to bridge the gap between their entry-level
segment and their more complex solutions aimed to bigger businesses. It
will be great if that happens, supporting the market with more qualified
proposals instead of a few huge brands and too many dwarves. The
problems for long established vendors is to offer good enough solutions at
right prices for mid size companies when they are more comfortable serving
corporations. In this sense some relatively new entry as Zendesk Sell or
Pipedrive or even HubSpot could play a relevant role in this area.

Low-Code Platforms
Low-code development platform is an application that provides the
Graphical User Interface for programming and thereby develops the code at
a fastest rate, reducing the programming efforts. Some platforms are also
pretty good for a quick deployment. The market appears healthy; the
number of vendors continues to grow, corresponding with increasing
demand. It is a mission impossible to analyse even a portion of so many
proposals available in the market. We limited the analysis to the most
relevant excluding, sorry for that, many that probably are also valuable, at
least we wanted to propose an overview and a benchmark. Low code is a
relatively new approach in developing solutions of any kind. Well beyond
CRM tools, its value relies on the speeding up of the development, reducing
the time enabling even non developers to control the logic and features,
workflows and processes, avoiding the need to intervene at the deep code
level every time. The benefit of using low coding can be frustrated by
vendors that are not fully committed to supporting standard procedures or
even standard languages (SQL). Their databases should be fully relational,
and the documentation clear and complete. One of the worst experiences a
company can encounter when testing a low-code tech solution is to discover
only when already locked-in by the vendor that the solution doesn’t
properly run SQL commands or that some other routine but slightly more
complex task can’t be performed inside the platform. For this reason,
deciding carefully on the vendor definitely matters. All the security
certifications should be in place.* The following is an extract from Gartner
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms 2020.†
* Software Testing Help, 10 Best Low-Code Development Platforms In 2021, November 2021
(https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/low-code-development-platforms/).
† https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3985947/magic-quadrant-for-the-crm-customer-
engagement-center
Appian
Appian offers low-code app building, rich multiexperience capabilities,
business process orchestration, automated decisioning, AI/ML and RPA.
The platform focuses on complex processes such as end-to-end case
management and other applications requiring sophisticated automation,
rules and analytics. Its technological differentiators include full-stack
automation capabilities, prebuilt no-code integration with various AI
services, and end-to-end life cycle support for DevOps. Appian has
operations in every major world region, with a focus on large enterprises.
Its 2020 roadmap includes enhancements to AI-service integration, DevOps
capabilities, RPA and expanded AI support for application development.

Strengths
Product: At the core of Appian’s LCAP strength is its rich process-driven application
development. Appian’s ability to offer a complete stack of low-code automation tooling that
can handle complex workflows, business rules and case management along with RPA is a
key differentiator. Added to that, it offers low-code tools to build multiexperience apps to
enable customer and employee experiences.
Market understanding: Appian brings in a complete end-to-end solution for its customers by
enabling low-code capabilities to build business applications, perform complex process
orchestration, and automate routine repetitive tasks with RPA. Customers looking for a full-
stack automation platform should consider Appian’s LCAP.
Overall viability: In a crowded market with many small, privately owned vendors, Appian
stands out as a stable, publicly traded company with a focus on low-code technology.
Although smaller than many of its competitors, Appian has many enterprise customers and
government agencies running its platform, which should ensure its long-term viability in
this market.

Cautions
Application development: Some of Gartner’s Peer Insight reviewers found that Appian’s low-
code development product is more suitable for professional developers. Appian’s
proprietary expression and scripting language is typically an inhibitor for “citizen
developers” building algorithmic expressions. Although Appian has built some
collaborative features to support multiple personas—including both citizen and pro
developers—Gartner has not yet seen much adoption.
Sales execution and pricing: Appian pricing has been observed as highly variable in Gartner
inquiries. Recently, the vendor has made some changes with a simplified basic subscription
model, an annual “Quick Start License” and other options that may allay customer concerns
in future.
Business model: Appian has a high proportion of professional services revenue associated with
its LCAP business. While some of these services are likely legacy business process
 reengineering consulting, and others related to large projects associated with its targeting of
larger enterprises, the proportion of services to product revenue implies more specialist
developer requirements.

Oracle (Visual Builder)

Visual Builder product is mainly focused on professional developers
customizing Oracle SaaS products for multiexperience, as well as
consumers of the wider Oracle Integration Cloud stack. Visual Builder
provides services access and coordination with a multiexperience front end.
Oracle’s vision is of a unified DevOps and low-code stack, released
recently as Visual Builder Platform.

Strengths
Overall viability: Oracle is a large and successful DBMS and SaaS vendor. The latter
increasingly relies on Visual Builder as the primary development and extension mechanism,
and Oracle SaaS is a major growth engine for Oracle. Therefore, Visual Builder will be
increasingly employed for Oracle SaaS development and customization, and potentially for
those customers constructing new SaaS.
Product: Visual Builder includes the Oracle JET engine for mobile and web development, and
provides ready access to multiexperience UIs. The paradigm of event-driven “action
chains” to provide advanced user experiences, on top of a full REST API and catalog
access, alongside developer automation tooling (including DevOps and test-case
generation) is instrumental in Oracle’s Visionary placement in this Magic Quadrant.
Pricing: Almost uniquely among the vendors presented in this Magic Quadrant, Oracle’s
pricing for Visual Builder is resource-based and therefore dependent only on consumption
—with no dependency on user counts or other metrics that can discourage adoption. This
makes Visual Builder much more accessible for new use cases

Cautions
Market understanding: Oracle’s policy of separating out specialist products for standard LCAP
functions (such as business processes and often integrations) means that Visual Builder
customers need to learn and license additional components for these capabilities. Indeed,
the majority of Visual Builder users acquire it as a component of Oracle Integration Cloud
(which itself is not an LCAP). This puts Visual Builder into the category of more specialist
tooling compared with the more multifunction offerings that increasingly are embedding
those capabilities.
Marketing execution: Oracle does not make much effort to market Visual Builder. Its recent
release of Visual Builder Platform was communicated as a blog post, and Gartner inquiries
for it are rare. So while Oracle appears to recognize the vision of SaaS plus PaaS, it seems
reticent to promote itself in this area. It also fails to market the advantages and differences
of its two separate LCAPs (see also Oracle APEX), likely causing reduced adoption.
 Platform ecosystem: Visual Builder provides easy component access to its business objects
and Oracle SaaS services, but Oracle does not promote a rich third-party ecosystem for its
customers and partners to market to and share. This means that, despite an advantageous
pricing model and multiexperience capabilities, Oracle Visual Builder provides a less-rich
target audience for potential OEMs.

FileMaker
Gartner didn’t take into consideration FileMaker, the Apple platform for
low coding.
The platform displays quick find, quick reports and customisable themes
for the ease of developers. Other features include, but are not limited to,
highlighted script errors, ESS adapter, external SQL data connection and
more.
Pre-built templates help businesses to build a robust app for internal use
to manage assets and data in one place. Secure data and full supervision of
the admin on users’ roles and permissions restrict access to controlled data
as well as built-in reports, charts, dashboards and built-in reports. Filemaker
was strong since the 1990s’ when it established a great positioning in a
market that was not quite born yet. Later the solution lost a bit of grip,
being reported slow when used in big project, with online apps. Recently it
appears to fix the main issues but is not anymore so in-vogue for
developers, they actually created a focused solution-provider network
capable to support business in adopting this tool. It may be a good thing,
but while its pricing remain premium also its adoption may be more for a
niche. Built-in reports, charts, dashboards and built-in reports.

Strengths
Highly flexibility in a fully developed framework. Overall a great tool,
probably also thanks to its long presence in the market.

Limitations
Limited interoperability that requires quite costly solutions, high level of
specialised skills involved in its set-up and maintenance.

Visual Lansa
This platform is proposed as a way to build better, build faster any
application for IT teams and software developers to reduce the human work
(hire less) and reduce time. They claim to interpret the digital
transformation for business with a powerful approach at a quite decent
pricing.
Digital transformation: Transform your manual and paper-based processes into web, mobile,
cloud, and desktop applications for better efficiency, productivity, and data accuracy.
Go mobile: Quickly mobile-enable the parts of your business that need remote access to
business-critical information. Enable IT to reduce costs and improve the bottom line.
Deploy anywhere: The flexibility to deploy to an IBM i or Windows server, or, take your apps
to the cloud anytime for better agility and elasticity. Improve availability while cutting
operational costs.*
* Lansa.com, Company’s promotion.

Strengths
Interesting balance cost/performance, visual high control of the
environment. Part of a big ecosystem.

Limitations
Probably a solution which still under development, some user found the
Debugger not fully useful and documentation little bit short. The matter is:
learn Lowcode platform is a job itself.

Bubble
The small company is going big. Born as a small solution around front-end
application Bubble has got $100 M to grow in 2021. They claim to have
created a new programming language based on visual no-code. For web app
bubble can be a solution to watch in the near future. It is now pretty good to
build faster MVP and testing apps.

Strengths
Easy to learn, fast to put in place, supports webpage creation and their
deployment live. Pricing really affordable.

Limitations
After 9 years still a solution “on-development”. In need of strong
development.

Ninox
Born as cloud database positioned on the lower market pricing and for long
time struggling with its own management culture, this small company
seems about to restart its way to grow. Thanks to a management change that
probably matters on its culture rebuilding and from that point to its whole
market presence, Ninox is offering quite useful tools to easy develop simple
process management applications.

Strengths
Easy to set up, really really low cost. About to change radically, hence
probably more benefit to come.

Limitations
No relational database, limited rendering capabilities, in need of great
investment to build reliability, performance and usefulness.

Low-Code Platform Summary

We listed some relevant vendors according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant
Report 2020 about low-code platforms. Our selection is totally arbitrary,
mainly for a market benchmark. We also listed some platforms, out of the
Gatner Report that can’t be fully comprehensive, to provide an better
overview of possible solutions that enable medium size enterprise in
creating their own CRM tool and more.
In some cases, even small companies could benefit from developing a
bespoke solution when their needs are not fully covered by existing ready-
to-use platforms and/or if their pricing can be a deterrent. Low-code
platforms may simplify, accelerate and reduce costs of app development,
which is interesting either for business people to reduce IT dependence, as
well as for IT departments to enhance productivity. The potential of low-
code development can be impressive and we are just at its early stage of
market adoption.
Conclusion of the Chapter and the Book
In this chapter, we reported reviews of solutions available in the market
with some considerations on our side but mainly relying on the publicly
available ones. The intention was to report an overview that everyone can
use for arranging a deeper investigation, being of the belief that every
organisation should analyse and verify carefully the best possible solution
under their own requirements and expectations.
The purpose of this chapter, was to provide a different perspective
beyond just the CRM solution vendors, the purpose of this book was to give
everyone, with a special care to non-tech business people, a completely
different view around CRM.
We hope to have been able to contribute to readers’ enhancement also
enjoying you all, developing a practice guide for organisations,
entrepreneurs and managers who prepare themselves for a CRM migration.
As previously mentioned, no company exists without a CRM.
Hence, adopting a solution that helps to avoid the hazards of memory
loss, paper alight or spreadsheet mess is a challenge to the organisational
way of manage relationships. For this reason, we left the discussion over
tools to a minimum. We strongly believe that implementing a digital tool
has no value if the organisation doesn’t prepare it based on its own strategic
view. Moreover, implementing a tool under urgency, shortcutting the
complex decision-making process, is probably among the most common
reasons for such a high CRM project failure rate.
With this book we wanted help organisations and entrepreneurs in
developing a better approach to their CRM projects, thereby helping
everyone to work better.
Index

A
Activities analysis, 116
Appian, 193
Audiences nurturing, 70–71
Authority, 38–39

B
B2B, see Business-to business
B2B lead generation, 31
B2B markets, 34
B2C, see Business-to-consumer
BANT model 37–42
B to B, complex sales processes, 112–113
Budget, 37–38
Business and technology strategies, 78–79
enable user-first, omnichannel experience, 79
tech sync of, data and human agenda, 79
Business requirements, 82
Business-to business (B2B), 63–64
Business-to-consumer (B2C), 7
Business units, 172
Buyer persona, 62
business-to business (B2B), 63–64
organisation issues, 62–63
price-sensitive, 65
WHWT process and model, 64–65, 97–98

C
Cold leads, 30–31
Communicating value, 76–77
Company’s brand, 30–31
Compensation and rewards, 171–172
Consumer expectations, 84–85
Contacting stage, 30–31
Conversational database, 82
CRM, see Customer relationship management
CRM awareness, 3–4
CRM project failure, 21
CRM project success, 20–21
CRM strategy, 18–19
Customer experience, 77–78
Customer relationship management, 1–2, 27; see also individual entries
see also individual entries
big bang or not, 13
business matters, 6
concept, 5–6
idea of, 8
journey
actionable tasks, 19–20
innovation, 17
parameters change, 20
strategy and execution, 18–19
vision and understanding approach, 18
way-to-do, 18
managing policies, 6–7
people awareness, 3–4
popularity, 8
disruptive approach, 9–10
industry leader, 10
innovation, 11
market, options and opportunities, 10–11
market numbers, 10
salesforce advertising message, 9
relationship management tool, 11–13
usefulness, 3
The Customer Service Vision 2020
meet customers’ expectations, helping team, 85–86
overview, 87–88
productivity gains, 87
say it once, and once only, 86–87
swift and unprecedented change, 83
Customers service IT tools
automation, 80–81
call centres, 81
ChatBots function, 80–81
 conversation channels, 82
direct support and assistance, 80–81
knowledge-based support, 80
service management, 82
system architecture analysis, 82

D
Data architecture, 95, 158–161
data collection, real life
effects and risks, 107–108
data methodisation, 102
kernel of, 106–107
optimisation, 104–106
structure, 102–104
description, 95
information and data
business description, 98
collection process, 96
components and technologies, 98–99
corporations, 97
decision-making processes, 97
digital collection, 99–100
digital era, 101
multidimensional selection, 100–101
parameters patterns, 100
planning, 96
query logic, 100
split approach, 98
synopsis, 108–109
Database (Db), 2
Data collection, real life
effects and risks, 107–108
Data-driven architecture process, 21–23
Data methodisation, 102
kernel of, 106–107
optimisation, 104–106
structure, 102–104
Decision-making, 165–166
platform selection, 179–183
Deployment definition, 145–148
Design and planning, 169–170
Developing solutions stage, 43–46
 product, 46
service, 47–49
Digital economy, 84
Digital transformation, 16–17, 83
Dirty data, 161–162

E
Execution failures, 173
Expected foreseen, 128–129

F
FileMaker, 196
Financials analysis, 118–119
Functional organisation, 22

G
Good service, 73, 84

H
Helping people (customer service), 73
business and technology strategies, 78–79
tech sync of, data and human agenda, 79
user-first, omnichannel experience, 79
case study, Italian case of success 88–94
communicating value, 76–77
customer experience, 77–78
solutions search, 73–76
synopsis, 87–88
Help now approach, 60–62
Hot Leads, 30
HubSpot, 190

I
Industry leader, 10
Innovation matters, 11
Internal processes, 21–22

J
Jupyter, 139–140
K
KPIs financials, 114
KPIs people, 113–114
KPIs sales process, 113

L
Leadership commitment, 170–171
Leads generation, 55
audiences nurturing, 70–71
buyer persona, 62
business-to business (B2B), 63–64
organisation issues, 62–63
price-sensitive, 65
WHWT acronym, 64–65
to CRM
decisions tree, 67–70
sales process, decisions tree, 67–70
funnel works, 59–60
help now approach, 60–62
people engagement, 56–58
prospect and opportunities, 65–66
sell now approach, 60
synopsis, 71–72
Learning opportunity, 51–52
The lighthouse, 156–158
Low-code platforms, 192
Appian, 193–194
FileMaker, 196
Oracle (Visual Builder), 194–196
synopsis, 198–199

M
Market, options and opportunities, 10–11
Marketing leads, 55–56
Marketing opportunities, 55–56
Marketing prospects, 55–56
Market numbers, 10
MEDDIC/MEDDICC, 42–43
Metrics, 119–122
quantitative vs. qualitative, 122
Microsoft Dynamics, 184
Mission setting, 168–169
Multichannel interaction, 23

N
Needs, 39–40
Negotiation, 49–51
“NO” say, to clients, 33–34

O
Opportunities analysis, 115
conversion, 115
multivariate analysis, 115–116
parameters, 115
value, 115
velocity, 115
Oracle, 184
Visual Builder, 194–196
Organisation
culture, 42
values creation, 23–24
CRM journey, 17–20
CRM project success, 20–21
digital transformation, 16–17
kernel of, strategic thinking, 22
multichannel interaction, 23
performance assessment, 24–25
process data-driven architecture, 21–23
synopsis, 25–26

P
People analysis, 116–118
People engagement
buyer persona, 57–58
remarkable, 57
People search solutions
complainers type, 74
free benefit, 74
gentle approach, 74
methodology, 75
Performance assessment, 24–25
Personal creativity, 32
Pipedrive, 189–190
Pipeline analysis
performance, 114
sales cycle time, 114
Platform selection
CRM platforms synopsis, 191–192
decision-making, 179–183
introduction process, 177–178
low-code platforms, 192
Appian, 193–194
FileMaker, 196
Oracle (Visual Builder), 194–196
synopsis, 198–199
synopsis, 199
technology selection, 178–179
vendors and platforms, 183
HubSpot, 190–191
Microsoft, 183–184
Oracle, 184–185
Pipedrive, 189–190
Salesforce, 185–186
SugarCRM, 187–188
Zendesk, 186–187
Zendesk Sell, 188–189
Power BI, 133
Professional counterpart, 34–35
Project deployment planning, 158
Projects fail reasons, 166–168
business units, 172
compensation and rewards, 171–172
design and planning, 169–170
execution failures, 173
leadership commitment, 170–171
mission setting, 168–169
salespeople engagement, 172–173

Q
Qlik, 136
Qualification purpose and outcome, sales, 43
developing solutions, 43–49
negotiation, 49–51
Qualification stages, 33–37
 business buyers, 35
business’s health, 36
concepts and behaviours, 33
methods, 36–37
“NO” say, to clients, 33–34
professional counterpart, 34–35
Querying process, 32

R
Relationship management tool
conceptual framework, 13
expected features, 12
purposes, 12–13
Remarkable, 57
Reporting and forecasting
activities analysis, 116
B to B, complex sales processes, 112–113
KPIs financials, 114
KPIs people, 113–114
KPIs sales process, 113
expected foreseen, 128–129
financials analysis, 118–119
metrics, 119–122
quantitative vs. qualitative, 122
opportunities analysis, 115
conversion, 115
multivariate analysis, 115–116
parameters, 115
velocity, 115
people analysis, 116–118
pipeline analysis
performance, 114
sales cycle time, 114
process, 112
sales process forecasting, 126–127
decision-makers, 128
designing data architecture, 127–128
designing information, 128
time, vital factor, 128
sales team surviving strategies, 124–125
the survivor bias, 123
synopsis, 140–141
 today’s reporting, 125–126
tools choice, 129–131
Jupyter, 139–140
Power BI, 133–134
Qlik, 136–138
SAS, 135–136
Sisense, 138–139
starting, final output mind, 130–131
starting small, thinking big, 130
Tableau, 131–133

S
Salesforce, 185–186
advertising message, 9
Salespeople engagement, 172–173
Sales process design, 28–29
Sales process forecasting, 126–127
decision-makers, 128
designing data architecture, 127–128
designing information, 128
time, vital factor, 128
Sales process management
design, 28–29
developing solutions, 49
learning opportunity, 51–52
negotiation, 51
purpose and outcome, 52–53
qualification purpose and outcome, 43
stages (see sales process stages)
synopsis, 53–54
Sales process stages, 29
BANT model, 37
contacting, 30–31
developing solutions, 43
discovering opportunities, 33
lead-in, 29–30
MEDDIC/MEDDICC, 42–43
negotiation, 49
qualification, 36
Sales team surviving strategies, 124–125
SAS, 135
Sell now approach, 60
Sisense, 138
Software adoption problems, 175
beta testing, 176
diagnose and solve, 176
pitfalls avoidance, 176
Solution of, tool implementation, 154
data architecture, 158–161
decision-making, 165–166
dirty data, 161–162
the lighthouse, 156–158
outputs, 164–165
pre-setting, 154–156
project deployment planning, 158
workflows process, 162–164
Solutions search, 73–76
Starting project, 143–145
big bang or lean, 151–153
deployment definition, 145–148
what, how and extent definition, 148–151
Strategic thinking, 22
SugarCRM, 187
The survivor bias, 123

T
Tableau, 131
Technology, 78–79, 158, 177
information, 24
today, 82
Time, 40–42
Today’s reporting, 125–126
Tool implementation
projects fail reasons, 166–168
business units, 172
compensation and rewards, 171–172
design and planning, 169–170
execution failures, 173
leadership commitment, 170–171
mission setting, 168–169
salespeople engagement, 172–173
software adoption problems, 175
beta testing, 176
diagnose and solve, 176
 pitfalls avoidance, 176
solution, 154
data architecture, 158–161
decision-making, 165–166
dirty data, 161–162
the lighthouse, 156–158
outputs, 164–165
pre-setting, 154–156
project deployment planning, 158
workflows process, 162–164
starting project, 143–145
big bang or lean, 151–153
deployment definition, 145–148
what, how and extent definition, 148–151
surveys, 174
Tools choices, 129–131
Jupyter, 139–140
Power BI, 133–134
Qlik, 136–138
SAS, 135–136
Sisense, 138–139
starting, final output mind, 130–131
starting small, thinking big, 130
Tableau, 131–133

V
Value creation, 23–24
Vendors and platforms, 183
HubSpot, 190
Microsoft, 183–184
Oracle, 184–185
Pipedrive, 189–190
Salesforce, 185–186
SugarCRM, 187–188
Zendesk, 186–187
Zendesk Sell, 188–189

W
Way-to-do, 18
What, how and extent definition, 148–151
WHWT model, 64–65, 97–98, 103
Workflows process, 162–164
Z
Zendesk, 186
Zendesk Sell, 188