I read a report today in TMC Net that Over 40 percent of CRM buyers wouldn’t buy from the same vendor again.  Although striking, I don’t think its that surprising.

As the study outlined, most companies select their CRM product based on product demos and customer references – both of which are manipulated by the CRM companies.  In the first case, CRM companies spend all of their time highlighting their strong features and minimize or, in fact lie, about shortcomings.  In the former case, many CRM companies use questionable tactics to get positive customer references ranging from annual “User Conferences” (read: Free Booze parties) to actually “paying off” customers for positive reviews.

I know.  I’ve been coddled by CRM sales execs in previous roles with multinational companies.

Furthermore, as the study points out, most whitepapers written by industry analysts are “sponsored” by CRM vendors.

In an industry with a nearly 50% implementation failure rate and 40% buyer dissatisfaction, isn’t it ripe for a major overhaul?

The answer is obviously a resounding “yes!”.  But there’s not enough incentive for current vendors to initiate major changes.  Instead, they continue to blame customers with “poor processes” and promote major system customizations.

In fact, there are a lot of parallels to the auto industry.  Only when there is a major shakeup in the market will vendors change the way they’re “solving” customer problems by placing customer needs and success ahead of technology.

I love change!

It keeps things exciting doesn’t it?  Always having to learn new things, gain new experiences – and ultimately grow as a person.  This is the biggest reason that I love business and particularly start-ups!  The business environment is always changing and forcing you to either adapt or fade out.  And let’s be serious, with the extremely competitive nature of modern business you would be lucky if you only faded out.

Many businesses fail to innovate in this regard.  And it would seem to me that in a competitive industry that most businesses should be adapting to your needs, rather than salesforcing you to learn how to use their product with books for dummies.  And they probably shouldn’t call you a dummy either.

But on a separate note: after hearing about Network Hippo’s aggressive adaptation to CRM trends, I contacted Scott so I could get involved in something so exciting.

After hearing his vision for the clients of Mercury Grove, I became increasingly excited about the coming release of Network Hippo.  Scott’s vision gave me a look into the future, and I’m excited to be part of the team to bring it to you!

We’re still putting some finishing touches on launching Dex v2, including an amazing new design that will blow you away (more to come).

But I thought I would share with you some of the neat contact features that we’ve implemented to make it easier to find relevant information about people in your network.

Check out the video here.

I just received a promotional offer from Salesforce.com! Signup now and get a free book: Salesforce for dummies (subtitle: A Reference for the “Rest of Us”).

I’ve got some ideas!

1. How about making salesforce easier to use.
2. Instead of making users learn how to use Salesforce, how about making salesforce “learn” how to accommodate its users.
3. With the ease of use of online, contextual help and product videos, and, hopefully, an evolving product, isn’t a print format a little “old school”?

Salesforce.com for dummies.  Oh the irony!

My friend Mike Sullivan from aBetterOffice sent me this video yesterday. For anyone who’s ever worked in large account sales, you’re sure to enjoy it.

My favorite part (being in technology) is when the guy asks the chef to show him how to make it so that he can make it “in-house”. Classic.

Enjoy.

We’ve been pretty quiet lately on the blog as we’ve been down in the Mercury Grove cave working away at building the new interface and features for Network Hippo. It has been a long process working through all of the usability issues and focusing on core features that will drive a lot of value for startups, small businesses, and independent professionals.

But it’s getting very close.

I’m really excited about how we’ve been able to streamline the application to make it more intuitive and really easy to use, and I think all of our work doing usability tests is really paying off.  We’ve had tons of great feedback from users, which we have incorporated in this new launch, and we also used the service usertesting.com – which is an amazing resource that I recommend for anybody developing web-based applications.

Some of the new features:

• Fixed the auto-email import so it runs daily
• Feedback on your network (quality and size)
• Collaboration with people in your network
• Ability to send emails from within the app
• Allow your contacts to update their info
• Better social network integration
• Smart notifications sent weekly by email
• MUCH easier to add contacts, deals, activities

We’re getting really close to launch and I’m excited about how everything is coming together.

Below is a teaser screenshot of the new reporting which I think is much more useful than other CRM-like products.  More details on launch to come!

It’s been almost a year that we have been researching, developing, and promoting our “CRM-like” software Dex (now Network Hippo!) and I’ve come to realize how bad most of the current CRM products are.  They’re marketed to Executives, Sales Managers, and Technical people with with the promise of increased sales and “sales visibility”.

The problem is that they don’t work.  In fact, for small and medium businesses, CRM software fails miserably.

There are three major obstacles with current CRM software:

1. They do not address the real problems of small businesses
   The problem for small businesses is not based on process improvements or “sales visbility” – it’s selling more.  The biggest opportunity for small businesses to sell more is by finding more qualified leads and better mining existing customers for repeat sales.  A smart CRM system would focus on these two sales features and help small businesses tap into their network of contacts to generate sales.
2. Usability is so poor and data entry is so laborious that people don’t use the software
   All of the current CRM solutions rely on intense data entry with extraneous fields that salespeople have to fill out every time they come in contact with a potential sale.  Here is the typical data entry for a salesperson, from first meeting through closing a deal:
   1. Create a new “contact”. Enter details from their business card and save
   2. Create a new company. Link the contact.
   3. Enter details of the first meeting (met at conference, said they were interested)
   4. Create a new deal. Enter potential sales opportunity.
   5. Enter a new “task” to follow-up with the contact next week.
   6. After calling contact (a week later), enter details of the call.
   7. Enter a new task to send contact information on product / service.
   8. Close task of sending information.
   9. Enter new task to follow-up next week.
   10. Enter calendar entry for meeting next week.
   11. Enter details from meeting
   12. Update deal to higher percentage (50%) and sales stage (to negotiation)
   13. Upload proposal to deal with calculation sheet
   14. Upload signed contract
   15. Update deal to “won” and close the deal

   … this is for each deal.  And half of the steps are taken for deals that never close.
   This process is WAY too intensive to expect salespeople to complete, especially in a small business when you need to spend ALL OF YOUR TIME making calls and trying to build sales.  Furthermore, there are often too many custom fields ranging from birthday to spouse name on these forms that require more time and a “system administrator” to setup and manage a tool that is supposed to save time and money!

3. Data quality is a core feature that is very poorly addressed
   Every small business that we have worked with has a massive contact list that is several years old with 30% – 60% of the contact information outdated or incomplete.   The very basic function of a good contact database is confidence that the database contains accurate information.  This is the cornerstone and absolute fundamental of a successful CRM system, and yet the tools for keeping these systems up to date is 100% manual and very time-consuming.

The problems of current CRM systems are very real and fundamental.

The future of successful sales contact systems for small businesses will include:

1. A Focus on sales opportunities, not processes and reports
2. SMART systems that make data input extremely simple – tailored to the users of the system as an enabler, not as “extra work”.
3. Automate data quality leveraging the web and many technologies to ensure the database is always accurate.

The CRM moniker should be reserved for large businesses who focus on processes and sales reporting.  For small businesses its a no-brainer: The cost of a CRM system far outweighs the value.

After months of discussion and consideration, we’ve finally come up with a new product name for Dex: NetworkHippo.

Why NetworkHippo?

First, it was important to us to incorporate the idea of “networks” in the name of the product.  The ability to manage your network and realize opportunities to “monetize” that network is really the core of our product.  Many other products in this segment focus on “CRM”, but we really think this is a dying term that is too constrictive and falls short of the real need / opportunity.

And hippos are awesome.  They’re big.  They’re powerful.  Considering their size, they’re extremely versatile and equally at home in the water and land.  They’re prominent – they stand out in a crowd.  They’re popular among other jungle animals, and they’re smart – but not in the “I take my self too serious” way like monkeys.

Oh yeah, and they swim with crocodiles(!).

We think that this name really represents a “breath of fresh air” in a pretty stuffy segment.

We’re really excited about the new name and the many new features we’ve been working on for our “version 1″ launch in a couple of weeks.  After lots of great feedback, and dozens of targeted usability tests, we’ve made some considerable improvements that I think you’ll love.

What do you think?

I get asked this question a lot, and I think there’s a lot of unnecessary “black magic” around it “in the industry” (if there really is an industry).

So here’s the answer.  A new website or website “relaunch” should cost about the same amount as a car.

Now there’s a pretty wide range of prices between a cheap used car (like Scott Lake drives) and a brand new Tesla.  Similar with websites, you can download some really nice web templates that are inexpensive, which will get you started, or you can build it from scratch with custom design and technology.  It really depends on the size of your organization, your budget, and the value you can create with your new website.

Most medium-sized companies should expect to pay between 15k and 25k for a professional website.

Here is a rough breakdown:

5k: Strategy, requirements & research
5-10k: Design
5k: Technical implementation
1-3k: SEO and other web traffic generation

Also like cars, you should plan on budgeting maintenance costs and upgrades.  Too often companies think that building the website is the hard part, but its not.  The hard part is maintaining it to grow traffic, generate new content, and process all the new leads.  You should rent all of your software and hosting and make sure they “play nice together”.  But plan on spending between 5% and 10% of the website launch budget on maintenance and a lot of time.  A great website should ultimately change the way people in the company work – it’s not a one-time project.

Beware anything that is free.  Unless you are a mechanic (can do some web development) yourself, you should expect to pay someone to provide you with quality service.

———–

We recently launched a free service to provide feedback on company websites.  If you’re interested, you can sign up on our homepage.

Photo cred: Phlairline

They’re up to it again!

Oracle continues to confuse people with their insistence on talking about social CRM while they keep on flogging a decidedly “unsocial” (but very profitable) product.

Below is the presentation they prepared to demonstrate their vision and roadmp, but I can highlight the most interesting concepts in just a couple of bullet points:

1. 52% of companies (remember, this is Oracle reporting this) are failing to populate and maintain data.  This means that half of all companies fail to even use the primary function of CRM!
2. “Non-engaged” Employees are “costing companies” 382 Billion dollars in the US alone!  I think “not engaging” in this sense means not providing an application that the employees willingly use!
3. Oracle’s brief history of the internet is represented by an arrow that starts at the beginning and ends yesterday (and gets progressively redder).  I don’t know what it means.  Seriously.
4. “A fully-loaded sales rep, averaged across industries, costs $500,000“.  Wholly crap!  If that’s the average…  Half a million dollars?  If you add in salespeople who are “unengaged” that’s like $382.5 billion dollars!
5. I think the executives at Oracle could have saved a lot of time and money on their social CRM strategy by just putting a big Linkedin button in the application so salespeople can more easily update their resumes – which is the only social networking they’ll be doing as long as their company is using Oracle CRM.