CRM Strategy Thought Leaders In Their Own Worlds

	CRM Strategy—Why CRM Fails and a 6 Step Approach to Success
	In this podcast discussion, Laurence Buchanan hones in on the critical success factors of effective CRM strategies. He shares how CRM strategies have evolved, why organizations fail in achieving their CRM endeavors, how newer disruptive technologies can actually exacerbate CRM failures and advises a 6 step approach to successfully implement a CRM strategy.
	CRM Strategy—A Data Driven Approach to Conceptual Objectives & Performance Refinements
	Jeff Tanner, Associate Dean at Baylor University's School of Business and a founding partner of BPT Partners, advises that to develop a successful CRM strategy begin with conceptual objectives, prove and refine your theory in an operational mode, permit the results to hone the objectives in a way that strategy evolves from real-world actions, and then carry on a journey of continuous process improvement.

CRM Strategy Best Practices

	How to Create a Winning CRM Strategy
	As Forrester shares, "Disappointment with CRM is usually the result of poorly conceived strategies that don't increase revenues or reduce costs." Depending on your company's CRM strategy, the same CRM software investment will yield wildly different benefits and payback. Here is a 6 step framework to maximize your CRM software benefits, payback and customer success.
	The Inseparable Link Between CRM Strategy and CRM Software
	A clear CRM strategy is the top contributing factor to CRM software success and sustainability. Unfortunately, CRM failure statistics continue to loom large suggesting that many adopters continue to put technology in front or in place of strategy. This post shares why CRM strategy is required to achieve CRM software success, and delivers a proven four step approach to creating a winning CRM strategy.
	The Final Four Competitive Advantages
	Competitive advantages used to be things like products, price, staff, service and location. But in the minds of customers these are all easily substitutable and highly commoditized. A competitive advantage must meet the four criteria of being relevant, measurable, unique and sustainable. When you recognize these criteria, you may also recognize the final four competitive advantages.
	The Top Reasons CRM Fails
	Analyst firms report that 30-50%+ of all CRM deployments fail to achieve their objectives or fail outright. As CRM is a 23 year old industry, and these CRM failure reports repeat themselves year after year, the statistics are cause for proactive risk analysis and mitigating measures. Here are the top causes of CRM failures, and the preemptive measures that can prevent, mitigate or respond to these challenges.
	How to Design Your 360-Degree Customer View
	The often cited but seldom realized 360 degree customer view is a holistic customer profile record that captures five types of customer data from across channels and systems, aggregates that data to understand what's important to customers, and applies that customer intelligence to deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences and achieve company performance objectives.
	How To Use Personas To Grow Customer Acquisitions and Retention
	Good customer strategies are built on good customer personas and insights. In fact, without customer intelligence your customer strategies are essentially guesswork and your execution is trial and error. But when personas show when, why and how customers make buying decisions they drive the actions that increase customer acquisitions and retention.
	Customer Segments Versus Customer Personas – Top Benefits of Each
	Despite being used interchangeably, customer segments and customer personas are not the same. They are applied to different use cases and achieve different objectives. This article identifies the use cases and benefits for each, and how they work together to improve customer engagement, conversions and retention.
	The Best Methods to Acquire Consumer Insights
	Consumer insights are essential to create products that are embraced, content that will engage, offers that will convert and customer experiences that will deliver repeat purchases. However, acquiring insights for low consideration purchases, that are fast, frequent, impulse decisions can be tough. Here the top 5 methods to acquire consumer insights.
	The 5 Most Common Customer Persona Mistakes
	Personas backed with the right insights identify the highest fit customers, enable the most precise value propositions, and shift focus from broad customer segments you could sell to, to highly focused customers you should sell to. Unfortunately, most personas don't deliver. Here are the most common customer persona design and implementation mistakes - and how to prevent them.
	Design Thinking — A New Problem Solving Approach
	Design thinking is set of principles that include empathy with users or customers, collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams, goals geared to individual emotions, a discipline of prototyping, tolerance for failure and a relentless commitment to learning and reinvention. Here is how design thinking is being used to solve tough customer and business problems.
	How Design Thinking Improves Customer Strategies and Customer-Centric Business Models
	Business leaders are using design thinking to implement customer strategies such as customer experience management and even wholesale company transitions from product-centric to customer-centric business models. This article explains why design thinking is highly synergistic with CRM and shares design thinking frameworks from Stanford d. school and IBM.
	Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
	Corporate culture and strategy are separate but symbiotic. Corporate culture is the human performance engine that drives the level of success, or failure, for every business strategy. Culture is a precursor and top contributing factor to anything and everything that requires employee effort. Here is why company culture eats strategy for breakfast.
	A High Performance Corporate Culture Point of View
	There are a lot of things a company can do to drive business growth. But the one thing that will directly impact everything else is corporate culture. A high-performance growth culture is an enabler of business agility and sustained company growth. I'm an advocate of high-performance growth cultures, and support my advocacy with a 5-point corporate culture point of view.
	How to Create High Performance Culture Ideology
	Culture is implicit in the shared values, unspoken behaviors and social norms that recognize what is encouraged, discouraged, rewarded and penalized. Most leaders recognize culture is far more powerful than strategy. In the words of Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." While there is no single path to a great culture, there are five pillars common among high-performance cultures.
	How to Achieve a High-Performance Corporate Culture
	Culture is both the biggest enabler of strategy and business performance, and the main obstacle to change and transformation. But most business leaders know that. What most don't know is how to achieve a high-performance growth culture that energizes staff, increases productivity, improves employee loyalty, boosts revenues and grows the company.
	The Productivity and Payback of Employee Engagement
	Employee engagement is a top contributing factor to high-performance growth cultures and an undeniable producer of productivity and payback. Research results from Gallup, Bain and IBM show increased engagement delivers increased sales, profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction. This post shares those findings and how to achieve these benefits.
	How Component Business Models Deliver Improved Business Processes
	The Component Business Model is an enterprise framework that identifies people, process and information systems redundancies across the organization, illustrates the top pain points or biggest upside opportunities with a heat map, and shows the path to building best in class capabilities, which can be shared and reused across multiple channels, geographies or lines of business.
	The Strategic Importance of Measuring Customer Lifetime Value
	Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a forward looking strategic metric that identifies customer value and upside potential, and can be leveraged to increase customer share, customer retention, margin improvement and top line revenues. But too few business leaders harness this metric. Here's how to calculate CLV and put this measure to strategic use.
	Voice of the Customer — Strategy To Tactics
	The purpose of Voice of the Customer research is to ensure your Customer Relationship Management strategy and design are not done in a vacuum and divorced from reality. Ignore or fail this vital step and every downstream customer facing action hereafter will be negatively impacted. This article shares methods and techniques to learn exactly what your customers want.
	How To Succeed with a Voice of the Customer Program
	Getting an accurate and complete Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a pre-requisite to designing any successful customer strategy. However, most organizations struggle with creating an automated VoC program that crosses departments and bridges data siloes. Here is a 10 step framework to implement a VoC program for improvements to customer loyalty, customer spend, customer share and retention.
	How Design Thinking Works for CRM
	Design Thinking identifies the most important success measures for the people who will most use the CRM software. What makes this a better method is that it shifts project objectives from being measured in software features and functions (which most users and managers don't care about) to being measured in user and customer business outcomes (which users and managers care deeply about).
	How to Prevent Becoming CRM Roadkill
	The CRM implementation success statistics underline a key fact. Success is critically tied to execution at all stages of the project. Anecdotally, the companies that executed well from design to roll-out had much better success rates. The ones that jumped their start or lacked systemic execution ended up with anything from a disappointing CRM system to roadkill.
	The Rolling Stones & 50 Years of Customer Satisfaction
	The Rolling Stones are celebrating their 50th anniversary. But how does a band stay on top -- or even together -- for so long? By giving customers what Mick Jagger lamented not being able to get himself -- satisfaction. In truth, the Stones are a case study in good, solid CRM best practices, and have the customer loyalty to show for it.
	6 Tactics to Make Your CRM Strategy More Effective
	Determining the effectiveness of a CRM software investment goes far beyond a rudimentary ROI estimate during a business case pitch. Nailing results to tangible impact is crucial in demonstrating real value from CRM initiatives. To maximize CRM software investment payback, Pam speaks with the experts and identifies six top tactics to make your CRM investment meet or exceed expectations.
	Mapping Your Business Reality to CRM Strategy
	CRM solutions require a high degree of self-awareness on the part of businesses. The mismatch between what businesses think they do well and what they really do well dooms some CRM projects. If you don't understand how your business handles customer data and customer relationships now, you can't make effective decisions to improve data and relationships for the future.
	Keys To Developing a Winning Social CRM Strategy
	If you're having a hard time putting your finger on what Social CRM means for your business, you belong to a very large club. Discussions with social CRM thought leaders and practitioners point out two things. First, social CRM isn't a product to be purchased. Second, developing social CRM strategies requires a new approach and creative thinking process.
	Aligning CRM Strategy with CRM Technology
	Mapping CRM software to CRM strategy is easier said than done. While CRM software features and capabilities should not be used to create CRM strategy, knowing what to look for and what’s available can help identify opportunities and craft workable strategies that can be implemented within the constructs of application software.
	CRM Software Benefits That Deliver Big ROI
	Even a semi-successful CRM implementation can show a positive return on investment. But are you getting as much ROI out of your system as you can? That's a different question and the answer, all too often, is 'probably not'. The fact is that most CRM implementations tend to leave money on the table because the business doesn't focus enough attention on getting the best possible ROI.

	CRM Explained: A Life Cycle Review of CRM Success Factors Former Executive Editor for CRM magazine's DestinationCRM.com, Marianne Cotter delivers a comprehensive look at CRM's promises, capabilities and cautions. This CRM special report delivers practical advice for: Building a successful business case for CRM adoption Selecting the best CRM software product for your business Creating the conditions for a successful implementation, and A look at new developments changing the CRM landscape.   More ...

A 5 Step CRM Strategy Design Framework

More References

• CRMforecast.com includes an excellent hub on CRM strategy with solid best practices and helpful insight.

• CRMsolution.com offers concrete advice regarding CRM strategy and objectives, several best practices and a comprehensive Blueprint which includes the business case for CRM as well as number of key success and failure factors.