Gartner Symposium, ITExpo 2006 - Ed Thompson, one of Gartner's CRM team is running through his state of the nation address on the Current and Future State of CRM. Interesting stuff, delivered at a high tempo (he's got a lot of ground to cover).
I'm hung up on one problem. Its a selfish one - and no criticism of Ed - but using the term CRM as an uber label for this space doesn't do it for me.
It carries too many overtones of those big, problematic CRM projects. Ed also supports the fact that the label isn't really working. He has come across at least nine other naming variants to describe CRM related projects. Most of these new names have been inspired by the notion that, to get a project to fly today, you need to distance it from the painful CRM legacy that exists inside many organizations. But none of these variations is really satisfactory either.
Why is my issue selfish? Because we help provide marketing organizations with solutions that Gartner would put under the uber label of CRM. Primarily we focus upon improving the marketing function but inevitably that joins up with solutions that will also touch sales processes and customer relationships.
When I use the term CRM among customers and prospects, most people race ahead and think I'm discussing the applications provided by the main CRM vendors, Siebel, SAP, salesforce.com, etc. So then I end up spending 30 minutes reeling them back in from that point.
Usually we start our story discussing the status of the marketing function and the need to improve its performance through better programs, processes and platforms. That story resonates for most CMOs, but I still don't have a killer label.
We also talk about what we call Marketing Process Optimization. But that's a description of an activity, its not a noun.
So, no easy answers from me either.
I have a one-to-one lined up with Ed tomorrow. I'll see what he thinks.