John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, one of the sites we listed on the blog roll last week, wrote an interesting piece on customer focus during a recession.  Similar to the post I wrote recently, John points out the importance of strengthening customer relationships to push through a recession.

I recently came across an article titled “Using CRM to Win in a Recession” from CustomerThink.com.  The article has a list of tips relating the importance of focusing on CRM during a down economy. The list makes some strong points but I have a few thoughts of my own to add.

In the office this week we were discussing some of our favorite websites and we decided to update our blog roll to include some of them to share them with you.  I do my best to keep up with them as much as possible, but the ones we're adding now are especially relevant and very informative to the readers of this site.  We think you'll find the focus of these blogs very relevant to your top priority - your customers as well as the technology aspects you utilize for business. 

In a recent piece for Destination CRM on the benefits of personalization within marketing, Marshall Lager wrote that “personalization provides marketing communications with the means to deliver real value to customers”. Lager cites recent research suggesting that although CMOs understand this potential value of personalized marketing a majority are having troubles putting it into practice.

David Sims ran an insightful article in TMCnet a few weeks ago, discussing why "Firing customers is a bad idea". Sims cites a study from the Wharton school that disproves the common, and in my opinion incorrect, philosophy of shedding your less valuable customers to increase profitability.

Many of the business-minded CRM professionals will argue that low spending customers take up too much time and effort to make up for the smaller percentage of profit they bring in, in comparison to the high spending customers, which take up the same amount of resources but return much more. The argument is that getting rid of the less profitable customers provides more time and resources for the more profitable ones.

As social networking becomes more commonplace, it is steadily creeping into the business environment. Companies have their own Facebook networks, MySpace groups, and use LinkedIn and Plaxo for recruiting and business networking. However, linking together social networks and managing business relationships is still a work in progress.

The other day I was speaking to a small business owner. They told me that using Concourse Suite was helping them manage sales leads, and I was asking them about the steps beyond the sale and how they were using the CRM and other capabilities, and what processes they had introduced.

"Beyond the sale? We're just looking to grow," was the response. I was stunned.

I'm not undermining the importance of the sale. Nothing happens until someone sells something, that's business. But good businesses looks beyond the sale and to a longer-term relationship. Relationships should be a top concern for any business that wants to grow. It doesn't matter if you have 10 employees or 10,000.

In conjunction with a recent piece of Concursive news, today I wanted to talk about franchise operations to discuss the importance CRM solutions can make in connecting such "extended enterprise." It is no secret that a franchise company's brand and reputation among its customers can often be measured in the sum, strength, and consistency of messaging throughout its stores.
Yet relying on each individual franchise to implement a solution consistently is probably unrealistic.