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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I once spoke at the wedding of some young friends. “Here’s some advice,” I said. “Don’t ask a middle-aged divorced guy for advice on marriage.” I hope a middle-aged remarried guy does better. Uh … excuse me for a moment everyone: Sharon, I don’t know why you said yes but I do know why I asked you — you’re just plain wonderful and I would have been a dope if I hadn’t.

Okay, I’m being self-indulgent. If your new spouse received your column every week by e-mail (you can too: www.iwsubscribe.com) wouldn’t you do the same?

Marriage is a lifelong commitment. Compare that to business, where time scales are so compressed that we now have mere seconds to accomplish what used to take years.

Now forget the comparison, because business hasn’t accelerated anywhere near as much as you’ve been led to believe. Yes, it’s faster. But.

Businesses operate in three distinct timescales — transactional, marketing, and strategic — and a lot of the perceived acceleration is, to a large extent, our confusing one for another.

At the transaction level — the buy-and-deliver process — business acceleration is very real. Buyers might not decide any faster, but once they have they want instant delivery. The term “Real-Time Business” (GartnerSpeak: “Zero-latency enterprise”) is about the transactional time scale. Real time really is a lot faster than its predecessors. Luckily, the need to deliver before the decision to buy is unlikely. We’re reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Then there’s what we in IT have been calling Internet time, supposedly the new pace for business. Marketing managers, though, have always worked at this pace. We were able to ignore Marketing time until recently, when the Web introduced us to it.

Before the Web we worked exclusively within the strategic timescale, building systems that endured, and that still need to endure far longer than the latest marketing campaign. Our working in Marketing Time doesn’t make a marketing campaign a business strategy.

Business strategies connect capabilities to marketplaces. A business’s capabilities don’t change quickly, and a marketplace — a complex, interconnected web of interactions among multiple businesses — changes more slowly than any single company within it.

Strategies must last for years. Still, they do change faster than they used to back when, for example, Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease. Talk about “… ’til death do you part?”!

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

You’d think CRM vendors would get customer relationship management right, wouldn’t you?

Not always. Some practice customer elimination management (CEM), CRM’s evil twin, instead, as when a sales representative from one well-known CRM vendor refused to talk about the subject with an interested prospect. When asked, he did send some literature — a FedEx box filled with various brochures and folder covers. He apparently expected the recipient — the CIO for a major division of a Fortune 500 enterprise — to assemble it all for internal distribution.

For some reason CEM is incredibly common among technology vendors, while CRM is impossible to find. Here’s another example, lightly edited for length and anonymity:

“I log an inquiry from ABC Corporation’s website, get a callback for a preliminary assessment, and then am given the name of a salesman assigned to call on me. The salesman leaves me a voicemail the next day.

“When we make contact I give him the basic run-down of what we’re looking for, he offers some solutions, and we set up a time to meet.

“So far, so good. Responsive, attentive, quick turnaround, sounded like he knows his stuff… I’m thinking this may not be so bad. Ah, but the moment you let your guard down….

“A day before the scheduled meeting (with the CIO, myself, and two other IT managers) he calls with a request. ‘Can we please move the meeting to the following Tuesday?’ Hmm. Okay, cut him some slack, everyone has something that unexpectedly comes up. We re-schedule to Tuesday morning.

“Monday before the meeting, he calls again. ‘Can we change the start time to 15 or 30 minutes earlier?’ Sorry, everyone’s booked up at that time. I ask if there’s a problem; he says no, our original time is fine.

“Cut to 20 minutes before the scheduled start time. He calls, obviously on his cell phone. ‘Take down this phone number,’ he says, and gives me an 800- number. ‘That’s our conference number. You should really be talking with the technical guru. He’ll be at that number at 9:00.’ What about you? ‘Oh, I’m on my way into the city to pick up my boss, so call that number, okay?’ I’m thinking, ‘Um … no.’ I say to him, ‘Um … no.’

“And his reply?

“‘Okay, bye.’ (On my honor, that’s what he said.)”

One more time: CRM isn’t technology. It’s a business strategy. When a sales manager figures a free ride is more important than having his sales rep attend a scheduled meeting with a prospect, CRM software can’t fix the problem.

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