Rick Astley and CRM

Rick’s CRM Principles…

''Never gonna give you up 
Never gonna let you down 
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry 
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you''

Thanks Rick

Same Old Recession Conversations?

THE TIME headline seemed to say it all: "The Simple Life: Goodbye to having it all." An excerpt from the article read: "After a 10-year bender of gaudy dreams and godless consumerism, Americans are starting to trade down. They want to reduce their attachments to status symbols, fast-track careers and great expectations of Having It All. Upscale is out; downscale is in."

Advertising Age jumped on the doom-and-gloom bandwagon. Commenting on the recession, one writer commented, "We all have the feeling this time it's not only far worse but also different; consumer buying habits are going to be forever changed."

TIME published its article in 1991.

Thanks to The Australian for this little gem

Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere ?

Had an interesting conversation the other day about Social Media and what conversations could be had in them. The Big 3, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace were compared to Work, Home and the Pub! I thought a very simple and useful way of deciding where you should be having what conversation with your customers

Being Provocative

Thanks to Bob Apollo at Revenue Insight for this interesting article on making the conversation more provocative in the Harvard Business Review

Jump Starting the Buying Process

It is must difficult to find a B2B sector that is not suffering at the moment. Budgets have been frozen, removed, delayed, put on hold and even where budgets still exist, the decision making process has changed with more and more buying decisions now having to be ratified at a more senior level.

The traditional way of grading leads using some form of Budget, Authority, Need and Timing (BANT) process would now seem to be useless – mainly as the customers process has stalled

One of the key ways to try and Jump start the process is to make the customer realise that the Need they thought they had is still there! One of the ways organisations try and do this is by sending through the ‘ours is cheaper’ message. But is doesn’t matter how cheap it is if they don’t think they Need it!

A smarter way of re-igniting the Interest in the Need, is to take a much more front foot approach about how important the issue is and in fact how it can perhaps drive a customers organisation out of the recession.

Customers are usually driven by one of two factors: Generating Demand and Decreasing Costs.

Surely the former is a much more engaging and attractive conversation?