Marketing Competence :: Resources

CRM Tool-Kit

"The CRM-toolkit holds what it takes to run a successful program and project. It contains the tools and key drivers all managers should use to achieve implementation success. Learn what really goes into managing a CRM initiative. The CRM Toolkit is designed to make creation of CRM agreements far more straight forward. It is supplied primarily in MS-Word format documents, ready to use."

CRM in 2003: Is That a Light I See at the End of the Tunnel?

By Clara Parkes
"What's the biggest challenge facing CRM implementations today? Could it be legacy or Web-services integration? Management buy-in? Perhaps vertical-market expertise? The answer depends on who you ask."

Cleaning Up Dirty Data

By Dylan Tweney
"Information is power, as the saying goes, and if that's true, bad information is worse than no information at all. Bad information tricks you into thinking you know something, when you often might be better off admitting that you don't. Consider corporate databases. In an attempt to cut costs and increase efficiency, many companies are dropping buckets of cash into ambitious projects that try to "mine" a company's database, looking for valuable information that can be turned into new products or services. The problem is that many companies are digging through the virtual equivalent of a garbage heap instead of a gold mine."

How to build stellar customer relations (hint: it's a long process)

By Lee Schlesinger, Executive Editor, ZDNet Business & Technology
When I hear "CRM," my eyes glaze over. Customer relationship management sounds sterile and complex. It seems like a system that's going to put a heavy burden on my staff to implement and support. I need to be more open-minded. CRM is really nothing more than etiquette, where one party is not you, but your company, codified in software.

CRM: facing a shakeout?

By VNUnet
"Vendors and analysts alike have recently warned of a major shakeout in the CRM industry. In fact, Tom Siebel, chief executive of the eponymous CRM giant, predicted that three quarters of his company's rivals would be bankrupt by the end of the year. US-based researcher Gartner also recently warned that two out of three CRM vendors will drop out of the market by 2003. As the market contracts and consolidates, how can users plan CRM project rollouts and work out whether their chosen vendor is likely to survive? Read on for vnunet.com's comprehensive coverage of the CRM market."

Privacy? Who cares.

Ann Harrison, Business 2.0
Excerpt: "A recent Forrester Research study revealed that only 6 percent of respondents trusted Websites with their personal data. And a Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive poll found that more than half the respondents said they stopped using a Website or canceled an online purchase because of privacy concerns."

The Bell Tolls for Marketing

By Eric Norlin, managing editor, www.personalization.com
Admit it: no one desires "more marketing and advertising" in their lives. The crippled siren songs of today's marketers fall on deaf ears. We don't even need to tie ourselves to the mast anymore - we simply ignore the call. Dead or not - marketing has a serious problem: No one pays attention anymore.

"But Wait, You Promised ..."

By Charles Fishman
"I am in the belly of the beast. I have risen early, traveled far, and overcome lines, rudeness, and indifference. Now, heedless of my chances of coming back without serious psychological or physical injury, I am journeying into a swamp that has become a source of boundless irritation, frustration, confusion -- even fury -- for tens of millions of Americans. I open the door and step into a customer-service call center. And not just any call center either -- one that is exclusively devoted to handling problems with cell-phones. It's cool inside and fairly well lit, for a swamp."

SAM Interview: Kristin Zhivago in … An Epic Romance With Marketing Technology

SAM Magazine
Excerpt: "If you want to correctly determine the value of your brand, start by interviewing customers and prospects. Ask them to rate your brand, and competing brands, on a scale of one to ten. Ask them what your company does well and poorly, and what your competitors do well and poorly. While you’re at it, ask them what they want your company and product to deliver, and which company or product does the best job of meeting those expectations."

Is Email Marketing About Relationships or Affinities?

Sean Carton
"Having a relationship with someone means having a connection that binds you and that is (hopefully) beneficial to both of you. Relationships are good things. So, as I heard folks talking about building relationships with their customers via email, I started to think about what companies I had relationships with. And guess what? I couldn't think of a single one."

One-to-(N)one? - The internet's once-rosy promise of truly personalized marketing seems to be wilting.

Susan Kuchinskas
"Melissa Shore hardly bothers to open email from Northwest Airlines' preferred opt-in list anymore. It's not because she's not interested. She travels a lot in her work as a senior analyst with New York--based research firm Jupiter Communications, and she's always looking for travel deals. "Every week, I'd get another email from [Northwest] offering discounts on flights from Chicago or Atlanta," she says, mystified. "I kept hoping to receive a message that read, 'Melissa, we've got discounts on these trips leaving from New York,' but I never have."

Patagonia: Turn Green

Carol Hildebrand
"In 1991 PATAGONIA INC. HOVERED ON the brink of financial disaster. Buoyed by double-digit growth, the maker of rugged clothing for serious outdoor enthusiasts had placed massive product orders that hit its warehouses just in time for the recession—and a sharp reduction in its credit line by financially troubled Security Pacific Bank. The Ventura, Calif.-based company took the painful step of laying off 120 of its 620 employees as it restructured its way back to financial health. But amid all the financial strife, Patagonia didn't touch two expensive cost centers: the R&D department and the grants program that funds environmental activists."

European Centre for Customer Strategies

A site full of very useful information. The only thing I didn´t like is that you need to register. Why, I don´t know, but see for yourself, because the first time round, you can visit as a guest.

Investing in People

Gary Abramson
"IMAGINE THE GENERATION that will make or break companies in the opening decades of the new millennium. How will they be different from the workforce of the 20th century? Leave the rhetoric about Gen X aside; forget about catching the zeitgeist. Instead focus on the philosophy, structure and feel of the third millennium workplace, which will spring from the minds of business leaders who dare to change the way they think about their employees."

Know your Customer

Louise Fickel
"DELL COMPUTER CORP. recently responded to a disgruntled customer by building a better box—shipping box, that is. The customer was one of many who had been invited to the company's usability lab to test the length of time needed to get a new PC up and running. While unpacking a Dell Dimension tower, the customer struggled and struggled with the shipping box. He finally became so frustrated that he picked it up and turned it upside down. The tower fell to the floor—and died. Although the purpose of the test was to learn how long it took a customer to install a computer, seeing someone destroy a tower was so startling that executives quickly decided to redesign the box and its packing materials."

Customer Relationship Management: Short-Term Loyalty

Lawrence F. Goldman
"I recently escaped the rat race to take a relaxing vacation on a warm, sandy island where computers were few and far between. I could not connect to the Internet; therefore, I received no e-mails. Except for a couple of miscalculated bar tabs, there were no data quality issues. Though this was incredibly refreshing for me, by the third day I found myself going through a form of CRM withdrawal. Not that I missed working, but I missed companies battling for my attention as a customer."

Cultural Capital: The New Frontier of Competitive Advantage (PDF format)

Richard Barrett
"This article explains what cultural capital is, and why it has become the new frontier of competitive advantage. It shows how to measure cultural capital by mapping values to the Seven Levels of Organizational Consciousness. It provides examples of companies that have a strongly aligned culture - high degree of cultural capital, and a weakly aligned culture - a low degree of cultural capital."

Seven Levels of Corporate Philanthropy - Making Money while Making a Difference (PDF format)

Richard Barrett
"Wherever you look in America you will find more and more companies making some form of contribution to society. They have discovered that making money and making a difference are mutually supportive goals. In 1995, when I began work on my new book, Liberating the Corporate Soul, I started with the thesis that the most successful companies over the long-term will be those that could be characterized as socially responsible. I was not disappointed with my research results. The more I looked into the issue, the more evidence I found to support my thesis: when companies care about their employees, the local community and society, their employees, the local community and society care about them."

The Optimal Path

Ichak Adizes
"If an organization can continuously change in a planned and controlled manner, keeping itself together in spite of change, it will never die. Its business will change, but the organization as such could liver forever. Aging is not an unavoidable fact of life. It can and should be averted."

"What I am saying, I hope loud and clear, is that spiritually motivated business is good business. It is good for the company, for its owners, for workers, for everyone."

European Centre of Database Marketing

A new twist on Data Analysis

Jacques Surveyer
Business intelligence systems seek to create something in a company or organization that most humans take for granted: self-awareness. But unlike the type of consciousness commonly associated with intelligent life, where information is centrally controlled at the top, BI attempts to distribute that intelligence throughout the enterprise. This way, as the old cliché goes, the left hand really does know what the right hand is doing.

CRM Software Tips

UpDate Marketing

Needs Analysis Questionnaire

Rich Bohn

CRM: Fueling your Move to becoming CRM-Enabled

Lawrence F. Goldman
"The great thing about CRM applications is that their benefits immediately affect a company’s profits and revenues. Firms receive information they’ve never had before - and it’s actionable. In traditional data warehousing, reports become a work of art: they are fun to look at and admire, but something concrete does not always result. CRM, performed correctly, will allow creative marketing people to gain insights from information for new product ideas or new promotional campaigns and turn them into profits."

CRM: Flying the (Not-So) Friendly Skies

Lawrence F. Goldman
"Putting CRM on the in-flight menu would put a sweet taste in my mouth - and give an airline a larger share of my wallet."

Customer Relationship Management: Evaluating Your "CRM-Ness"

Lawrence F. Goldman
"My company recently switched software vendors after doing business with them for a very long time. On the ride home from work the other night, I broke down the entire experience from the perspective of a customer relationship management (CRM) consultant. Though this analysis did not make me feel any better, I thought that by comparing this company's missteps to any recent issues you've faced might be a useful way for you to evaluate your company's "CRM-ness."

The bottom line is this: attention to CRM initiatives would have saved my company as a customer."

Datawarehousing in need of renovation

John Taschek
Like a merry-go-round turning so slowly that you can't tell it's spinning, data warehousing technology seems to be going nowhere. Eventually, however, someone will come along and give it a big push, knocking off a couple of unsettled riders and giving the rest the ride of their lives.

Database Packages at "Software User"

A relatively brief listing of database packages, but each one being linked again, thus providing interesting reading to those looking for PC-based database packages.

100 top data warehousing leaders step up

Jeff Moad
"Top executives at shipping giant United Parcel Service of America Inc. don't have to work very hard to come up with good reasons to continue increasing investments in data warehousing hardware and software. All they have to do is cast their memories back to just over a year ago. As the $22.5 billion company struggled to recover from one of the most devastating labor strikes in its history, UPS marketing officials were able to tap into a secret weapon: a 400GB data warehouse containing up-to-the-minute customer information."

Integrating information in data warehouses

Data marts are the data equivalent of fast food outlets -- you can get your data fast and they can pop up in just about every corner of an enterprise. But a steady diet of quick data, like fast food, can spell trouble.

Datawarehousing in the year 2003

Mark Hammond
Data warehouses are not only getting bigger, they're getting better. Data warehousing is expensive. It's complicated. It's prone to failure if not based on business drivers, and it requires the support of senior managers and considerable IT resources to succeed.

Those who do it right are getting their money's worth and more. But those who don't are finding themselves back at the drawing board, budgets busted and fearful that a competitor is mining gold and gaining a crucial competitive edge.

Open door policy -- 3M's data warehouse rolls out the welcome mat to partners and customers

Bob Francis
"... Tracking the myriad incarnations of that one 3M invention is a no-brainer. But the situation becomes magnified profoundly when you consider that the $15.1 billion 3M has over 50,000 products. When you factor in deviations in packaging, shape, size and language, that number creeps up closer to 500,000 or more. Take the simple Post-it note, which now sports three to 12 languages (depending on the country in which it is marketed) imprinted on the package. Multiply that example by 3M's range of products, and you have an astounding amount of critical core business information that the company had essentially kept locked away."

Kim Bayne's Marketing Lists on the Internet

Kim Bayne

/MouseTracks/: The List of Marketing Lists

New South Network Services
"The List of Marketing Lists is maintained by New South Network Services. If you know of a relevant existing list not mentioned above, we would love to add it to The List of Marketing Lists."

Arizona Resource: Links to Small Business Marketing Resources

Craig Roberts

The Role of the OLAP Server in a Data Warehousing Solution

An Arbor Software White Paper
Data warehousing is not a product, but a best-in-class strategy one that accomodates the need to consolidate and store data in information systems dedicated to improving the performance of the corporation by providing end-users with timely access to critical information. Within a data warehousing strategy, online analytical processing (OLAP) supports strategic, high return on investment (ROI) applications.

Data Warehousing for Cavemen

Philip Greenspun
"This document is intended to make you buzzword-complaint with the MIS world. In terms simple enough even for an MIT computer science Ph.D. to understand, I'm going to explain OLTP, data warehousing, and OLAP. Kiss that ghetto post-doc goodbye and watch big companies line up to pay you $300/hour to romance their most critical data."

Understanding your Individual Solution Requirements

Brains, New Zealand
"The following list of questions has been developed to allow you to gain a greater understanding of your specific Marketing Database requirements (this list has been adapted from a Donnelley Marketing questionnaire). These questions should not be viewed as an exhaustive list, but more as a starting point for your analysis process."

Marketing Software and your competitive Advantage

Brains, New Zealand
A recent Harvard Business Review reported that by the end of the decade "a marketing database will be vital to sustain competitive advantage. Loyalty and/or relationship marketing will be standard practice of successful companies." If only we had a dollar for every time we have read a statement like that! But don't get us wrong, our issue is not with database marketing - it is more with the amount of talking and lack of doing.

A Day in the Life of a Relationship Manager

Mani Subramani, Suzanne Iacono, John C. Henderson
IS Organizations are increasingly focusing on managing the interface between themselves and their clients within organizations to improve not only the level of customer service but also the utilization of firm investments in hardware and software. Several organizations have recently created full-time specialized positions, often termed 'Relationship Manager' to manage the relationship between IS and Line groups. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study to understand the role of the 'Relationship Manager'(RM) and how people in these positions deliver value to IS and Line groups in the organization.

IBM's Customer Relationship Management: No One Home

Al Wong
"To summarize, I recently bought an IBM Thinkpad 701C notebook computer and, after only two weeks of using it, the internal modem went bad. I could not replace the modem myself as that would void the 3 year warranty that came with the notebook. To save time I thought I could get the Thinkpad repaired locally. I called IBM's technical support at (800) 772-2227 and they referred me to a local authorized IBM service dealer called Connecting Point.

Connecting Point kept my Thinkpad for exactly 3 weeks and made no repairs to it. Instead I received lies from several employees ranging from they sent for a new modem to they sent my Thinkpad to IBM for repair. When I complained to the store manager, Alfonso, I was met with complete apathy. I have never experienced such unprofessional behaviour in a storefront business.

Read on for the gory details."

Interface Software, Inc.

"InterAction enhances a firm's bottom line by reducing the cost of doing business while providing relationship data that can help increase revenues. Professional services firms and corporate professional teams spend significant time searching for, recreating, and reentering information.

Consolidating this client information into a central location can directly reduce a firm's operating costs by helping professionals, staff, and information systems personnel."

Relationship Management System for Lotus Notes 4.5

IntellAgent Control Corporation
IntellAgent Control Corporation develops Enterprise Relationship Management solutions for use by companies that need to manage accounts, opportunities and commitments. Based on Lotus Notes 4.5, the IntellAgent Control System is a premier workgroup contact, opportunity, and task management system.

RFM for Windows

Database Marketing Institute
"RFM for Windows® is a software program that helps marketers determine in advance which customers are most likely to respond. Successful direct marketing to existing customer often involves response rates as low as 1% or 2%. That means that 98% of the pieces mailed are wasted. RFM for Windows helps you predict who those 98% of the pieces mailed are wasted. RFM for Windows helps you predict who those 98% are."

Customer Service and Support

Epicor, Inc.
"Return to the future... with Clientele, the technology tool that makes personal customer relationships possible again. Customers keep you in business. So when a customer calls your Support department, you need to respond -- immediately -- with answers at your fingertips."

10 Mistakes to avoid in Datawarehousing

Datawarehousing Institute
"The staff of The Data Warehousing Institute has called upon experts across the industry, and conducted meetings in several cities with active data warehousing project managers and IS executives to assist us in developing a compendium of the "ten mistakes to avoid for data warehousing managers." This article contains about 65 percent of the complete document."

Database Marketing in the Tourism Industry

Prepared by Clive B. Jones
The New Marketing Environment for Leisure & Tourism Difficulties in Adjusting to the New Marketing Environment How the Computer is Changing Marketing ...

Unlocking the promise of Database Marketing

Sigma Marketing
"What goes around comes around," or so the saying suggests. Wasn't it just yesterday that the advent of radio and television had advertisers drooling over their good fortune? Finally, they could reach the mass market in one fell swoop. And did they ever -- with everything from spicy meatballs to Mikey, America's favorite cereal guinea pig.

Smart Marketing

Parker Stoner
For all beginners to the subject, Parker Stoner has compiled an interesting site on Database Marketing. Nothing earth-shattering as such, but a very nice way of refreshing your memory in case you got lost somewhere. Have a look; it's worth it.

Why change doesn't work

Michael Finley
Whenever something goes wrong, managers try to address and remedy it; often consultants come in and have their try. Unfortunately, often it just doesn't work - no matter what name change has been given. Michael Finley tells you why. This article is also a plug for his book, which I highly recommend even in a database marketing context, because change is at the heart of a DBM/RM-centered organisation. If you can cope with organisational change, you can cope with anything.

Ray's Magic Marketing Minutes

Ray Jutkins
Ray is updating his MMM on a regular basis. This field is more for those in the direct marketing field, and less for techies. But again, it is great reading for those who would like to learn more about the art of direct customer communication. Ray's site is definitely one of the 'must-visits' on the Net.

On this note, I'd like to extend a _BIG_ thank-you to Ray Jutkins, who has been extremely supportive in helping me getting this site in shape. "Ray, thanks a lot for your support! You definitely walk the talk."

From Data Mining to Database Marketing

Kurt Thearling, Pilot Software
"The key to making a successful data mining software product is to embrace the business problems that the technology is meant to solve, not to incorporate the hottest technology. In this report I will address some of the issues related to the development of data mining technology as it relates to business users."

The functionality of database marketing products will increase to integrate with relational database products (no more dumping a RDBMS into a flat file!) and with key DSS application environments, it will stress the business problem rather than the technology, and present the process to the user in a friendly manner. Database marketing will start losing some of the hype and begin to provide real value to users. This will make database marketing an important business in and of itself."

White Papers on Data Warehousing

Larry Greenfield, LGI Systems Incorporated
If you are new to the area of Data Warehousing, Larry Greenfield has an excellent web site with many articles and links.

This page is part of his Data Warehousing Information Center, and give you access to a few dozen other sites. See for yourself what might be of interest to you.