Leveraging tech for business management

Quotes

• “Our view of the CRM is that the R part, which is the relationship is more than just a sales relationship. Any company that is talking to their leads and clients is not just talking to a salesperson. Your brand, your company is communicating in all different kinds of ways.” -Lars“Different things are building the relationship and a lot of the companies that think about CRM starts first with a sales-centered approach and they think about all those other things as an afterthought and then they think, ‘we don’t have to pull all these data together so let’s go out and buy these different software pieces and let’sfigure out a way to sync out all that data back again and it ends up creating a giant tangled mess for a company. We want to solve that problem by having a single platform where all of that is managed.” -Lars“CRM can change your business. It affects how everyone thinks about what they do. Partially because now everybody feels like they are connected to everybody else. In a lot of businesses, people think very functionally.” -LarsIf you can create a team kind of environment where everyone knows exactly what they’re contributing, it’s not a matter of saying over a wall and saying, ‘you guys suck’ if it’s not working. Now we can see quantifiable how many leads are coming through, how are they going through that process, that customer journey, where are they dropping off and why.” -Lars“This is the gift and the curse of the MarTech industry. I think most people think of MarTech as the connectors between all these disaggregated systems where I need to get Marketo to talk to Salesforce, to talk to whatever point solution I have, and there is no centralized place where all of your data is flowing through weaving all these systems together.” -Lars“Every business needs to be data-driven. Every one of those decisions that you make at a tactical and strategic level should be driven by data rather than just the empirical it feels like the right thing to do.” -Lars“If you can create a central database, not only do you give every person at every level the ability to make decisions based on actual data, you create a team-based environment where you knows that they are immediately contributing to another person’s job and they don’t have to worry about collisions in data.” -Lars“I understand the idea of being able to support your operations by giving the actual operators access to data that is relevant to the entire customer journey. I also see that using one central repository for all of your data helps you with data cleanliness. I do think there is a level of complexity that comes along with having access to all of the data in one place.” -Ben “That’s the trick. Whenever you have a lot of information, you have to present it in a way that’s useful tothe people that are consuming that information. That is where the design of your CRM is very important because all that data may not necessarily be relevant but it may be and it’s important to have access to it.” -LarsAt the senior level, you have access to all of that data. At a very high level, theoretically, you should be able to see how all your marketing campaigns are doing, how your salespeople are doing and then you figure out how do you bubble that data up into a summary level where that information makes sense. You can’t even get to that point if you don’t have all the data first.” -Lars“It is the same in high-level management in terms of filtering out all these data for different users. You’re trying to figure out, of all the data that you are collecting what is actually relevant. That is a lot easier to do when you have all the single repository as opposed to saying, I’m a CEO, I’m a senior-level management person and I need to make a strategic decision based on all of this information on what happens throughout the entire customer journey which is very multi-disciplinary.” -Lars“You are looking at how your Account Executives are handling new customers, to customer service, to marketing different campaigns, different channels, and all those things. If you don’t have that in one place, it means that you’re hiring different developers to synchronize all that data together and if that’s not your job, you are now creating a whole part of your business that is focused on managing a CRM and all this information in a way that, that’s not what you do. -Lars“You now have to become a software management company and maybe you manufacture widgets. If your job is not managing software development, that is going to be a huge distraction in your mission.” -Lars“If you’re running a data-driven business, that business is going to be only as valuable as the quality of your data and I see the value of your data in a single repository because you don’t have to worry about data cleanliness, overlaps, duplicate records. There is a lot of elegance in a simplified solution that can be found.” -Ben