In the last article “Does CRM really help? Different answers to different people”, I tried to speculate why SMEs, particularly from Hong Kong and Asian countries, are still skeptical of whether CRM can help their business.
With the “live” customer database, SMEs can have plenty of options to choose how to reach their current and potential customers effectively. However, many businesses have failed in figuring out the importance and for it is far from possible to see the immediate benefits of implementing a CRM solution, bucks are usually “saved” on using the handy Excel to fulfill the needs.
With my 8-year consultancy experience, I have been helping a lot of businesses to migrate their Excel files to different CRM solutions, to solve the following problems:
– Free-style formatting
As there is no restriction, users can easily put information like how you meet in “Contact”, the whole address in “Country”, any kind of contact information into “Phone”, etc. that makes reviewing and searching of information extremely difficult. The inefficiency even aggravates when files are maintained by different people with different style of input.
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The experience from a meeting last week really gives me an opportunity to share and discuss the “appropriate” ways to acquire new customers with you.
My adventure started when my marketing lady and I had an great opportunity in meeting an executive of a travel agency…
Frankly, my presentation to the senior person was not very impressive that I was told to speed it up in less than 10 minutes, which I expect ordinary executives are supposed to be interested in. However, after the short presentation, what interested me was another around 30-minute technical discussion on email marketing that my marketing lady had no clue on it or even I could hardly handle.
Our discussion revealed that the executive knows everything about email marketing, and asked me any technical know-how to “bypass” the security policies implemented by Google and Yahoo as he has been figuring out how to do email blast to around 300K contacts with free email accounts. The background of the discussion is that he did buy a server and subscribe server co-location service just for the purpose, and had tried many email blast software just with the intention to do the blast to the huge number of email addresses that he had no idea of how valid they are.
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Perhaps MBA students should take this as one of their case studies, or perhaps some talents in producing copycats should stop what they are doing and think about it: The Power of Branding.
Undoubtedly, it is commonly believed that no people would consider the second best. When you are going to buy a new product but find that there is a flaw, I am sure you will probably not go for it. Would marking down the price help you change your mind? I am afraid not, and please don’t talk to me about “workarounds”. In the modern competitive world with full of alternatives, “flaw” just simply means “failure”.
However, I am indeed stunned that the eyeballs and sales are still on iPhone 4, even it is widely announced that there is a “flaw”: reception problem when you squeeze the antenna areas.
Many reports, like this, have already stated that iPhone has lost its edge to rivals like HTC Desire or Samsung Galaxy S, but why many people just can’t wait going for the product with “flaw”, just because it has the free case solution (i.e. “workaround”)?
If I have to put an explanation, just to my common sense, I could say that’s all about branding Apple had been building for decades. iPod, iPhone, iMac, MacBooks, etc. any brands from Apple are always successfully symbolized as “Fashioned”, “Simplified” or “Stylish”, although some are less successful.
But I still couldn’t imagine how powerful branding can be: to make so many people buy a phone that sometimes doesn’t function as a phone.
Running an exhibition is indeed a good opportunity for us to listen to opinions from the public, no matter if they are potential customers or not. I could never imagine I would have the chance to learn a good lesson from an experienced business consultant about the tricks to China market.
After around a 2-hour discussion and reading on her blog (you have to be patient in front of experienced people who are willing to offer help), an inspiration came up to my mind that it is not exactly about the tricks to China market, but the re-thoughts of the key values of our IT-related business: solution to address our customers’ concerns.
While agreeing to Circle’s points of view that the appreciation of RMB does annoy Chinese companies, mentality can hardly be changed. For example, it is far from possible to persuade most of the Chinese exporters to post their products online, using e-Commerce bundled with ERP or cost-effective order taking and inventory tools like GearApp, and let them be sold bit by bit. Having chats with some of these businesses proves that my concept is right. They are only looking for buyers from different countries and that this is exactly what the HKTDC is doing (it is not difficult to find a lot of buyer and seller areas), just as what HKEX is helping Chinese companies to go public. More >
