In contrast, the best technologists are re-engineering and collaborating to co-create genuine digital businesses, not just “serve the business”.

As digital disruption accelerates, the division between front and back offices is blurring. Traditional back-office apps are migrating, one vendor at a time, to be closer to the sales-and-marketing, customer experience driven front end. The agility imperative means back and front office must integrate and synchronize

Digital technologies are transforming CRM. Tighter integration means CRM is extending from sales, service, and marketing into commerce. The long-term focus is not simply on selling products and services, but on delivering authentic brands and experiences, from campaigns to customer journeys to commerce.

Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

Watch the Webinar Recording

The carnival that eats San Francisco for a week, produced yet another impressive set of numbers:

• 170,000 registered delegates (one fifth of the host city’s population)
• 2600 speakers
• 1600 sessions
• 400 exhibitors
• 10 million online viewers

With program sessions devoted to “wellness” and “inspirational leadership”, Dreamforce can be described as “the Burning Man festival but with everyone wearing clothes and talking all day about cloud computing”.

The core message was that companies must be committed to capturing, connecting and acting on customer data across the engagement spectrum with a dynamic, agile customer management platform.

SFDC is now the fourth largest software company in the world, after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and is on track to become the first Software-as-a-Service subscription company to hit $US 10b in revenue.

None of the annual customer conferences organised by SFDC’s currently larger rivals _ Oracle’s OpenWorld, SAP’s SAPPHIRE Now, or Microsoft’s Convergence events _  go close to matching Dreamforce’s numbers. Customer management or what founder Mark Benioff describes as “customer success” is generating all the momentum and energy:

If your CRM _ meaning analytics, sales automation, marketing,  service, collaboration and mobility _ is not pivotal to your company, then you have a major structural deficiency.

This old-school configuration, with CRM disconnected, does not work:

This was my takeway after contributing to the panel discussion at the Melbourne session of marketing guru Jay Baer’s Sitecore-sponsored ANZ tour last month.

If your target is “too busy” to return calls and/or respond to email traffic, then you are not sufficiently relevant.

Jay’s high concept is “Youtility”, marketing he describes as “so useful people would pay tor it”. He says we have to be prepared to “embrace the power of eventuality”. “Relationships come together over time, typically these are micro interactions,” Jay says. “Eventuallity” may be the right way forward, but it requires a high degree of organisational and cultural maturity and patience.

Here are Jay’s principal bullet points:

• Audience attention is fragmented
• Marketing and customer service has converged
• Marketing is now a spectator sport
• Stop trying to be amazing and start being useful
• If you are useful, your customers will keep you close
• Stop aiming at “top-of-mind” awareness and move to “friend-of-mind” awareness
• Relationships must be based on trust and value
• Smart marketing is about help not hype
• From friction to research
• We hyper research everything because we can
• 67% of the B2B purchase process is conducted online – Sirius Decisions
• Relationships are created with info first and people second
• If people have to call you to buy from you, you are doing it wrong
• The better you teach the more you will sell
• It is way easier to get caught now. The truth will always come out.
• Trust is the filter through which all business success must pass
• Differentiate with transparency
• Humanity is the ultimate trust builder
• 92% trust recommendations from friends and family. 47% trust advertising – Nielsen
• Don’t’ just change the message – change the messenger

This is one of my favorite quotes from Customer Experience guru Bruce Temkin. It features prominently in my Customer Experience is the New Marketing presentation, which I delivered at Alex Allwood’s Customer Experience is the Brand book launch on June 29 in Sydney and again, in an updated form, on December 14 to a CIO-CMO audience assembled by IDG Communications, the publishers of ComputerWorld  and CMO Magazine, also in Sydney:

Here is the slide deck:

http://www.slideshare.net/MitchellMackey/mitchell-mackeys-customer-experience-is-the-new-marketing-june-29-2015-compatibility-mode

G2 describes itself as a user-driven software review site. Here’s their mission statement:

The current approach to buying business technology is broken. Buyers spend too much time sifting through spin, reading outdated analyst reports, and sitting through endless meetings. After all this, buyers still lack confidence in their choice of technology and most projects fail to meet their expectations. We will change this. By capturing our collective wisdom, we will make purchasing business technology as easy as buying consumer products.

As the chart above illustrates, Salesforce.com earned the highest overall score, followed by Microsoft Dynamics.

Several vendors earned High Performer status by achieving high customer satisfaction, but they do not yet have the market share and global scale required to get themselves into the Leaders’ quadrant.

The top High Performers include SugarCRM,  Workbooks, Salesnet, and Nimble .

The CRM Grid rated Oracle, SAP, Sage, and NetSuite as Contenders, meaning that these vendors have significant scale and market share, but below-average user satisfaction ratings.

The top ranking was validated this week when the founders of Oracle and Salesforce.com, Larry Ellison and Mark Benioff, announced that after years of fierce competition they are getting into bed together.

Salesforce.com will embrace Oracle’s new  multi-tennant 12C (c stands for cloud) database technology and introduce the Oracle Exadata hardware into its datacenters, while Oracle will integrate Salesforce.com into its Fusion HCM (Human Capital Management) HR and Financial Cloud (ERP) products.

Critically, from the CRM perspective, Oracle acknowledged that it will start using Salesforce.com itself.

Whilst the developments are interpreted by analysts as good news for Oracle’s infrastructure business, any company with one of Oracle’s CRM products (Siebel, Fusion CRM, CRM on Demand, RightNow CRM, E-Business Suite CRM or PeopleSoft CRM) should be wondering about their place in the landscape given these statements this week from Oracle’s Ellison during the announcement conference call for the media and the analyst community:

“Almost every time we buy a Company, they’re running Salesforce.com CRM. And, in the old days, we would try to move them over to our sales automation application — the Fusion sales automation application right away. We’re going to leave some of those companies on the Salesforce application for this specific purpose of making sure our integrations — that’s why I say we’re going to become a user of Salesforce.com’s CRM applications. We’re going to leave those implementations in place. We’re going to wire them up to our financials, and we’re going to be an early adopter of these out-of-the-box integrations. So, I mean obviously — I am sure Marc can do a better job than me of telling you just how successful Salesforce.com has been in CRM. But, we see them all over the market. They’re the market leader, and our customers expect for us to work gracefully with Salesforce.com. Both at the application level and the Company level.

“You’ve got to be able to turn on the Salesforce CRM applications, the Oracle HCM or ERP applications. And those things just have to start sharing data and working together – the key word being seamlessly . . . and that’s what Marc and I are committed to working on.”

It wasn’t stated explicitly during the announcement, but the Salesforce.com alliance relegates Oracle’s own CRM applications _ which it has recently started promoting as “Customer Experience Solutions” that customers can “Enhance, Augment and Migrate” _ to the rear-vision mirror. They will still compete with Salesforce.com (they will not go away anytime soon) but the case for any of them suddenly became a lot harder to make even allowing for Oracle’s formidable, hard-core “no prisoners” sales culture (which is, in fact, very similar to Salesforce’s).

The company’s new-generation Fusion CRM product has failed to win any reference customers. The two deployments which were announced in 2011, Siemens and Green Mountain Coffee, have apparently hit the proverbial rocks.

Siemens appears to have abandoned its implementation and Green Mountain Coffee is reportedly unhappy.

Critically, Oracle isn’t promoting any positive Fusion CRM customers on its dot com website. Only two old Siebel “customer highlights” are featured in the CRM section. If you have the time, click on the Gartner Research panel on the page. Two of the three Gartner links have expired. The one active link leads to an out-of-date 2011 report. Could this be because Gartner now agrees with the G2 Crowd users?

Today the conventional, on-premise Siebel platform, which Oracle purchased in 2005 for $US 5.8bn, is nearing the end of its 20+ year life cycle.

R8, which was introduced in 2007, is the last major Siebel release and recently there have been a wave of significant defections, which have shrunk Oracle’s flow of license maintenance revenue (on which its margins are reportedly as high as 90%).

Companies as diverse as IBM, Kimberly Clarke, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Bayer, Forrester Research and Corporate Executive Board have all walked away from Siebel in recent years.

Oracle’s user interface product, Open UI, is cited as a solution to Siebel’s usability issues, but as one leading analyst told me recently it is no more than “lipstick”. And despite being released in 2012 there are still no reference customers.

Customers of the marketing automation tool, Eloqua (now called Oracle Marketing), that Oracle bought last year no longer face a fork in the road. The vast majority are Salesforce.com users.

And the newly-christened Customer Experience Suite, which includes Oracle Marketing (Eloqua) and other acquisitions Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire) faces an interesting positioning challenge (whilst integration itself remains a massive work in progress).

Finally, the Benioff-Ellison bromance has reignited speculation that Oracle & Salesforce.com could one day exchange equity, with Benioff becoming Ellison’s successor. Watch this space, as they say.

• More likely to consider brands that promise better experiences
• More likely to recommend brands based on good experiences
• Willing to pay more for brands they associate with superior experiences

These and other business benefits are significant when you get customer experience right, according to brand management agency Jack Morton which has completed a major survey, called Best Experience Brands, across 4000 consumers in four countries.

Jack Morton says 60 per cent of the surveyed consumers were willing to pay an “experience premium” for a brand’s product or service.

And eight out of 10 were more likely to recommend a brand based on a great experience.

The research was conducted earlier this year. It involved 1000 consumers each in the US, the UK, China and Australia.

Josh McCall, chairman and chief executive of Jack Morton, said: “what we found is that no matter their geographic or cultural differences – when it comes to brand choice, consumers around the world are placing increased importance on experience”.

Forrester Research agrees. A recent report, called You Cannot Price Your Way Out Of Bad Customer Experiences, addresses the key question does it make more sense to invest in customer experience or in reducing prices to improve customer loyalty?

Forrester tested the relationship between customers’ perceptions of their experience, their perceptions of price-value, and their loyalty.

The report shows how customer experience trumps price-value perception as a loyalty driver.

This means, for example, to win over customers, retailers need to compete on experience, not only price, and banks need to build trust in the transparency and fairness of their rates and fees.

Yet despite the compelling benefits, Forrester analyst Harley Manning says that few companies are equipped to harvest the full potential of customer service as a business strategy

Harley assets “you have to change the way you run your company. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way“.

“When you consistently manage from the outside-in perspective of your customers, you’ll break out of the endless cycle of chasing after problems you create for yourself. That’s because you’ll systematically stamp out the root causes of those problems. This new way of doing business will also create the opportunity for competitive differentiation.”

This means:

• Lower customer service costs
• Enhanced revenue per customer
• Improved retention
• More new customers

Goals worth chasing.

10,000 U.S. consumers were asked to rate their recent interactions with companies across three dimensions of their experience: functional, accessible, and emotional, using their responses to rate 246 companies across 19 industries. Thirty-seven percent of companies received a “good” rating or better, an increase over 28% of companies in 2011 and 16% in 2010. Grocery chains, fast food chains, parcel delivery services, and retailers earned the highest average scores while TV service providers, health plans, and Internet service providers earned the lowest.

The three dimensions are:

1. Functional: How well do experiences meet customers’ needs?
2. Accessible: How easy is it for customers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotional: How do customers feel about the experiences?

Here are the leaders and laggards:

No surprise in that statement. So, what should we do about this sad state of affairs, afflicting most, if not all CRM platforms?

Nucleus says value-creating efforts must be focused around integration, extension and collaboration:

• Integration – integrate front and back office, desktop applications, and social business applications.
• Extension – deploy content and collaboration tools to replace multiple content repositories.
• Collaboration – add social collaboration to CRM.

There is no doubt integrating data sources and leveraging social collaboration tools will generate superior value from your CRM platform.

Yet conservative corporate cultures all too often get in the way. Integrations, for example, are seen as hard work, especially if standalone legacy solutions are more or less functioning regardless of the amount of manual effort that may be required to maintain them and extract value.

So, prioritize and get started, if you haven’t already on rounding up your disparate data sources and start trialing collaboration tools such as SFDC’s Chatter and Microsoft’s Yammer.