Customers Don’t Want Relationships…PERIOD!

CRM is dead. Its slow death began the day software vendors claimed the term as their own, and essentially productized a phrase (and acronym) without bothering to provide any outcomes. That’s right, software vendors can only lay claim to a small portion of any positive outcomes that have been achieved by those select few companies that have actually achieved them. However, they can lay claim to nearly all of the negative outcomes; and there are many. Will anyone challenge this simple list of possible outcomes that customers of CRM value, but rarely achieve simply by implementing a software application?

• A sustained rate of growth — most companies have implemented some form of (yuck) “a” CRM within the past 10–15 years. That’s a fair time horizon for looking at sustained rates of growth. Have you beaten the rate of growth of the economy every year?

• A sustained level of cash flow — as an ex-banker, I’ve seen many companies point to their rapid growth while I was looking at their rapidly gro…