Welcome to my final post on the three processes that are key to a customer intimacy strategy. The subject of this post is customer relationship management. The first two posts were on product management and results management.

Before we implemented changes upon buying them, almost all of the ten companies we’ve acquired at Consona spread their customer relationship management across multiple employees and organizations. One company had four employees across four different organizations responsible for its own internal silo of the relationship with customers. The company had one representative each for software, maintenance, consulting services and customization services. This company’s structure was perhaps best for each of the different areas of the business in that an employee was focused on a particular product or service, but it was obviously not best for the customer. And, the company struggled to develop true relationships with its customers. I talked with managers at some customers who stated that they had not heard from the company in years. The company may have talked to its main contact at the customer about maintenance or ordering additional licenses, but it was not talking to the managers that were running the business.

Customer intimacy requires a focus on proactively managing customer relationships. Our approach at Consona is to centralize the management of customer relationships into one organization with customer account managers (CAMs) who are responsible for all aspects of our relationship with their assigned set of customers. From a revenue perspective, this means the CAM is responsible for and compensated on software, services and maintenance. We have a defined set of processes that ensures that our CAMs are proactively managing their customers. We also implement process changes to acquired companies that include managing all proposals to and negotiations with customers through the CAM.

The most significant change that we introduce when a company joins Consona is the culture change that the CAM is the decision maker when it comes to how the company responds to a need the customer has or to an issue that we are working to resolve for the customer. Our CEO is the best example of how to lead the way on this culture change. When customer interactions are escalated to his level, he always thoroughly engages with the customer in a discussion, but finishes with the statement that he will review the situation with their CAM,lk and the CAM will make the decision on our response. Managers across the business must support these culture and process changes in order for the transition to a customer intimacy strategy to work.

In the next few post, I’ll switch the topic to measuring customer satisfaction.

My last post addressed the reengineering of the first of three key customer related processes as part of making the transition to a customer intimate company. The three processes are product management, results management and customer relationship management. In this post, I’ll give my views on how a customer intimate company proactively manages the results that their customers achieve with their solutions.

In the software industry, reengineering the processes associated with actively managing customer results involves product quality, professional services and customer support. I applaud the industries in which product quality is generally high and customers are overall satisfied with the quality level of the products they are using. Product quality is generally poor in the software industry. Of the eleven products that we’ve acquired at Consona, only one met our quality standards at the time of acquisition. We have found the main cause for product quality issues at most of the companies that we’ve acquired to be rushing a new product version out to the market in order to attract new customers at the expense of thorough product testing and, thus, existing customers. Our approach is to work on a new product version until it meets quality standards, even if it means delaying a release past its announced release date. Whatever industry you’re in, a transition to a customer intimacy strategy is likely to require the reengineering of product development processes. If you’re in manufacturing, it could be the implementation of a Six Sigma program. If you’re in software, it could be the implementation of a Capability Maturity Model program.

At the first user conference that I attended as part of Consona, which was for the first company acquired by Consona, I had two customers independently tell me that their company had been a customer of ours for a long time, that they were relatively new with their company, that their company had not seen anyone from Consona in years, and ask me if we could have someone visit them to check on how they were using our system. We not only provided the “Check-up” service to those two customers, we also turned the concept into a program. Prior to acquisition, the attitude regarding providing professional services to the customer base was to work on it whenever consultants were available due to the new customer sales rate being below expectations. Implementing the “Check-up” service and being much more proactive about working with customers to understand their ongoing needs were a couple of the first actions that we took to transition to a customer intimate strategy. The most important item that we worked on was instilling in our company an attitude that we share responsibility with our customers for the results that they achieve with our solutions for the initial implementation and on an ongoing basis. Once the attitude change took hold, we quickly accomplished the reengineering of services methodologies, practices and processes and the development of a complete line of services designed to help our customers accomplish all of their objectives for using our product in line with Geoffrey Moore’s Whole Product concept.

In the area of customer support, we did not have as much reengineering to do on the first Consona acquisition, as that company already had an award-winning support organization. And, by now, you’ve gotten the picture. We worked with an already very good support team on values, culture and slight process changes and ended up with a team practicing customer intimacy.

In the next post, I’ll address the final of the three key customer related processes to reengineer: Relationship Management.

In my last post, I stated that the most important factor in being a customer intimate company is defining the right set of target customers. So, what else is important in making the transition to implementing a customer intimacy strategy? The next step is the reengineering of three key customer related processes: product management, results management and customer relationship management.

I believe product management is a key process for all B2B companies and is the most important business process for a technology company. None of the ten companies that Consona has acquired were executing product management the way that it should be at a technology company. The problem in every case was that customer involvement in the product management process was very minimal. Sure, customers input their product change requests, but their involvement in the process to determine how CRs were incorporated into future product releases was little to none. During due diligence, one of the companies we acquired told me that their approach to including customers in the product management process was to meet for half an hour with customers that visited their headquarters. It turned out that only a handful of customer visited each year, which meant they were obtaining minimal input from 2-3% of their entire customer base.

Unfortunately, a fairly common attitude in the software industry is that customers should not be involved in product management because they will drive the process toward minimal functionality improvements versus significant innovation. My comment regarding this attitude is, “Please. That is just an excuse.” Involving customers in every phase of product management and development can make the process longer and is hard work, but the resulting solution is definitely a better fit for customers and provides them with more value. Product companies can definitely involve customers in both product development and innovation. Customers should be involved from the product vision phase all the way through to product release. Documents can be provided and online meeting technology can be used to obtain concurrent input from a significant number of customers. Customers should be providing input on the features to be included in a new product or release, reviewing process flows and feature designs, as well as testing initial product versions.

The best resources that I have found for product management are the Pragmatic Marketing Framework from a company called Pragmatic Marketing (http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pragmatic-marketing-framework) as well as a book called “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. Moore’s Whole Product concept is an excellent concept to apply in delivering the entire solution that customers need to be successful.

“Customer intimacy” is not just another term for excellent customer service. So, what is it? At Consona Corporation, it is both one of our four core values and one of the three pillars of our company business strategy. We follow the principles of customer intimacy defined by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in their excellent book “The Discipline of Market Leaders.” The other two disciplines the book defines as strategy choices (of which they claim you should only pick one) are product leadership and operational excellence. According to Treacy and Wiersema, all three disciplines require good customer service; however, the focus of this week’s blog is on how customer intimacy goes beyond good service.

Customer intimate companies focus on providing the best total solution for their customers, including ALL the services and support they need to achieve the optimum value from the product. “Best total solution” does not mean best product, it means best result. Of the ten companies that Consona has acquired, how many were truly customer centric at a customer intimate level? Zero. All of these companies said their customers were important, so what was keeping them from being customer intimate companies?

Take a guess at the answer to the following question:

The most important factor by far in being a successful customer intimate company is:

a) Great products.
b) Great professional services.
c) Great customer support.
d) Great customers.

Think that I threw (d) in for amusement? Think again, because that’s the answer! It’s another way of saying that the key to success is to thoroughly define your target market and to select only customers in that target market. If you are diligent about providing an excellent match between your target market and your solution, and focus on adding customers that value the differentiated aspects of your solution, you’ll have great customers. It sounds simple, but it’s hard to do. Try to imagine walking away from a sale. It sounds ludicrous. Like you’re throwing away money! But it’s not. In fact, you may lose money in the long run on customers that are not a fit for your solution.

Some companies value low prices; others value leading edge products; and still others value the best total solution including product, services and support. To be a customer intimate company, you need to ensure that you focus on providing what the companies that value the best total solution are looking for, and also focus on only those types of companies.

Welcome to the first post for the Consona CRM Every Experience Counts blog. I’ll be your host and I’m looking forward to making this a valuable experience for all of us. I’ll start by telling you a little bit about myself and then cover the plan for the topics that I intend to include in the blog over the next year or so. I’ll finish up with a preview of the first topic which is: Customer Intimacy.

I work for Consona Corporation as the General Manager of the Consona CRM division. I live in the headquarters city for Consona, Indianapolis, Indiana and have two sons (22 and 18 years old). My older son is working on obtaining a masters degree at Duke University’s Divinity School (go Blue Devils!). My younger son is a senior in high school and will likely attend college next year with a major in music recording engineering. If you’re into metal music, you can check out his band here: http://www.myspace.com/darkprocessionor for ambient music fans his other band: http://www.myspace.com/avling. I’m not at all musically inclined, so in my spare time, I like to workout, read and play golf.

I started my career as a programmer analyst and then project manager in the information systems department at Texas Instruments. My career has benefited greatly from my early years at TI because of the experience that I gained from both developing new systems and implementing them across a variety of businesses that included semiconductors, computers and printers, consumer products, industrial automation products and defense products. After several years in the IS department, I was looking to take advantage of my MBA from Southern Methodist University by moving to a software products company in a sales and marketing role. As it turned out, around this time TI had started a software division focused on providing computer aided software engineering development tool products and I transferred to that division in a sales role. I experienced a great ride in sales and sales management with the TI software division as it doubled in revenue each of its first five years and eventually reached $250M. My favorite position at TI was the last one that I had as the general manager of a new business unit that I developed the business plan for, obtained funding for, and was just successfully getting off the ground when the software division was sold to Sterling Software. Sterling shut down all of the new initiatives TI had and asked me to join them as VP of sales and services for North America in the Application Management division. My experience with acquisitions at Sterling allowed me to gain further valuable experience in strategy development, market analysis and product planning. I left Sterling when they were acquired by CA, promptly went on the startup path, and went zero for four in terms of success over a three year period.

I joined Consona Corporation as VP of sales and marketing five years ago when it was formed through the acquisition of Made2Manage Systems by Battery Ventures. I worked with our CEO to develop our business model, strategy and operating principles for the company. I’ve also been involved in a number of acquisitions in the areas of due diligence, integration and operations. I led the executive team that integrated Onyx into Consona back in 2006 and am enjoying my current role as general manager.

When I reflect on my career, I sometimes feel that I’ve learned more about what not to do than what to do. After all, I worked for an organization that went from zero to $250M in revenue as fast as any software startup and then lost $60M in its last two years of existence. I then followed that up by working for four startups that all had multiple strategy and execution issues that resulted in their downfall. Upon further review though, I’ve had a mix of positive and negative experiences in my career that have combined to result in the development of very definite views on business strategy and execution. My goal in this blog is to share those views with a specific focus on delivering excellent customer experiences. And, I hope to stir up a fair amount of debate so that readers benefit from multiple viewpoints.

The topics that I plan to cover over the next year range from defining excellent customer service as a value and strategy to specific inputs on how to execute on delivering valuable customer experiences. So far, the list of topics that will be included is:

• Customer Intimacy
• Measuring customer satisfaction
• My personal experiences as a customer
• Building excellent customer experiences
• Customers sharing their stories

Next week we’ll start with “Customer Intimacy” as our initial topic. I’ll talk about my experiences implementing a customer centric strategy based upon the books The Discipline of Market Leaders and Blue Ocean Strategy. I’ll address why business practices based on customer intimacy are not required for all companies to deliver excellent customer experiences, but are an absolute must for businesses with a customer centric strategy. And I’ll explain my views on how customer intimacy results in an experience that goes well beyond excellent customer service.

Welcome and thanks for reading the initial post.