When is a CMS a CRM?

Strange world we live in when the title of a blog post is mainly acronyms. But then that’s what marketing technology revolves around. And quite frankly I appear to enjoy these terms. So does that make me me sad? or Marketing sad? Whatever, the main thing that matters is that you found this page because of the acronyms, so you’re on the same wavelength.

For many years now, too many to recall, I have been involved with Content Management Systems (CMS). They’ve come on in leaps and bounds where it’s hard to define what constitutes a CMS and what constitutes an on-line application like CRM. Both are accessible from anywhere with a browser and an internet connection, both interact with a user to change things and both end up reporting/changing/viewing etc. So when a client of ours, VR Property Group (VR) came to us and asked us to look at their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – not an area that we are experts in but VR wanted our advice , our views and our thoughts as marketers and business people. It was then that the similarities of requirements between CRM & CMS came fully to the forefront. What VR wanted was:

• A CRM that they could access from anywhere in the world – they currently have offices in Spain, UK & USA.
• An administrative interface that would allow them to update CRM contents, add users and generally change ‘stuff’
• View reports on properties that they sold
• View sales consultants progress and forecasting
• Manage client details
• Interface with their suppliers and various authorities
• Manage sales activity in a CRM way – track leads, follow-ups etc
• Can be used by a wide variety of technology users i.e. from the very basis to the very technically advanced
• And communicate via email to the outside world and via messaging internally

They had been using a traditional CRM, the third CRM they had tried in a row. Nothing wrong with them but they were all based around being flexible so that any industry could use them, which effectively meant they weren’t tailored to VR’s working environment . Yes there were templates/add-ins available that would tailor the CRMs to a property industry, but still not right, still not VR – and besides once they had done that the price was verging on the ridiculous.

So hence the call to me to ask if I had any ideas. After assessing their situation, they did have very specific requirements and their commission structure was unique, actually very creative and inventive, which in turn meant that a standard system or a tailored system still wouldn’t match what they wanted without a lot of bespoke work. And yes the costs then got higher and higher.

The old grey matter got working and I approach Kameleon Digital, our number one provider of CMS systems. They themselves are very creative and very amenable to new ideas. So bounced the idea off them about the CRM and the men at Kameleon said “Yes.” Basically what VR wanted could be done using the current CMS with some tailored work.

A few months, several iterations of a functional specification, lots of meetings with VR in Spain and Leeds add in a handful of changes to the CMS and VR have a CRM. A CRM that is based on a CMS, that didn’t cost a fortune, exactly matches their environment and can be used by everyone from the casual sales consultant through to the tech. savy administrators.

So on the face of it, you could say, ‘Nothing unusual there’.

But, I disagree.

Where are the lines that are drawn in the sand that say CRM is only CRM . CMS is only CMS. On-line accounting, HR…. are only what they describe themselves as and are fixed in a single box? Yes there are integrated solutions out there that will put several boxes together into one box – but they end up being either too fixed, too limited or too inflexible and you end up back at square one but this time for everything in the box.

But what we have achieved here with an ‘out of the box’ marketing approach and a technical team that  ‘can do’ is meet a clients requirements by using a system (CMS) that wasn’t originally created for CRM but does exactly what the client needed, at a price they wanted. Who wins?

• The client? Yes. They got what they wanted and it has a direct effect on the productivity and profitability of their business.
• Me because Insight gets the sale? Yes.
• Insight, because they are seen as thinking outside of the marketing square? Yes.
• The client – Insight relationship. Yes - the client now knows they can talk to Insight about anything for business advice and we know our long term relationship just got stronger.
• Kameleon because they now have another string to their portfolio? Yes.

Does it mean we now sell CRM and that we’re experts? Hardly, but what it means is we’ve understood a marketing requirement and used creative marketing approach to meet their needs. It means that the application of technology marketing is literally only confined by your thought process. Which probably brings me back to where this blog thought arose from.

Marketing solutions shouldn’t be fixed, we’re creative in marketing so don’t let the acronyms and descriptions hold us back. What we do is provide business development solutions for clients which we call marketing. So start with an open marketing mind and you can achieve most things, we took that approach and we have a happy client that has met their objective – and we all won.

Isn’t that what business, and in this example, marketing, is all about?

I think so.

Learning from brand ‘America’

It dawned on me today that America was very clever with its marketing of brand America.

OK, yes I know, over the past few years they haven’t done themselves a lot of favours, but just putting that aspect aside for the moment (if it’s at all possible) I was just considering a term that is widely used worldwide and initiated and propagated by Americans. And that’s the simple use of adding American to other nationalities.

2nd and 3rd generation settlers in America have and always will be, I would guess, been known as African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans etc etc and even American Indians, you know those guys that were there originally. Does this happen anywhere else in the world? In the UK we have 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th generation nationalities that we just refer to as Italian, Chinese, Indian etc.

It’s just a very small point but just how clever is that by the Americans? Just by adding that one word onto the end of every other nationality present in the USA, no matter how long their families have lived there, they project America and the pride of being American. We talk in the UK about an integrated, multi-cultural, society but no British identity – not saying that is wrong because we all need a separate identity and to treasure our cultural roots. But how much more promotion for British/UK identity would we/could we have had by using British-Italians or UK-Italians. Everyone then has pride for where they are and where they live and retain their identity, pride and culture.

No matter what you say about our overseas cousins, they did a great job on brand America, worldwide. A marketing lesson to be learnt there.