Alignment and CRM meet at Maximize 2014
May 2014, Following the keynotes at the Siia maximize event held in San Francisco, they began the program with an opening panel on alignment and how it is being integrated with CRM and traditional sales/support models. The panel was moderated by the SandHill Group and included a range of businesses including Invisible CRM, Dicom Grid and Mindflash.
As markets, development and sales/support teams become globalized, the challenges of how to mange the customer and the products increase. There are many methods that have been tried, and the focus on alignment of the customer’s needs and the larger vision and direction of the company’s product plays a big role in the success of the company.
Dicom Grid focuses on the enterprise health care sector. In their structure, the CTO is still a coder and the heavy focus is on R&D and the tech being used. In this scenario, a traditional 6 mos trial with monthly releases of the installed code base is used at the customer site and has a personalization configuration built during that time. The CEO also leads sales, so there a very lean structure for the organization. This structure works as long as there are not a lot of customers with conflicting product goals and needs.
Mindflash on the other hand addresses the SMB Enterprise marketplace. They have a cloud hosted training company where the VP of the product development reports into the CEO/President directly. This allows for disrbuted development teams, while the final code review and market presence are directly managed through the headquarters prior to release to the cloud. The cloud releases are uniform across all customers, as it is a single code release. The sales people and the development people form the two tiers of the support network to insure the CRM is working correctly and the features needed are being put in with the correct priority.
Invisible CRM developed an approach that involves 2 product planning mtgs/wk – 1 technical and 1 strategic. These meetings are attended in-person or virtually by both internal and external team members and the outcomes organized with proprietary tools and software. Sales and marketing then integtrate this information with the features and requests from customers to develop the working plan. This structure allows for multiple “organic” discussions on directions and features while allowing for short cycle releases.
For on going customer feed back, the tools are integrating m2m feedback on the activities of the end user as well as web based customer service interfaces.
