Every business has a dream. If not, why bother spending so much time and effort on something which other people are doing already? The difference is some businesses are ‘living the dream’ whilst others merely ‘talk the dream’. Allow me to explain.

I was called to a meeting today with a prospective client who is looking to buy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. ‘It’s what we need’ they tell me. I always get nervous when I hear this. It’s not that CRM software is ‘last year’s next big thing’. I believe it is this year’s and next year’s big thing. It is just that most people put the cart before the horse.

CRM software is merely a tool to implement a business strategy. It just so happens that the strategy runs to the very heart of the business, and CRM (if implemented properly) is a very powerful way to actualise that strategy. Nevertheless, CRM remains a 21st Century power drill.

The business vision comes first and is foremost! That is why I was so surprised when my request to understand what the company wished to achieve was rejected. “No”, said the MD, “first tell us what your company’s background is with CRM and we will tell you if there is a fit with our needs.”

I tried to explain that we had not come to sell a bit of software. The tool is useless without understanding the purpose to which it will be put, but my objections were overruled. All I could do was indicate how my company had worked with similar businesses in the past. I had not realised that I had been invited for an interview.

After saying my bit, the MD still keeping his cards closely guarded to his chest, then articulated his vision to me. “We believe that every contact we make, whether supplier, third party, prospect, or friend, is a potential customer. We want to capture all of our relationships within one database, and offer a consistent, high quality service where we can offer ourselves and our skills to the marketplace in a more sophisticated way.”

This was an admirable statement. If only it were true. No sooner had these words come out but they were followed by what the client thought was the purpose of the meeting - they did not need help with strategy, nor an opinion as to how CRM might fit into the wider business needs, what they wanted was for someone to tell them the best CRM package on the market and to integrate to it their disparate standalone databases – seamlessly of course.

“Oh! You haven’t come to tell us that you’ve connected up XYZ systems and here is the method to do it? Your focus is helping businesses manage the process of change? Then I haven’t heard anything so far that tells me you can do anything more than we can! How are you better than my IT Director here”?

What do you say faced with such a question?

“Well, in fact your IT Director is great at creating Access databases, but has no clue about business process analysis and business strategy. He needs to get out more and stop getting excited about whether Winzip has greater compression technology than WinRAR!”

“No”, I answered politely, “it was all a question of the need for such projects to have a dedicated resource focussed exclusively on the project definition, creation and implementation”.

His response? “You need a new sales pitch! We know what we need”.

I thought to myself “My company doesn’t do sales pitches.  We offer insights, advice and assistance, that are beneficial to others and for which we get paid”.

But what was really going on in my head as I concluded that it was time to pack my bag, was that a business can claim all it wants about customer service and “relationships”, but if it is so sure that it cannot learn from others, or minimally, be open to ideas, which might be different from its own perspective, no CRM system will overcome the deficiency in that social skill. Live the dream!