Meeting with someone recently they asked me what my favourite CRM platform was. I've had a chance to work with a wide variety and what struck me about it was it doesn't matter what my favourite one is, but knowing what the capabilities and constraints of the one you are working with does.
In previous roles I've had the opportunity to be a part of the implementation teams for some large deployments, which are massive endeavours. My role was typically to understand how the business requirements and corporate vision would align strategically to the tool being implemented.
In the marketing and advertising world the scope is simply understanding what system you are going to be interacting with and what you'll be able to do with it.
The enterprise tools are incredibly similar in terms of capability and it would be very difficult to rank them as a lot of the factors align with their compatibility with your companies current infrastructure, and budget.
The types of tools that I like the most of those that are able to hold customer records of all (or most) of their interactions with you. Tools like Eloqua are extremely helpful as they offer deployment and analytical (although limited) within it, where as Salesforce.com and it's integration of Radian6 offers another level of social behaviour tracking.
The trick then becomes in knowing what your tool can't do. Sure, the sales guy said your tool "could" do triggered emails based on interactions or track Facebook posts from linked accounts - but did you buy the module? I often find that marketing clients only remember what was said in the sales presentation, not what they bought.
Over the last couple of months I've had the unpleasant experience of finding that what a client says they can do (or data they have) is far from the truth.
Adjusting a strategy into phases to show return and demonstrate value can be tough in these instances, particularly when the client has no ability to add new functionality. Conducting a full discovery process and objective setting can also help prevent these surprises from popping up.
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