The Future of Marketing Automation and CRM 2.0

I just finished reading Paul Greenberg's excellent blog article on CRM 2.0 and it got me thinking!

In an odd way it ties in with the conversation Jep Castelein is having on Sales-Marketing 2.0.

Will the social media explosion affect future CRM systems? Deep down in my engineering roots there lurks a fundamental belief in entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that in a closed system everything tends towards disorder! Will monolithic CRM systems absorb the functions of client services, sales force automation, marketing automation etc? No. In the evolution of many technologies we have seen precisely the opposite - increasing entropy! They evolve to an increasing number of target audience specific applications with defined interfaces to permit sharing of information.

CRM 2.0 will be virtual
CRM 2.0 will be a virtual system comprised of technologies from many firms who each build a specific piece that serves their target market best. So Marketing Automation firms will rule the roost in serving marketing, Sales Force Automation systems will serve sales and Customer Service organizations, and finance will utilize their own finely honed technologies. However "this too shall pass." In turn each of these systems will divide into even more target specific applications.

Imagine the marketing automation systems dividing up into those that serve B2C best and those that serve B2B, or those dedicated to social media interaction monitoring. You might have a chat system, and a blog system, and a user portal. The idea of physically getting all of these as a holistic solution from one vendor is like buying your entire stereo in one physical box. Yes it can be done, but will you want to do this five or ten years hence? In my stereo the HDMI plugs make buying the specialized pieces and connecting them together easy and the performance is so much better than any single box solution.  CRM 1.0 failed because it tried to serve too many target audiences (sales and marketing and service) with a single box approach. We don't need to physically co-locate the bits and bytes. They don't need to reside in the same database. That is an IT control driven centralization approach that under-serves organizations. What we need is a virtual CRM.

Shift the Conversation to Interfaces and Data Quality
The conversation needs to shift to what the interfaces look like between these systems? How will the web analytics giants like Google, Omniture and WebTrends, who deal in the performance of online assets, connect to the Marketing Automation giants who deal in the activities of named contacts? Who are the future giants in PPC, Blog watching, chat monitoring, and reputation watching? What will their interfaces look like? Will PR have the ability (finally) to report on which 'eyeballs' have read their press releases and articles through various social media services and link it back into the virtual CRM?

What is the future lingua franca of marketing systems?  Is Informatica the gold standard of data integration?  Marketing and Sales combined will not be well served by any single monolithic system so I don't expect a Smarketing 2.0! I want to see plug and play just like my stereo components so I can quickly assemble my virtual system, replace components with newer components easily, and know that I have perfect data fidelity. We know from CRM 1.0 that just ammassing all the data on a single set of platters didn't resolve the data integrity issues as it once promised. Having multiple marketing and sales systems interconnected does however heighten our awareness of the need to scrutinize all data entering the system for validity and completeness before adding it to the virtual CRM. So whilst I may see entropy as inevitable in the software systems for sales and marketing, I shudder to think that my data could suffer the same fate! 

-Kevin "Fighting Data Entropy Everyday" Joyce

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Comments

[david raab]

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. I think most people do want all their components in one box -- both for stereos and CRM systems. Some folks actually enjoy wiring together the pieces, but most just want to use the completed system. In the case of CRM in particular, 'smarketers' want an integrated solution so they can easily present a single treatment stream to each customer, regardless of whether the contacts originate with sales or marketing, and whether they are delivered by email, phone, social network, or whatever.

Even integration via plug-and-play standardization isn't as easy for the 'smarketer' as buying a single package. This is the old 'best of breed' vs. 'integrated suite' discussion, and I think history has shown pretty conclusively that integrated suites win, even when their features are not as good as best of breed. The convenience, speed of deployment and reduced risk are insurmountable advantages. There's no reason to expect this industry to be any different.

[Kevin]

Thanks for the comment David! I believe we agree that a single centralized system that could represent all things to all people (and departments) and seamlessly integrate all data from all sources into a homogeneous view of customers and prospects would be awesome. I believe we agree that this is what everyone wants! But I feel that it will not, and indeed cannot, evolve as a single physical database.

Instead it will happen as a virtual centralization, and we can accelerate this reality if we all focus on building elegant plug and play data integration APIs to social media analysis products, PPC products, telemarketing tools, Web Analytics, data append services, sales and service databases, finance databases, USPS database, hoovers, etc. In the future when you open a contact record, the view will be built dynamically for you by drawing on data real time from multiple sources and combining them on the screen, just as many web pages are built today. But we need data integration standards and data quality standards to rise to the occasion! The bandwidth is becoming free, and the latency will be negligible so I feel it is inevitable.
-Kevin