A car maker invited us to analyse all sales and marketing processes as well as customer interactions in the workshop. The objective was to implement a simple but powerful tool for the garage owner to manage his customers and to produce better marketing data for local, national and pan European campaigns.
We conducted workshops in the Benelux, UK, Germany and Italy and came up with a fully documented process guide and the requirements set for a CRM tool and the analytical data model to support the necessary marketing decisions. It was clear that a garage owner wasn’t interested in complex CRM tools so we advised a simple, easy to configure tool that was self-explanatory in its use. Considering the low margins on cars, the proposed CRM tool was the cheapest in the market, yet it had all the needed functionality.
The result? The client chose one of the gorillas in the market (remember the adage “no one ever got fired for buying…”). The garage owner had to pay a six fold amount for the tool compared to our proposal… which he didn’t. One year after we left the project, less than ten garage owners of the 20.000 in Europe had dipped into their pockets to purchase an expensive and complex product which made the client totally miss the mark of this endeavour.
The conclusion is clear: just like analytics, CRM success depends largely on the users’ motivation. If they don’t contribute, the system is useless. And before you can make them use your system, make sure it fits in their overall business infrastructure, their strategic focus and their available budget.
Still, some vendors think that analytics and CRM are perceived in the same way as legally obliged software tools like accounting and inventory management which are integrated in Enterprise Resource Planning software. They aren't.
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