Front Office Box

and, if you’re like us, probably isn’t right for you either.

This may seem a strange post by somebody who most people think is in the CRM business, and it would be, but we aren’t in the CRM business – more on that later.

1. Traditional CRM apps are all built on the same model, originally developed by Siebel and subsequently salesforce.com.
   • The primary objective of these systems is gaining control over what the sales guys do – market segmentation, lead follow up, forecasts, call rates etc.  The bosses want CRM because it’s the only way for accountants to control sales people.
   • We don’t have typical sales guys, and don’t care about activity rates.  The control and reporting dimension is irrelevant to us.
2. The same CRM apps only do stuff for sales guys.
   • Departmental software obviously makes sense for IT Strategies in big businesses – Sales, Service, Order Processing,  Inventory, Finance are all functional silos and need systems to support them.
   • It makes no sense at all in smaller businesses where everybody does a bit of everything.  We don’t distinguish between sales, service, projects, customers or vendors.  These are all included in the bigger picture of what we plan to do, and how we plan to do it.  To us a sales call is no different to a call with a marketing partner – they both need to get assigned and delivered.
3. Big, corporate apps are full of features.
   • Much like Microsoft Office, these features get built in because the marketing guys want to differentiate from the competition.
   • They might be useful to business process designers who get paid to make life complicated?
   • But they’re of no value to us.  We don’t have time to figure out whether to, or how to, use them.  We’re too busy getting on with the day job.  We just want to be able to use the tools in ways that make sense, to us.

Given the problems of a) understanding b) adapting and c) using traditional CRM apps we would do the same as most businesses our size.

We’d keep our plans in spreadsheets, our contacts in our email system, our documents in folders, and our notes on paper.

We’d also work really hard at keeping every member of the team up to date with email and stikie notes.

And we’d probably run extra hard to catch up with all the stuff that fell between the stools.

As it is we don’t, because we’ve got Front Office Box.

That’s why we built it.

April 20th, 2009 - Posted in CRM  |  Add a Comment