It’s not a typo. For the last nine years, I’ve been engulfed in permission-based marketing and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s more about nurturing a relationship — not necessarily trying to manage one.
From a technology standpoint, Customer Relationship Management is still fitting. However, I believe it’s no longer appropriate for describing the interaction between a company and its current and future owners. Therefore, I’m rephrasing it CRN — or Customer Relationship Nurturing.
CRN is the process of continually creating personalized opportunities for customers to explore and interact with your brand, which will effectively serve to fulfill their needs and actively increase one’s customer base.
Now stop exerting control over your customers and start cultivating these individuals into the most loyal and evangelical consumers possible.
Tags: business, CRM, CRN, customers, managing_customers, Marketing, Scott_Petinga
Nice thought but you might want to rethink those initials.
http://www.crn.com/crn/
Scott,
Great thoughts! Tell us how you think we can best nurture those relationships.
Good analogy. After all, customers don’t report to us. They’re a guest in our house.
The same conceptual thinking applies to Partner RM – for channel sales. We should treat them as a team member with whom we develop or nurture an ongoing relationship.
So naturally the word “Management” should refer just to data and its visibility. Nurturing or Development should aptly describe the human interactional aspect.
wow. insightful. Seth Godin and other marketers have been saying basically the same thing for like 10 years. And before that, The one-to-one future – peppers.
Great point Alex but we also can’t forget that as permission-based marketing becomes more mainstream it is our responsibility as innovators and early adopters to educate the majority, continue to redefine the philosophies and methodologies, and elevate technologies that we believe can improve the interactions between companies and consumers.
This is exactly the conclusion that I have come to, especially in the world of complex B2B sales.
As Microsoft CRM consultant, I obviously spend much of my time on the technology aspect of implementing the software to support business processes.
However, I also work to educate my clients on how to use the technology to nurture those relationships.
Typically, this means segmenting leads/accounts/contacts into multiple marketing lists, using the campaign management funtionality to automate various marketing communications such as e-mail newsletters, and providing ways to track responses from prospects and customers.
Sadly, not all organizations are open to this philosophy. Some just want to implement the software and get the project done.
My hope is that more and more organizations will start focusing on nurturing relationships to drive revenue and profit growth, rather than implementing technology.
Thanks again for writing about this topic.
Michael Cross
http://navintmicrosoftcrm.blogspot.com