The first is the obvious one: access to customer data on the road and at meetings without needing to set up a laptop and finding internet access. This means that information transfer is more timely in both directions. The sales person is working with all the best information that the home office has, so that she or he is not behind on the latest developments that might affect a sale. At the same time, the office learns about – and gets to act on – new sales, new contacts, etc., without having to wait for the sales person to return.

A second benefit is that the sales person on the road doesn’t just have access to the data in Sugar, but access to the people at the home office as well. If your CRM is used for support, a case or ticket can be created from the road just as easily as from your desk. This means that the sales person can get the help that they need immediately. A CRM with social tools like user chat can be even better, because it provides broad access to support staff, rather than hoping that the person you call picks up the phone.

One last benefit to mention at this point is that mobile CRM can provide better work flow with less data loss. If sales people can enter contacts, opportunities and sales from the road, rather than entering it just into Outlook and then updating the CRM upon return to the home office, your CRM will be more up to date without demanding more time from your sales team.

The value of social media for CRM is that social media gives you information from the customer, not just information about the customer. It lets you know what your customers are saying, not just what they are buying. And that can be valuable information. By providing a venue for your customers to discuss their experiences with your latest products, you can get valuable feedback about what you are selling and how it is being received. And this feedback comes at you in real time, which can help you to be agile enough to fix the issues your early adopters identify even before the bulk of your clientele hit them.

At the same time, if you take part in the conversation, you can also build a reputation for being responsive to your customers. This includes both graciously taking praise for what you’ve done well and also responding quickly to negative feedback.

So what strategies should you pursue? It depends on your business. For some businesses, an Amazon-style comments section might work well. For others, a question-and-answer forum and FAQ might be the way to go. But deciding the tools is not the end of the game: do you want to listen to your customers, or do you want to talk with them as well? Amazon has decided not to respond directly to comments on its products, leaving all comments to their customers. This might encourage more honest feedback, but on the other hand it might make Amazon seem less responsive. You may prefer to join in the commenting yourself, engaging your customers in direct conversation. The important thing is to figure out what it is you want your social media strategy to achieve, and then to tailor your social media strategy to meet those goals.

A few years back, I did a poll of close to 200 Chief Financial Officers. I found that only a very small percentage believed the business cases that they were presented with. That blew me away.

If you’ve ever done a large, corporate business case you would know the amount of time and effort that goes into them. You would realize how costly they are. It’s possible to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a corporate business case — in time charges alone. If you have to bring in outside help and expertise the numbers can grow even more.

So for senior financial officer of a company to NOT believe these business cases after all that expense — that’s got to be a wake up call. Doesn’t it sound irrational? Maybe. But if you look at the results of studies over the past three decades you will see that business cases are often wrong. They routinely understate costs and over estimate the benefits that are to be received. Don’t believe me? Download the Standish Chaos reports. Or just go through your own corporate business cases and see how many were really accurate.

Why are we spending that much money on them if we don’t believe them?

When I’m asked this question I take a blank piece of 8 X 10 paper and place it over my posterior. I point out that although there’s no content on the page, it does cover my butt. Which is why I think a lot of business cases are produced.

Can your business afford to make investments where the costs are fiction and so are the benefits? Probably not.

So what do you do?

In the 1990′s I headed a practice in a major consulting company that tackled this issue of how we really tell what the costs and benefits of an IT investment will be. What I found out in running that practice – with some of the best minds in the industry, was that a business case did not have to be complex. What it needed was to be realistic, well thought out and down to earth.

We found that you really needed to spend your time focusing on the real issues — what is really going to be different when we do this? What changes will we have to make? Are we capable of making these changes?

When you cut through the crap, the butt covering and really got the point, we found that simple business cases outperformed complex ones. You could spend a lot less and get a lot more.

Don’t believe me? Check out this white paper and produce a business case for CRM on the back of an envelope. It won’t take a lot of time. You don’t have a lot to lose. If you try it and aren’t satisfied, none of your time will be lost. You can use it all to go on to produce a more expensive, time consuming business case that most of your senior execs won’t believe anyway. Or you can change the game and do it on the back of an envelope. You choose to continue not believing your business cases or you can choose Business Case for CRM on the back of an envelope.

There are two questions — and if you answer them successfully you are on the way to CRM success.   Ready for them?

The first one is this –  “so you can do what?”  Get this one right an you are on the path to success. Because that question leads to the most important questions and some of the best and more concrete strategic planning you can do.

We do a lot of CRM “remediation”.   People come to us with underachieving or downright failing efforts.  90% of the time, we we get called in to fix a CRM project in that unhappy state, there is one factor that stands out in the early assessment.  There was no clear strategy.

Strategy has become an ugly word in business.  It’s seen by some as “navel gazing”,  “over-thinking”,  “admiring the problem” or described as “academic”.   It’s the antithesis of what we value in the modern business — action!  I’ve even heard one CEO brag about his “ready, fire, aim” approach.

But really, strategy is very simple.  It involves answering two key questions.  It’s really that simple.

So ask yourself.  “I got a CRM so I can do what?”   Get more leads?  Get more sales?  Increase customer satisfaction?  Maybe it’s more than one of these.  Maybe it’s all.  Maybe there’s another reason.  That’s okay.   How do you know which one is right?  It’s easy.

Let’s take “get more leads” as an example.   If we want to find out if that’s right, we only have to ask the question again — “so I can do what?”.   And the answer is?  Inevitably it’s a little more concrete, like “so I can sell more?”

So that’s great.  We are on our way to success.  We need only introduce one more question.  This is it.  “How?”

In our example, we ask, “How will “getting more leads” help you sell more?”   If you can answer that clearly, you have done the major work in articulating a clear CRM strategy in concrete terms.

Think about it for a minute.  How does getting more leads get you more sales.  Well, first, they have to be the “right leads”.   And what are these “right leads”.   When we went through this exercise for ourselves we came to the conclusion that we had much greater success with some very specific categories of companies, and with some very specific needs.  We got to the point where we could describe not just the companies, but the people who were looking in real and concrete terms.  We didn’t need just any leads.  We needed those particular leads.

Those are the leads we needed to get.  That’s when we started to ask ourselves how do we find these leads?  How would these companies find our website?  And once they got there, why would they stay?  What could we offer them to make them begin the conversation with us?  How could we keep that conversation going?

Try it for yourself.  How will getting more leads help you sell more?  It will drive you to the specifics of who is (and who is not) your customer.  It will help you understand what really needs to be in place to be successful.  Think about it.  If you could answer those questions, you’d really be on your way to success.

Try that same formula on other aspects of your strategy, like “increasing customer satisfaction”.    You’ll be surprised.