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My trade is the art of looking after customer relationships. CRM

I started out thinking it was software and ended up learning about the psychology of relationships. Social creatures that we are, we always go back to where we feel understood and wanted. A CRM that ignores that is nothing but a pretty, expensive database.

About me

My name is Frederick and what I really enjoy is building things. I started out coding on my own and ended up in CRM, which is where a company keeps everything it knows about its people. Dynamics 365 is the tool I can find my way around with my eyes closed.

The whole cycle is what interests me. Sitting down with each department to understand how they work, designing the solution, building it and then staying on to teach people how to use it. When the platform falls short I step outside it and bring in whatever is missing, always by the shortest route that solves the case.

And there is a step before the software that has me hooked, CRM strategy. Which customers a company actually wants, what it promises them and who answers when something goes wrong. That is where it gets decided whether anything we build afterwards will be worth having.

I teach, therefore I learn

Experience tells me you learn something best by teaching it, so I write up and record whatever I solve. If you came to know more about CRM, my aim is that it reads or watches well and lands first time.

Enter the libraryNothing published here yet

Want to fix or roll out your CRM?

What has to be decided before anyone touches the tool, and what it costs to leave it undecided. With examples, with figures and with each platform as it really is.

Start with the strategyNothing published here yet

My odds and ends drawer

Things I do and find interesting enough to write down. What I am reading, what I tinker with outside work, and the odd story that deserved to be kept.

Open the drawerNothing published here yet

My best mistakes

01Sir, yes sir

Early on I saw myself as a translator between what people asked for and the code. I translated literally and questioned nothing; the less I knew about the business, the better. If it went badly, I washed my hands of it: I did exactly what I was asked.

Underneath there was an assumption I never checked, which is that the person asking was not wrong. They were wrong, and more than once opening my mouth and questioning something got us to a better solution. These days you have to convince me it is the right solution.

I will not build a bridge nobody has bothered to check will stay up.

The other half I see in a lot of people, management included: executing without carrying the decision about what gets done and how. That is when I understood what consulting actually sells, and it is responsibility. The executive delegates it; if it goes wrong, they point at the consultancy, and the consultancy answers that it did what it was asked.

Nobody wants to carry the risk. That is exactly why whoever carries it is the one adding value.

02CRM != Software

I came from being a hundred per cent technical, and to me the CRM was the software: entities, forms, flows and permissions. If someone asked for a CRM, I heard an implementation, and I had a wall up against everything else: strategy and theory were not my thing.

It took me far too long to see what sits behind those three letters. A CRM is the decision about how a company treats its customers: who it wants, what it promises them, and who fronts up when something goes wrong. That already exists, well or badly, before anyone buys a licence.

The software is not the CRM. It is where the CRM shows.

What came out of it were implementations that were spotless on the inside, built on top of a customer relationship nobody had ever decided. It does not help that I have barely met a company or a consultancy that worried about its CRM strategy: what gets sold is licences and implementations.

Automating a mess only makes it faster.

03The brief nobody knows how to write

People do not always know what they want, and almost never what they need. So a well-framed brief rarely turns up. The first time it happened to me I put the technical case and insisted the thing had to be planned with a strategy behind it. But which one? Nobody knew, and there I was waiting for someone to say it.

It took me longer than I like to admit to see the obvious: I could be the one proposing that strategy, with judgement behind it. It is the hardest step I have taken, because of what it demands: soaking up the company, the market, the competition.

You have to think at that level.

That is where the tool stops mattering: Dynamics, HubSpot or Salesforce are the means. Handling them well is worth something; knowing where to take people is worth more.

It is the mistake that grew me the most.