What Could NextGen CRM Look Like?

A unique view through the lens of Jobs-to-be-Done

Take a few minutes and write down all of the tools and services you use to develop revenue. I’m curious to see if your list looks like mine. We often make the mistake of defining markets as the products people buy, and as such, we just as often don’t see our non-traditional competitors.

For example, do you consider Zoom to be a competitor to Delta Airlines? Many of the people flying - before the pandemic - were business travelers. Some are consultants who were traveling to client sites to co-locate for the purpose of getting project work and team collaboration done. Others are salespeople, who are trying to close deals or identify follow-on work. So, there are potentially a number of jobs which involve real-time collaboration for information exchange and/or decision-making.

Why does a salesperson fly to another city to close a deal? Because, face-to-face connections have proven to be highly effective in the past. But, we may be living in a new normal, albeit the extreme version. It’s highly likely that remote collaboration will be far more commonplace now that we’ve had to react to suddenly-imposed external constraints. Is Zoom as good as face-to-face? No, but the technology is certainly getting better, and it may be good enough given the circumstances.

My List of Customer Acquisition Tools

• Data: e.g. prospect lists, customer lists, interactions, etc.

• Information: e.g. data enrichment, competitive research, etc.

• CRM Technology: e.g. marketing automation, sales automation, business intelligence

• Communication: face-to-face, mobile phones, video-conferencing, etc.

• Transportation: e.g., automobile, ride-share, airline, etc.

• Lodging: e.g., hotels, Airbnb, etc.

• Meals & Entertainment: e.g. restaurants, sporting events, etc.

• Workspace: e.g., home office, corporate office, co-working & virtual offices, etc.

If I were to itemize everything, this list would get very long, very quickly. The brands behind many of the things I mentioned would not consider themselves as being in the develop profitable revenue market. They view themselves in the communications market (Zoom/Mobile Phones) or the commercial real estate market (WeWorks) or the hospitality market (hotels/restaurants) or the transportation market (Airlines/Uber).

The problem with that thinking, as we are now seeing during this pandemic, is that the people that were benefiting from those services are now being forced to find new ways to get the same job done.

The Job-to-be-Done of a beneficiary is stable over time, but those executing jobs in the consumption chain will eventually be jobless

NextGen CRM

A few years ago there was a purposeful migration from the acronym CRM to the acronym CX. Everyone defines Customer Experience differently, but it appears that the large majority feel that it has to do with more, and better engagement. The reality is that if we could all get our jobs done with little to no engagement, we’d have time to get other jobs done. More important jobs.

As was recently expressed by Aarron Spinley of SAP, experiences are about memories, and have friction associated with them. Services are preferred to be frictionless and/or automated. Another JTBD evangelist calls these immersive vs.non-immersive customer experiences. When it comes to developing profitable revenue, I think we can all agree that we all would value solutions that are faster, cheaper, and more reliable. This is the sort of non-immersive, frictionless service that should underpin the next generation of CRM.

Non-traditional competitors

What would the impact on travel and lodging be if, suddenly, salespeople didn’t need to travel to close deals. Or, what if consulting teams no longer needed to be on-the-ground in order to get work done, maintain relationships or find new ways to grow the relationship? If you have ever been to the airport on a Monday morning, or a Thursday afternoon, you can probably paint a nice picture in your mind. It would be devastating. And we’re witnessing it right now with the pandemic.

Is there certainty that the commercial real estate market is a safe bet going forward - with the same offerings? If a large portion of workers begin working remotely by default - and many companies are making these policies permanent - where would you be traveling to anyway? Remote workers would no longer need to consolidate their homes around a geographic commercial hub and might have access to dispersed shared spaces. So what would the smart people be doing in such industries?

Here’s an interesting and related take on how WeWorks might correct their market-sizing mistake

They’d be trying to understand why people use their services and investing in emerging and/or non-traditional solutions that are certain to have a huge impact on their future. As strange as it sounds, marketing and sales automation companies may not come out on top as part of the next generation of customer relationship management - or more appropriately, NextGen Revenue Development.

Whoever understands the complexities of that next level of abstraction will be the winner. I’ve done my best to simplify the lens on profitable revenue development so we’re not forced to evaluate 8000 brands that don’t get the entire job done - or don’t get it done well. And isn’t it funny, not one of those brands is Delta, United, Zoom, GotoMeeting, or Airbnb.

With the new constraints, which may become the new normal, maybe one of those brands will figure it out, and help us all in our pursuit to develop profitable revenue in a better, faster, more reliable, and unified way. Heck, twenty years ago, who thought an online book seller would be the leader in computing technology today.