It’s not the done thing old chap…

I’ve been doing the CRM equivalent of wearing neon pink in a Wimbledon final, coughing when your opponent is about to take a vital putt on the 18th, or bowling underarm in a test match, in other words going against protocol. More specifically we’ve been asking for reference sites before we’ve even started a formal vendor selection process. It’s not perhaps something I would normally do, but one of the key sponsors for a forthcoming project is a great fan of learning from others, so we’ve been asking prospective vendors, if they’d like to showcase their talents and take us to one of their sites.

The response has been interesting – rather like a new mother who has been informed their baby is rather ugly – in effect ‘it’s not the done thing old chap’. Ask to see some software and you are likely to get trampled underfoot. Ask to see some real-life examples of the application of technology to beneficial effect and the room goes rather quiet.

Traditionally site or reference sites are generally an afterthought in the due diligence part of vendor selection, a rubber stamp exercise long after the actual decision has been made. They shouldn’t be, but that seems to be the accepted norm.

Which raises the question why are vendors so squeamish on site visits. There are, I suspect a number of good reasons. Firstly it tends to involve calling in favours from customers to host these events, and secondly you can never be quite sure what that customer might actually say on the day.

That said, these are manageable issues, I’m a poacher turned gamekeeper don’t forget, and in my previous lives I went to great lengths to ensure we had both good showcase sites and that customers were prepared to host visits. If we were negotiating terms on a project we would make sure that if we had to give something away we got something in return, often a commitment to host a certain number of visits per year.

I suspect the real reason is – and yes I’m going to hark back to a familiar theme – that a lot of vendors don’t actually have that many good, slick, revenue enhancing sites to showcase, for the reason I frequently go back to in this blog, that very few CRM implementations manage to bridge the gap between technology and a revenue enhancing system.

So, if you are a UK vendor and have sites that showcase you as a stand out implementer of high return CRM technology, then feel free to contact me, I have a large membership organization who might be interested in talking to you.

ShareThis