April 30 2008 Conference Call

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, April 30, 2008

IRC

#vrm at chat.freenode.net

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Category:conference call

Attendees

• Joe Andrieu
• Dean Landsman
• Doc Searls
• Iain Henderson
• Christopher Carfi
• Charles Andres
• Deb Schultz
• Brett McDowell
• Renee Lloyd
• Adriana Lukas

Notes

Enterprise Sales

What do we need to be saying to Enterprises to get them on board?

Chris kicks off: If we are going out there, who are we approaching? And what problem are we going to solve. Probably one of three:

Business side or IT. Business side owns more budget... so, what are we bringing and what problems are we solving for marketing and sales.

Deb: Whether they call it CRM or not, how they reach out to the customer.

Chris: So, we start with the business/sales conversation at the VP level and that gets handed off to IT for implementation. That's the historical approach, which would mean conversations about integration with Oracle, SAP, etc.

Deb: It might be interesting, given my work at P&G, to have a call to approach these data entry points such as Enterprise 2.0 and the database marketing folks. Talk to them and get some feedback.

Doc: Is what big companies are looking for technical at all? Such as we need to tweak our Seibel, etc., or is it conceptual at this point? And what is the difference?

Iain: I think you need to separate it into two types of businesses. Online companies that get it and offline companies that aren't quite there yet. It's about finding that individual that gets it.

Doc: is it just a matter of getting a conversation going?

Deb: Yes. Where we are with VRM... I've been with P&G for a long time. It's just slow. What is the right pain point VRM solves? Is it through marketing? Is it through IT? Is it from who owns the customer contact or who owns the back-end? So let's talk to some folks and take it from there.

Doc: Perhaps we can arrange some calendar/travel coordination so that Doc can get some facetime with one of these guys. How about at iCitizen thing in Ohio.

Deb: Sure. They'll be there.

Brett: Another approach is through infrastructure vendors. So, putting VRM as another application of existing technologies. We are generating external buzz, when companies start investigating this, they are going to start asking their software and integration vendors. So, showing alignment between VRM and traditional technologies is a way to breach the enterprise.

Doc: As we fill out our portfolio of tools that live on the customer side, and those that live on the vendor side, and the new pieces of the puzzle that live on both sides, it would be nice to diagram some of that out. It gets a little complicated. What do we add to CRM, what do we add to a webservice framework? What do we add to a mailing list system? I've talked to folks at SAP about this sort of thing. There are going to be large providers of software and software consulting that are going to be recommending pieces that we provide or pieces that we put together.

Brett: At IIW, that's what Paul Madsen was diagramming.

Doc: Yes, that was one just one specific use case: Change of Address. There's also an opportunity to look at where the conversations are happening. A large part of what happened with IBM aligning with Open Source was a matter of putting a lot of stuff on the table. Going into customers and telling them we're going to help you find and manage all your SAML service. The most important relationships are actually personal. So what can we do that helps existing providers helps their customers. Not just in terms of a single use case, but to look at how the Enterprise side is organized now and how we change things.

Deb: I'm seeing a lot of realignment around Web Services.

Brett: I think we should figure out what it means to be compliant. Once we figure that out, we can talk with folks about it.

Next Meeting

May 14 2008 Conference Call?