April 30 2008 Conference Call
Conference Call Notes
Drafted by Joe Andrieu, April 30, 2008
IRC
#vrm at chat.freenode.net
Other Calls
Attendees
- Joe Andrieu
- Dean Landsman
- Doc Searls
- Iain Henderson
- Christopher Carfi
- Charles Andres
- Deb Schultz
Previous Action Items
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.