Late last week Andrew sent around some amazing designs for the new MG app. (I’m not sure if I can tell you what the official name is yet). In any case, the designs were fantastic and will really push the envelope when it comes to functionality and UI design. Above is a little snapshot of one very tiny part of the UI. I thought it would be fun to have people guess what the individual icons might be. In case, you’re not sure what we are trying to do, read Scott A’s post below.

Click on the image above to see it in a bigger size.

We’ve come to two conclusions:

1. We need to build a system that is “smart” to help you improve your relationships, not just “track” them
2. The term CRM is too narrow in scope and delivery and carries too much negative baggage

And so, we have been working for the last few weeks on a better term to describe what we’re building and have come up with:  Network Relationship Management (NRM)

NRM is a new business discipline that describes the processes used to measure the influence and contact points of a person’s or company’s professional network.

To put it in context:

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) focuses on the processes and tools that a company uses to manage customer information.
• NRM recognizes the influence of a company’s professional network and helps leverage strong connections, improve weaker connections, and actively manage the overall health of the network.

A healthy network delivers increased customer loyalty, higher quality leads, and a better reputation — a major success factor, given today’s popularity of “word of mouth” marketing.

As we look at the popularity of online social and professional networking tools, they have been linking people together -  but soon the internet will connect us all!  It’s actually pretty obvious - it’s not who you know that matters, it’s the quality and relevance of the connections that matter.

Here’s an example.

I have exchanged emails (twice) with Seth Godin, author of several good pop-marketing books.  He responded quickly both times, and is listed in my “network” and my apple contacts.  But I don’t “know” Seth Godin, anymore than I “know” Wayne Gretzky (although I have an autographed hockey card).  The same goes for the 10 people I met once at a conference that are now in my LinkedIn network.

Network Relationship Management allows you to recognize the quality of relationships, and their relevance to business.

Which is why we need a powerful Network Relationship Management tool.

We are witnessing an increasingly blurry line between private and professional networks (doesn’t everyone check facebook profiles before hiring now?) and smart companies are beginning to recognize the much more complex business relationships between contract employees, consultants, suppliers, customers, media, and company “friends”.  If companies can strengthen their relationships by analyzing their total network, they can increase sales with existing customers, improve relationships with new leads, and improve overall word of mouth marketing - which all contribute to the bottom line.

In this new “networked world”, CRM starts to look like a dinosaur.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about how our products are going to fundamentally change how companies - and people - will be able to manage their networks.

Stay tuned.

This week MG started eating their own dogfood even more than before. If you take a look at the screen cap above you’ll see an email form and below that a blog sign up screen for the MG beta. This is important because the beta sign up form is now being generated from the MG application and the people who sign up are being directly entered into the app as email responders.

This little bit of functionality is great for email marketers or anyone who solicits participation via the web. You can essentially create forms then have the email addresses that they collect be put straight into the MG “CRM”. In addition to this, you’ll also be able to send out email marketing campaigns and have response entered in the system as a respondent to a specific email campaign. Its all powerful stuff especially when coupled with the rest of the MG feature set.

Scott A. hasn’t blogged about this yet so I wont let the cat out of the bag (too much).  Jeff Meldrum, Scott A. and I met a the Chelsea Pub a couple of nights ago to start trying to figure out a naming convention for the MG Apps.  Naming something is interesting because to name it correctly you have to try to accurately define what this thing does and determine where it fits within the context of other similar things.

I think we were all surprised and please at where this exercise led us.  The first thing that became apparent to me was the we’re not trying to name a CRM system.  Just looking at how the feature set of this application has evolved, CRM doesn’t really apply anymore, we have pushed beyond that moniker.  This was a lightbulb moment.

Once we figured out that this project no longer fits within CRM paradigm and extends beyond it, naming became a lot more interesting.  I’m sure we’ll do a post soon where we’ll bounce a few names of our readers but in the mean time, I can’t wait for Scott A. to do his post about the evolution of the MG apps and how it relates to the new paradigm of whats to come.  Stay tuned…

Mike Marker got busted.

I was talking to him on his cellphone at lunch yesterday and we were having an animated conversation about the project when he cut me off mid-sentence.  Turns out he was pulled over by the Kentucky police.  Here is the transcript of what I heard:

“Just a second, Scott”.

Some background noise.

Kentucky Policeman: “Hello sir, can I see your id?”.

[shuffle, shuffle]

Kentucky Policeman: “Well Mike, do you realize that you drove through a stop sign back there?”

Cool hand Mike: “Umm, No I didn’t.”

Kentucky Policeman: “I’ll be right back, I’m going to write you a citation.”

Mike (back on phone): “hello… stop laughing Scott… it’s not funny … seriously….”

Click.

Let’s admit it. CRM can be a bit dry. Part of what’s cool about how MG is approaching CRM is that they are incorporating tools that more closely emulate a personal relationship. That’s what the “R” stands for. Now that things are in full production, its interesting to see a lot of these ideas come alive in the product. Since we are all fans of Twitter, Scott and the team thought it would be a great idea to include something similar in the product. If you check out the screen-cap, you’ll see what I mean. On the right side is a place where you essentially can post tweets or really short messages. If you look above the text box you’ll see that messages are being filtered for “Mike Sullivan” which show messages to Mike.

The ability to send short messages around in a team environment is a great idea because it emulates real life. That is how most office conversations take place so why not build a real world purpose into your CRM.

More on this later, but there are some really amazing features in the pipe that will really change the way relationships are valued. This is just one of them.

PS: The screenshot has no look and feel yet. I will Andrew wow you with that once its ready.

I recently watched a great keynote speech given by Malcom Gladwell at the New Yorker annual conference where he talked about “mismatches” in hiring people.

The core concept is that organizations determine specific skills that are important for a role, isolate those skills, and then evaluate candidates based on their ability for each skill.  It all sounds so logical and obvious.

The problem, according to Gladwell, is that it doesn’t work.

He uses several examples spanning professional sports, lawyers, and teachers, and in every instance demonstrates that the candidates’ ability in isolated skills - vertical jump in basketball, mental acuity in football, college entrance scores for lawyers, level of scholastic achievement in teaching - are all poor predictors for determining if people will perform well in their job!

There is a fundamental problem with converting “people” into stats and using these stats to make decisions.  It is logical but not always worthwhile.

Now think about how most companies use CRM analytics to determine “customer profiles” and predict future sales.  Current CRM dashboards have detailed pie charts and graphs that isolate key information.  But is it a reliable source for decision-making?  Is it RIGHT?

I don’t think so (gasp!).

I think that CRM dashboards are misleading and setup sales people for failure, or worse, encourage them to “cheat the system”, making most CRM analytics nearly worthless.

There’s a need for CRM dashboards to provide real value to salespeople by helping them process a lot of data that helps them to manage the human side of business.

I think we have the solution.

Thanks to Jay Godse for sending me this video clip.
Graph from Graph Jam.

We need a name. Four names really. Okay, maybe five.

So far we’re stumped.

Every decision, every action has been the product of collaboration and passionate discussion, yet this elephant in the room seems to receive sporadic attention, or inattention. It’s the blank screen problem on a billboard scale.

Its seems that this one area of the project has been relegated to our quiet contemplative moments – almost as an afterthought.

This needs to change.

We need a rambunctious, semi-professional stream of consciousness type discussion that can put 50 to 100 names on the table in short order.

No filter. No judgments. Just ideas.

There was no canoeing, no bow-hunting, and no livestock impersonation. Rather, this was a thorough functional review and creative design discussion of our soon-to-be-launched suite of Customer Relationship apps.

Meetings (retreats) like these are important because they help remind you of the things that you take for granted. Things like:

• Our applications are already filled with knock-out functions and features.
• The people you are working with are smart, creative, passionate, and fun to be around (even before the 5th beer).
• We don’t do it enough.

It also reminds me that we have a lot of work to do to ensure that our organizational structure and processes are well thought-out and everyone is well-prepared to support the launch. In the immediate future, we’ll need to finalize our resource plan and start assembling the missing pieces. Wish I could do it from a cabin in the woods…

Just got back from the Mercury Grove retreat. As I mentioned in my previous post, we were getting together to go over the final path to launch. Most of this had to do with getting Andrew and Creighton together in the same room to work on the UI design and functionality. Both of these guys are smart. Let me say it again, BOTH of these guys are really smart. I have worked with talented designers and developers in my short career and none of them can match how good these guys are. They’re professional, experienced and fast workers. We went through about fifteen screens with them over the two day retreat and each one seemed better than the last. This is especially interesting for me because I’d like to start showcasing some of the elegant features that they have incorporated into the the app.

On the social media side, I presented the plan for entitled “From now to launch and beyond” which was pretty well received. Up to this point, I had been a little disappointed with how some of the MG crew and partners couldn’t bring themselves to blogging. The retreat made me realize that you just cant force people do things they just don’t want to do. The result is a bit of shift in how things will roll out from now on. Although, I want everyone to participate, they don’t have to. We have to use peoples passion where it is most effective. For me, it would be in the SM plan and the blog and launch. For others it can be whatever they are working on. Although it would be great to see that passion put into words, its not the end of the world as long as the product is great.

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