If the company you work at has been in business for longer than a couple of years it is likely that they have an complex mosaic of tools and processes to support their customer marketing, sales, service and product management capabilities.

At my latest company, some of our own tools are over a decade old. They are expensive to change, costly to integrate and never seem to be a joy use. Thankfully, everyone realises and the only way is up from here.

To be constructive in my input, I went on a hunt to see how highly successful and recently established firms are solving the same problems.

Their lack of politics over defending past choices always means they provide the clearest indication of what is currently considered state of the art.

Choosing an application is a social problem

The good news is that the pace of new ideas for how to improve the above capabilities has come along leaps and bounds.

The bad news is that there is a complex web of dependencies that mean you shouldn’t make any decision about any particular tool in isolation.

How nicely applications play together depends on the popular player in industry that they choose as their friend. One wrong choice and many great options can be closed off for good.

Interestingly, you will be hard pressed to find a successful new firm (even one with significant growth and scale) choosing the inbuilt CRM options of packaged vendors like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft to engage with their customers.

Instead the these companies clearly mark out their differentiating capabilities and ensure that they acquire the best technology to support their strategy. In fact, they only integrate them into their more stable and slow changing platforms where absolutely necessary.

The ingredients for a successful recipe

The following eight ingredients for creating your own tasty recipe of software for supporting your product business are intended to summarise what I discovered. Feel free to add your own ingredients to suit your own tastes.

Ingredient 1: Unify your team communications

As you setup all these tools your team is going to quickly find duplicate notification, chat and so-called social communities. Email becomes the lowest common denominator — but that’s a hack. Consider supporting the setup process with a tool like Flowdock.

Their concept of inbox and threaded conversation is specific to getting a job done is much more useful than the chaos of most “chat” tools.

In addition, they tightly integrate with all the other tools I’m going to mention — meaning everyone involved with getting happy customers can have conversations in one place.

Ingredient 2: Get yourself a customer management system

There really is a toss-up here. Almost every sales person knows (and often dislikes) Salesforce.com and everyone else integrates with them. If money is no object — buy it. Salesforce.com is still the default decision if you expect to be a decent sized organisation and have a lot of customers.

If money is tight, then options such as Sugarcrm or using the basic customer management in your finance package such as SAP or NetSuite are an okay alternative. Just don’t use them as CRM suites!

Ingredient 3: Ensure you can service your customers

In the future, I might recommend the Salesfoce.com Service Cloud, for all but the largest company, I’m going to play favourites and say you should opt for ZenDesk instead. You might think I am playing favourites with Australian firms, but like our presence in Hollywood — it just seems we product talent in these areas.

ZenDesk is a very social application. It works with a lot of the more agile ecosystem that digital businesses use and has a low TCO.

I also love their examples of branded customer communities. You will also find that they are integrate with a fair set of the usual contact centre tools that you require.

One particularly reason I selected ZenDesk from a host of sassy startups is that like Salesforce.com they integrate with a new breed of applications focused on being successful with your customers.

Ingredient 4: Have a laser sharp focus on your customers

Both product management, sales and marketing care about how successful their customers are in using their software/service and turning those people into proud advocates eyes/ears for the raw data that guides your product.

To do this requires joining the dots. You can manually do your analytics and draft reports — but some innovative firms are getting software solutions that bring together a bunch of historically separate features for this purpose.

Totango is a good example of this class of application. Disclosure — I haven’t used them yet — but they look fantastic. There are lower cost alternatives such as LeanEngage that are in development and look like exciting possibilities as well.

Ingredient 5: Ensure you deliver new features and bug fixes

I struggled with this one for a bit. There are a lot of rather poor applications vying for attention. I ended up with two and the choice would depend on your context.

Sprint.ly is the application I would dearly love to use, but haven’t yet in a work situation.

They have done the hard work to reimagine how people can effectively get a job done.

Unfortunately they lack integrations with some of my other preferred tools — and only integrate with UserVoice as a customer service tool — one which I have a hard time recommending.

A tool that I’m using at the moment and which is the cause of spirited debate amongst dev teams is the less than universally loved Atlassian Jira OnDemand.

It is still an evolving integration of two separate products and requires significant effort to get value out of it’s flexibility and power.

The user experience can be confusing and inefficient for many tasks. All this however is outweighed by the fact that literally every other applications integrates with them.

I just hope the Atlassian team take inspiration from competition like Sprint.ly and lift their game in the user experience department.

Ingredient 6: If your current product doesn’t work, don’t add new features

Unfortunately our delivery team’s are not always delivering bug free code. If you leave it up to your customers to reports errors you are missing our on an opportunity to reduce costs and do a better job.

Don’t leave your Dev guys to wade through logs and try and make sense of reported issues captured by customer service.

There are a number of good candidates in this area. I chose Airbrake.io because unlike Raygun.io, they have avoided the use of an annoying hamburger menu on their website.

Ingredient 7: Identity is the foundation — it really should be first

I left this to later, but I see too many firms spending way too much money on getting identity right — both for their customers and their staff. You probably have Microsoft ActiveDirectory. Resist the temptation to use ADFS. It’s terrible — only the most religious of the Microsoft world recommend it.

Instead partner with a more innovation identity specialist such as Otka, Ping or Onelogin — you highly unlikely to regret it the out-of-the box integration and support for all the other apps I’m going to talk about.

I recommend Okta because they address some of the challenges around identity profiles and data, not just the single sign-on challenge.

Get this right and your staff and customers will thank you — as will the CFO.

Ingredient 8: Choose your email, storage and document provider carefully

Google is not perfect. Gmail currently is long overdue for an update. Google Drive and it’s related apps have come a long way and have a long way to go.

However, for most businesses, these issues are far outweighed by the low cost of ownership and the huge integration ecosystem they have built.

Microsoft Office 365 (or their on-premises version) does have integrations, but they are rare, less well supported and generally involve becoming best friends with a consultant.

The recent announcement of closer ties between Salesforce.com and Microsoft may shift this equation — but it’s not there yet. For now, I would only recommend Microsoft Office 365 if your teams live in Microsoft Office and you have a lot of legacy integrations you still need to support.

I plan a separate post on all the ways that OneDrive, SharePoint and Yammer fall short as products for managing communication and content.

What next

What have I left out? If you have suggestions for what needs to be covered buzz me at #russkalz on Twitter. Also let me know if you would like to see a visualisation of how all these fit together?