Analytic DiLEMMa — Marketing Software Selection
Why Following The Leader On CRM Systems Is Often A Poor Decision
If you’ve never played Atari’s Lemmings, you’ve missed out. The game is nearly three decades old, but it was a classic. It was also a little dark. Let’s be honest.
Lemmings was highly rated, several times rebooted, and quite challenging. The player was asked to influence a line of marching lemmings on their path across a challenging, puzzling, and often lethal playing space. They would march straight ahead until they hit something (turning them around), fell to their death, or successfully exited the field. Individual lemmings could be assigned roles from blocker, to builder, to time bomb (told you it was dark). Victory was as simple as getting the minimum number of lemmings successfully to the end — sometimes as few as one (dark).
While limited pixels and silly cartoonish appearances allowed the game to remain less than morbid, it taught some interesting lessons ranging from the dangers of being a mindless follower, to the nature of teamwork, to the impact of limited resources (handing out jobs was a limited function).They are lessons that I have seen often ignored in the area of software selection for departments like marketing and sales. The business world is filled with CRM lemmings.
“We bought it because everyone else did…” insert the name of your local marketing VP here
The Argument & Rebuttal
- Sales and marketing is an art. I get it.
- Lot’s of people have done this before. True.
- If it worked for them, it should work for us. Also true, likely.
- Question? Did it work for them? Uh, yeah… sure… it must have.
- Can you define the criteria for success? Look this isn’t rocket science. No, it is more analogous to a game called lemmings… I’ve played that game. It doesn’t end well for you.
It never does. But a lot like Lemmings, there is a restart button. There is also a paused, resume, and quit. Throw in the timer and the score that won’t budge past 0000000 until your first success and the analogy grows deeper. Poor CRM software selection may be the single biggest contributor to bad marketing since… well, actually there is a lot of bad marketing and reasons for it.
Enter The New VP
- So, any thoughts on migrating to a new CRM system? No, we need to stick with what we have.
- But I think there is opportunity to collect better data and align the feedback… Look we have a ton of great data and limited budget. True but we need more than just data if…
- Besides, we can’t take a risk on these new start-up solutions. It is a risk. But I think it is warranted. It would allow us to…
- Look that decision was made long before I got here and we will still be using that software long after I leave. Likely true. Nice to meet you. I wouldn’t worry about hanging up the pictures.
It is a sad fact that many analysts last less then 18 months in any new role. It is a staggering fact that they will likely work with three VPs in that time (at least those dedicated to sales and direct marketing). VP’s come and go. They often arrive sounding like analysts, talking about data and modeling. Unfortunately, they then march headlong off the nearest cliff, right behind the last one.
Learn Some Lessons From Lemmings
- Sometimes you need to stop the endless march while the plan is made and the path is cleared.
- Tools are limited. That makes it all the more important to chose the right ones.
- Success sometimes requires painful sacrifice to get things to the next level.
- The landscape (market) is challenging. It will take innovative thinking, teamwork, and significant risk to really succeed. So trust the specialists and stop being afraid.
- But most of all, you follow the leader at great peril. Especially, if you have no way of knowing if they were actually successful.
A Final Story
During the dotcom/dotbomb, I worked for a supply chain software company with a huge share of the nations top retailers. During my first few weeks on the job, I uncovered that many of the original forecasting algorithms had been miss coded. It was as simple as + signs where (-) should be — but if you consider what this does to an inventory forecast, it is a staggering error.
No one cared. Not the company. Not the clients. As I later learned, they hadn’t purchased the software for its forecasts or data. They had purchased it because the automation allowed them to “check the box” on hundreds or even thousands of SKU forecasts every month. But our sales team rolled on, there was little need to prove (or even question) success when you could rely on — everyone else is doing it.
Play Lemmings, it is a lot of fun. But don’t be one.
If you do find yourself in a line full of blue shirts and crazy green hair — go for the umbrella (parachute) and pray you don’t get the time bomb.
Thanks for reading!
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