…Innovation creates a hockey stick — as in market growth.
If the rest of the “sCRM” world doesn’t react quickly, they could miss out.
I just read Martijn Linssen’s post about his thoughts on Nimble and he was dead on. Everyone is talking about being where your customer is, but until now no one has designed a solution that worked that way. Duh! That’s really all I can say. Not only that, you need to be where your customer is while you are still where you want to be…in Nimble.
I was talking with a customer this week who was comparing and contrasting Oracle OnDemand versus a product we were working with and he was demonstrating a lot of excitement about the ability to customize fields and forms at the end user level. Not only that, the ability to build business rules within and around that functionality. All with no programming.
Generally, I look at those as inflexible in the long run, but I do hear this consistently; so why are we pushing something else? I’m pretty sure I recall @Jon_Ferrara talking about similar functionality with Nimble, or a similar concept. Beyond the relationship piece – which is the game changer in my opinion – I hope and believe we’re going to see a toolset that enables the customer to craft solutions to their problems without the heavy burden of programmers and IT. Of course, this would have to happen in a way that also doesn’t create a nightmare of cubicle generated process that is both meaningless and burdensome – but that’s another post and one that I’ve talked about before.
The count down is on for the Nimble beta. Will it be the catalyst to move sCRM from hype and conjecture to reality? The kind of reality it should be, and not what a gazilion and one social media entrepreneurs what it to be? I hope so because I need to see concepts in action and the only action I’ve seen is twitter streams, webinars and wrongly labeled technology (not all bad by the way!).
Countdown……3…2…1…receive email? 
Mike Boysen
Mike Boysen, founder of Effective CRM, is a strategic consultant in the CRM arena. He brings practical insight to businesses to help them understand customer-centered business strategy: outside-in process design, frameworks for understanding customer needs, understanding the jobs of your customers, market growth through innovation, behavior driven relationship marketing programs and designing systems to support these initiatives. The technology part is simple, so why are you spending so much money on that? Can't answer that? This is not the CRM your friends have been talking about...