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The human element The ‘next big thing’ in marketing and business development is not a piece of software, but the people behind it.
I recently provided a day-long marketing and business development consultation for a very well-known niche engineering firm. The scope of the session was to evaluate the firm’s recent and current marketing and business development practices, and then to develop an action list for tweaking or eliminating ineffective activities and creating new ones.
Bernie Siben THE FAST LANE
I spent a very intense day with the company’s president, COO, CFO, BD director, and marketing person, with a few other people joining for short discussions of specific areas. We spent a lot of time talking about the current nature and value of client relationships – of turning the firm’s clients into friends – and how that can impact the firm’s bottom line. We talked about the huge value of having the person who owns a relationship bringing others into that relationship so it will continue and thrive when he retires. We talked about current trends in client relationship management software, and how these
packages are, unfortunately, both mislabeled and misleading. To the best of my knowledge, there is no CRM software package on the market that can actually manage your relationship with a client. There is no software that can get in its car and drive across town – or get on a plane and fly across the country – to visit the client. So you can’t rely on a software package to actually manage a client relationship.
Only a person can do that.
And if the person makes proper use of his or her firm’s CRM software, they will write up the
See BERNIE SIBEN, page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER November 6, 2017, ISSUE 1223
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