Gary Lemke, publisher of CRMAdvocate, had a great post today:
Lemke: “To continue my discussion about the lack of user satisfaction with many CRM applications, let me summarize one message I hear from many users of many different solutions. Listen up vendors!
Users are asking their suppliers to make the features they already have work as advertised, work more effectively, work more completely, work more reliably, or simply to make them work. They are asking vendors to stop the “feature war” of adding new features and make existing features better.
I’ve been on the vendor side of the game and I understand that competitive pressures make that difficult. However, I do believe just about every vendor should reconsider more investment in the “make it work better” area and not just in the “new feature” area. Now, that’s true differentiation!”
Great points, all. The “feature-checkbox-arms-race” is the easy path. If the competitor has a feature, it must be something that’s needed, right?
Wrong.
Chasing the competition is the easiest way to get a product (heck, even an entire company) pulled away from the strategy that made the organization unique in the first place.
Innovation should be a combination of discovering/creating solutions to customer problems, bundled with those moments of insight that are the true differentiators for the organization. Chasing the competition? Not so innovative.
Lemke nails it. Do the right things, well…right.