"The more I think about it, the more VRM [Vendor Relationship Management] makes sense. If you think about vendor customer interactions as an arms race then you have to admit that vendors have invested
heavily in their weapons while customers are still playing with
slingshots. Time to recalibrate." – Denis Pombriant
"What makes [VRM] so compelling is what it calls
upon business to do. The truth is that the customer control of the
business ecosystem is just part of what actually has gone on with
consumers in the past three years or so. What may or may not have
occurred to you is that the change has been social, not commercial. Customers are in command of their own destiny because they are humans with new ways to communicate with those of their own kind." – Paul Greenberg
photo credit: aidan jones
Those are two great quotes! Happy Holiday.
I think there is an opportunity for a VRM like service/capability that allows us not only to manage and control our relationship with vendors but also with other humans or entities that group humans; this service/capability would control, track and allow access to our social graph to those humans or entities as we deem appropriate and also gather data out of that interaction that in turns changes/updates the social graph again. I wrote more on that here: http://selvascano.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D7439E6DC600CAE9!1459.entry
Filiberto Selvas
First of all I do sense a revival in the CRM space but if CRM is going to have a second wind it is the word “customer” that needs to be redefined, rather than demonstrate that CRM is still viewed through the eyes of product makers. Everything 2.0 says that it’s is the software that matters, but was there ever a Toyota 2.0, what does a leading thinker in supply chain management going to do, will they copy the acronym makers or take a leaf out of the book “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots”? which you can find on fightthebull.com
Christoper I have always admired you for the work and effort you put in in the CRM space, but does sub-categorization really sell more product or are in the CRM space going to embrace this second wind to not repeat the thinking of the first wind. This second wind is about becoming business partners and if VRM is simply an admission that CRM is a vendor business, why not simply confront this renewed life as business partners via an acronym that still has life.
CRM is complimentary to supply chain management, is the underlying premise of what the software can do really jump on the band wagon of turning social media into social CRM or Web 2.0 into CRM 2.0 – eventually when the bandwagon gets hot, everybody that isn’t really CRM jumps in for the ride.
Personally it is time for technology to stop trying to create identities and start doing what others who are extending supply chains are doing, get involved for long term business sense, rather than short-term identity and have faith enough in what CRM is and then focus on practice as the way forward and leave the new tags behind, and even cloud computing doesn’t have a 2.0. – it just is a different way of thinking.
M.