Neale 00:09
Welcome to the podcast. We have with us another Bright Spark. Greg Hancock, welcome to the show.
Greg 00:14
Thank you very much.
Neale 00:15
“The show”, it gives it pretensions above itself. Maybe. Welcome to the podcast. You’re going to be our CRM expert today. We want to talk about all things CRM. You’ve had a long career with IBM, worked with Microsoft. You’ve consulted in lots of CRM implementations. A lot of CRM implementations don’t go as planned. I think I read somewhere sometimes up to 70% don’t fit all business needs? I just wanted to start off by saying, why is that? What are the big failure points when it comes to CRM implementation?
Greg 00:47
Really interesting question. That’s exactly what I’ve built my entire business around, so perfect question. Yeah, I think that’s a Gartner or a Forester stat that you’ve pulled out there. Yeah, there’s a lot of things, and what we talk about is releasing the value out of the system, and really it’s whether clients and customers can really get that value at the end thing. And there’s one way of looking at it, that the users aren’t happy and, oh, we hate the system and all the rest of it.
Neale 01:21
Yeah, a lot of founders syndrome, they say we’re used to working in Excel. We like this program, it is always how we’ve wanted to do it.
Greg 01:28
Because you just you just take it however you want to work it right but but once you start adding that control so the question is does the business get value out of it not just do the users get and the happiness out of using it because quite often they’re very happy using excel so that it’s it’s identifying the value and and then seeing it released but the the there’s a lot of reasons why projects fail and whether the question is have they failed so have they released value or not and all the users happy is to
Neale 01:59
Two separate things… do you think there’s a, an argument there then you say it doesn’t hit the value that when you start a CRM implantation you should have some KPIs
Greg 02:09
Absolutely, yeah exactly. So when I was at Microsoft the big thing was business value assessments, you identify where the values can be and you drive that through and that’s what we sold off of basically, we’re gonna provide this value to you. The biggest problem in terms of releasing that value is the broken supply chain all the way along. So Microsoft as a vendor, so a fantastic product, it is a fantastic paper mortgage for 20 years so I’m very happy about it.
Neale 02:35
You very have a soft spot in your heart for that CRM. Is it Salesforce or?
Greg 02:41
So Microsoft Dynamics is a slightly broken food chain or supply chain, so Microsoft does sell a fantastic product if you’re engaged with them in that sales cycle when you buy that SaaS product and that then gets handed over to a delivery partner and they may not be hand in hand in that approach, there may not be a hand over, there may be a fantastic demo that shows a bunch of functionality that the partners never even seen themselves and then they’ve got to go through the discovery approach again, what do you need it for, and then they do the or plumber routine of, well that’s going to be expensive, well that doesn’t quite work or Microsoft have told you that and it’s not released yet and all that kind of stuff and neither are wrong, it’s just a slightly broken process and then they go into an implementation cycle which is a bell curve of nightmare right in the middle, always guarantee that you’re all going to fall out, no one’s happy, but everyone goes in there thinking it’s going to be roses and dancing through the forest hand in hand when reality is there’s going to be sticky points and decisions and extra cost and all that kind of stuff and we’re talking large implementations, small kind of out of the box stuff, and it’s how you get through that and then how you focus to a go live and the other part of that is equally where the line between partner, delivery partner and client responsibilities, so for example, I’ve written contracts myself where you’ve put the client is responsible for their data and your data migration, the client’s like yeah, yeah, yeah, and I just signed the contract away with that, not a clue, and then they come to do an export from their legacy system, the company that owns that legacy system, well we’re not helping you.
Neale 04:33
Because you’re leaving us, why would we put time and effort and budget into it? Yeah, of course.
Greg 04:37
They get a huge encrypted Load of data put it in the cloud can’t move it anyway can’t do anything can’t clean it Don’t know how to get it into the serum system But the partners going well we can we can help you that but that’s gonna cost and that was your responsibility Oh, by the way, we’re now late. You know, there’s all these needs a budget in more time
Neale 04:54
time and effort and…
Greg 04:55
Yeah, exactly and these little sticking points that you may not see coming down track So I’ve developed a program to kind of do an assessment and then and then alignment of that to kind of preempt all this stuff Which is what I’m working
Neale 05:10
right now. Have you ever been guilty? You’re probably gonna say no. So one of the organisations I worked with was a large SAS NFP CRM system. I’m actually still really good friends with a guy who developed it for like 25 years now. His biggest bonus contention was always the sales team would go out, sell the product and at the time they’d be like, oh is it cloud-based? And they’d be like, yes. When actually it wasn’t, or you know, oh can it take donations? Yes. Much experience of sales through that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Greg 05:45
Huge. Yeah, no, I mean, it’s the present coming excluded, obviously, but the things I talk about, just one of the issues, but the handover between sales and delivery in a delivery partner is absolutely key and always slightly, slightly challenging. I would say flawed, but it’s challenging. So you send in the best guy, the pre-sales consultant who sells the product and the dream, and then they slowly or quickly disappear into the background and you bring in the delivery guys who weren’t present for that sale and they’re going, what do you mean we’re integrating with the air conditioning system? When does that fit in? That really came up. So yes, that happens a lot, but not all partners are guilty of that. Some have got it, got it, I’ve worked with ones that got it very, very locked down and that if you’ve got a good pre-sales team and they do that gradual handover and you call them the early engagement team, they then get through that, but it is a key thing.
Neale 06:47
Yeah, I think again, keep your KPIs and expectations. You have a KPI for what the system has to deliver, and that has to be tracked along the way, then it should be a fairly smooth ride. We were talking about people of Excel and trying to get, you know, founder syndrome out of the way and people don’t want to move. How can you, what can businesses do to encourage early adaptation? What do people need to do on both sides to bring the people along?
Greg 07:15
You’ve got to get them on the bus early, really. So currently, I’m doing exactly that. We’re two months before the discovery period, so we haven’t kicked the project off right now. We’re setting up demo environments, and we’ve got a communication and change plan that goes along with that to make sure those key stakeholders are fully engaged from day one. Identifying the product owner is absolutely key, so you’ve got that decision maker, but also that person that takes decisions to the key steering group, et cetera. So you’ve got to get that team structure right. You’ve got to get the key individuals right, and you need to get them on the bus early and get them that visibility. The worst thing is you’ve got somebody at the back going, well, I’ve not even seen the system. They’ve been talking about it for months, and when does that come in live and all the rest of it? They get to me.
Neale 08:01
engaged early as you just said because otherwise you just sat there they’re gonna be more Armors folded and I’m not just this yeah
Greg 08:08
And then suddenly you sort of dump it on the Mongo Life and they say, well, this is terrible. Where’s my Excel spreadsheet? And they will secretly do that under the debts. So yeah, get them on board early. Have actually have a genuine change program that goes alongside it and comes programmed. Now obviously that depends on scale and budget and all the rest of it. But I used to be quite a cynic on change until about 2014 when we did a big transformation and it changed the way we worked. Those people listening who know me know exactly which one it is, but we rolled out to 17 countries in three months because we had that change program and we had 700 videos in different languages produced and we just churned it out.
Neale 08:51
I’m actually interested in what it was involved in the change program then. You said video content, was it staggered with comms, what was the… Yeah, yeah, so we had a whole…
Greg 08:58
whole communication program so we were making sure that everybody was up to date and they knew when they were going to need to be involved, how they needed to be involved. We did a tell us why this doesn’t work for you rather than tell us what you want it to do approach and find those real sticking points before we rolled out to each country and we had a whole host of videos leading on almost like a selling promo video and training videos as well which were integrated in the learning management system. Really robust. It was really good but they were a global automotive company so they had budget but they wanted to launch in a rapid rapid time and being able to do 17 countries in three months was unheard of.
Neale 09:55
Fantastic. Talking about large organizations. I was having a chat with our producer, Mark, just before he’s at the stage where his business is looking at CRM, the sales team, and we’ve started to say, you know, we could do something to stop building a pipeline, you know, they’ve got clients coming in, relationship management tool. Where is that cutoff of going from your Excels, your, you know, your independent SaaS for finance, your SaaS for HR management? Is there a distinct cutoff where you go, you know what, this needs to be an all in one. It is a gradual process in your experience. In terms of an organization growing into having it. Is it a financial thing? Is it a size of team? Is it size department?
Greg 10:37
I mean, I think if you’ve got a sales team, you need a CRM system, you know, really I’m a small business There’s currently two of us. I’ve got a CRM system because I want to know That conversation that I had three months ago with that that guy that I haven’t caught up with again That actually could lead to to a sale and nurturing those those potential customers and those those relationships that I’ve got so And and the way the tools are done so integrated certainly see a Microsoft products so integrated in your day-to-day You know and all the rest of it keeping track of that is is key. So I would say From day one if you’ve got a sales engagement have a CRM system of some description And maintain it and make sure that you keep it up to date and maintain it There are obviously enterprise level and then there’s cheaper free All those are the ones that we talked about in the beginning so you make your decision on on where you want to go But I wouldn’t have a sales team without without it. Yeah
Neale 11:40
Would you recommend, because obviously there is an entry-level free hub spot, there are other CRMs available, would you encourage sticking to one or when you get bigger to migrate over or grow with a platform? The reason they ask is that when it comes to things like data and your information, doing that yourself and crossing over, putting in dirty data into a new CRM and it can be quite painful. I mean this is the business that you’re in. Is it better to grow with one system or does it really depend on how the business is changing? Because it’s a painful cost as well as time and…
Greg 12:13
It is. I guess it depends on your processes, how much custom work you need to be done, does that solution still fit your needs, all that kind of stuff. I would say if you’re ground zero, a couple of people, then one of the three products works. I have a good friend of mine who’s CEO of an events business and he’s very happy with HubSpot and it works for him and he’s got a significant business selling event spaces. Those products do scale but if you want enterprise level or that kind of top tier level, you’re looking at Salesforce or Dynamics really and you can look at any Gartner or Forrester box and they’re always in the top right hand corner. Then you start looking at how does it integrate with the rest of the business and particularly if you’re integrating with the finance system or you’ve got other data sources and all the rest of it, that’s where you need a robust integrated tool. You want it within your cloud not to then be going and creating security risks by making connectors and all the rest of it, which you can do but you start to look at actually can I have it all in one single place really.
Neale 13:24
going back to your Microsoft for around about two years, IBM before that for six years, what was it like working in a huge organization like this?
Greg 13:35
I never thought I would work in an organisation at that scale, I always sort of started out wanting to be integral in the business and have the ear of the MD and all that kind of stuff. Hands down, ground floor. Yeah, and the first organisation when I got into CRM, I remember fixing the toilet door because the handle was broken. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, and just somehow found myself making some steps that ended up me going to IBM and it was a bit like, wow, this is the thing, I’ve made it. Big fish, small pond, same size fish.
Neale 14:13
Much bigger pond.
Greg 14:14
But the thing that I really liked about that size of organisation is always someone you can go to for help. There’s always somebody that knows something that you don’t know and the opportunity for growth in that organisation is bigger. So I reached a bit of a ceiling in previous smaller organisations. You’re not going to wait for the delivery director to retire or worse. Where do you go in terms of getting… or you make that leap from company to company. Within an organisation like IBM you can choose a channel and you can grow and that’s how I ended up becoming kind of UK practice lead for IBM because I was able to work the system I guess to a degree.
Neale 14:58
Do you prefer it now to you sort of in control of your own destiny? Did you miss anything from the IBM days, Microsoft days?
Greg 15:07
I guess I’ve come to a point in my career when I need that independence, and I’m now sort of not looking to go back into corporate. I actually, that experience really carries me when I’m dealing with enterprise organizations, because I can see the politics and the way they work, but right now, very, very happy to be working independently, and every day I wake up excited, whereas you end up going through the motions a bit when you’re just taking a salary.
Neale 15:37
No, absolutely. You can see that completely. Let’s go podcast. AI has come up quite a bit. It’s, you know, it’s buzzword of the day. We’ve got it in, we talked about it in marketing, we talked about it in engineering, coding. Most new laptops now are coming with an AI assistant button. How is AI enhancing CRM experiences? How are you utilizing it?
Greg 15:58
I mean it’s massive really, so you look at Microsoft’s investment in AI is absolutely huge. The whole co-pilot suite, shall we call it, spans right the way across CRM, low-code, all of their products and it’s integrally baked into that product and I use it myself, you know, I eat my own dog food, so to speak, or what the nicer term is. You can run with that one. We all know what it means, but it’s absolutely integral and the thing that it does is it lifts that usage. So we talked about failed CRM implementations, well a lot of the failure is because people don’t use them or don’t want to use them, it becomes an admin chore rather than something that’s really driving the business and you’ve got to get that balance right.
Neale 16:48
You have to learn how to use it. You have to move it for an old one. There’s a whole, yeah. Exactly. It’s a challenge.
Greg 16:53
I’m a sales guy that likes to use a file effect and you’re asking me to update that phone call that I had with my mate who’s been buying for me for 20 years.
Neale 17:03
same, I’m no pat for marketing and you, yeah, but you’ve got to pray.
Greg 17:07
Exactly, exactly. But the thing that co-pilot and other AI solutions add to it is it just makes it so simple. And at the first level, being able to just read a summary of that account, for example, what they’ve bought, what their cases are in service, you can just see that straight in the page and be able to write an email and get the co-pilot solution to reword it for you. It just saves so much time on that base. And that’s the kind of ground level of that baked within Microsoft.
Neale 17:41
It’s an assistant thing rather than a decision-making thing. It’s enabling you to save time, make appointments. You can talk to it rather than sort of typing stuff out. So it’s a time-saving thing.
Greg 17:50
And the amount of times over the years, we oh, can you create us a report that gives us a full summary of that account and email it to me or whatever. We don’t need that anymore, you just go tell me about account XYZ Limited and it pulls up the full history in a nice, succinct way with numbers, with whatever, and you can query it and you can chat to it and get the… That’s incredible for what it does. The next level, which is agents, which is Microsoft’s big play, and that is automation using AI. So being able to automate customer complaints, automate service in any way, and just take that or any of those complex processes, you just take the AI, do the heavy lifting.
Neale 18:33
so they so you get a number of custom plates and what they are just responds them through sort of natural decision trees or
Greg 18:39
Exactly. You essentially teach it to take through that decision tree. If it needs to reach out to a different individual in the business, then it will. Rather than it being a business process that a person has to do, you can get the AI to do that.
Neale 18:54
do the heavy lifting sorry i’m laughing because i just had in my mind because we’ve done a lot of decision tree stuff for the minute um but in terms of customer complaints it’s like this guy’s pretty fiery so he needs to go to this department yeah this guy seems a little less fiery shouldn’t have but literally that’s
Greg 19:09
I mean that’s baked in there. Wow. So yeah in journeys in customer service you essentially bake that in and it just it learns where to teach people. How many swear words they’ve used? Exactly yeah and get the sentiment analysis and the big red flashing light that says don’t, you know, inject. But rather than decision trees, which is the old way of doing it, you’ve got an AI that’s intelligent enough to understand in this scenario it needs to do this or in this scenario. When I was at KPMG recently we did a lot of work in the banking industry looking at how we can manage complaints better. So in this scenario when this person’s complaining about this come back with an automated response that says actually if you upgrade your account then you can negate these charges and things like that. So decisions based on cognitive understanding of what they’re asking for, what the bank account says and pulling all that in and making a decision. I mean that was really trying to stretch the capabilities of the software at that time without going too much into true building. But yeah I mean that’s just become incredible. Yeah.
Neale 20:32
I mean, as a decision tree, it’s very much like an A-B sort of response, but with the A-I, it’s a lot more, you say, nuance. It’s like, okay, there’s several more scenarios that you can go through and then wind up and go backwards and forwards. Because it’s still a referencing tool, isn’t it? It’s not actually an intelligence, as you’d say, a human intelligence, it’s just referencing hundreds of thousands of previous experiences and coming up with a solution. Date has got to be good in the next place.
Greg 20:58
and you you I I do think in the world that we’re in now with with AI being baked into these these products you still got to deliver the product well you’ve got to deliver serum solution well you’ve got to get your data right you’ve got to get it that’s cut future down the line they’re talking as SAS products being dead right I can see that of a version because AI agents will essentially take the lift heavy lifting out of it but right now you’ve still got to get your implementation correct and I think the cycle is that you know where the technology companies like Microsoft are in terms of pushing the boundaries and a lot of the companies that are adopting it and maybe two years behind that curve so that they’re trying to and they want to get there and everyone wants AI baked in but they’ve also got systems that they haven’t quite figured out how to get them to work yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah potentially yeah yes everyone
Neale 21:56
Not everyone. It’s… But the potential.
Greg 21:58
Yeah, it’s really, it’s just a curve, right? You’ve got the people cutting down the weeds in front of you, and then the people that are using it just behind, trying to keep up, trying to get to that. But they’ve got to get the foundations right, and if you don’t know, and it’s people, and it’s data, and it’s all of those things that we talked about right at the beginning, they’ve got to be right.
Neale 22:19
right of the reference it’s a referencing tool the more they use the more examples they have the better it’s going to get so it’s just they’re all going to be road bumps and but continuancy is the key yeah
Greg 22:29
I mean, there’s examples where we needed to do, use AI to query some very big and multiple heavyweight documents as a knowledge base almost, contracts and that sort of thing. Now, that seems really simple and there’s tools that are baked into it, but when you start getting into the tens, twenties, hundreds of thousands of documents that are hundreds of pages long, you then start meeting challenges in terms of the capabilities of what you do. So the product is growing, you can do that kind of stuff, but you’ve got to get to the point where it can really do it at the true level that everyone understands. I want it to do this, and here’s my library of 30 years worth of documents. Please make that entirely searchable. Well, yeah, it might take a little bit of time.
Neale 23:20
Well they’re using, I don’t know if this is true or not, this is just something that I saw online, it was on Instagram, I was going to say they read an article, apparently Pokemon Go, the very popular famous game, they actually use that to track GPS locations, and if there was an area that the company didn’t have, they would create a new Pokemon to be there, so people would go and find it all the time, they’re registering their GPS. Don’t know if that’s true or not, I don’t know if mentioned it on a business podcast, but I just find that absolutely fascinating that, because the Apache films with the text was a way of AI or computers to read, to document historic text, so they get enough people to go, oh that looks like an I, that looks like a T, that looks like a knee, and with all that information combined they could start to digitise a lot of historic text, that was handwritten, by the sounds of it they’re doing the same gamification in order for GPS, but it’s getting that data in isn’t it, it’s sort of feeding the machine all the information, so it just gets better and better at learning.
Greg 24:22
Exactly, I mean the current model is all trained on the internet, which is historic data. So there is questions around that and the quality and all the rest of it. When you’re implementing, if you’re a business implementing an AI solution and making it available to your users, you’ve got a whole bunch of considerations around security, making it be trained on your data and not bringing external data. For example, I built a very quick co-pilot model to query some old RFP documents and I chucked the documents in and I pointed it to it and I said, now tell me, and I ticked the box that said, use external sources as well. It was coming back with some false results saying that we’d done work that we hadn’t done that it got from the website that was relevant, but it was other people’s other companies work, whereas I needed it to very much just focus. So you’ve got to get that training, you’ve got to get that security and that ring fence around it and get all those places, that stuff.
Neale 25:27
in place. Yeah, fantastic. I’m definitely going to check the Pokemon thing by the way and put the description underneath it’s true or not.
Greg 25:33
The best thing I learnt from Pokemon Go was that I’ve got the smallest suspension bridge in the world in my hometown, so yeah, well it’s just several things.
Neale 25:43
and it educates as well. Exactly. Hacks all our data. Speaking of data hacking, and again this is just a really interesting conversation I had with Mark before, he uses Black Friday to basically unsubscribe from hundreds of emails. I’m sure you get spammed. I sign up to stuff all the time. I think about it. I think this came from a spam. It did come from a spam. Yeah, I know it did actually. Yeah, we emailed you. We’ve got such as many. How you mean? Why not? Why not? One of the things I like to do is, let’s just say, I’m trying to think of any company. Let’s just say I’m on a McDonald’s list. When it’s actually just type in your name and account, I always go first name Neil, surname, McDonald’s, and then my surname because I know then if I get an email from a third party source and it says, Neil McDonald’s, go, oh, well they’ve sold on my data. So if you ever want to track where your own data is going, that’s the way to do it. It’s very interesting. Speaking of marketing emails, you’ve got little CRM yourself. You said it’s really important for sales and I’m for marketing for relationships and stuff. We were just talking about getting an inundated with emails. In your view, what is the ideal sort of sweet spot? We just had like a monthly newsletter, fortnightly catch up. You’re a CRM guy.
Greg 26:54
Gotta be targeted. So we used to, I mean, we’re talking 15 years ago. We used to have a little story about the the corner shop owner and You walk into this job and he says, oh, you know same same sweets again, Mrs. Miggings and all that kind of stuff in that corner shop owner knew what these customers wanted because he engaged in them every single day Yeah Now if you put that at scale It’s understanding what your customers are buying what their interests are and using that cleverly To target directly from them. I I signed up for an email with a clothing brand and immediately got an email You know for for ladies clothes and I bought men’s clothes, right? You you can’t landed on the right day All right Yeah, so you’ve got you’ve got to be targeted and you’ve got to really know your customers and know your audience and You know tools tools like Microsoft Journeys customer insights journeys as they’ve called it now they change the name You know being able to automate those journeys being able to create that learning around Your data and the more that AI comes into that the clever It’s gonna gonna get but I think people are still spamming still chucking tons of emails out We implemented a system. I don’t know long time ago 15 years ago for a Huge one of the major venues in the UK and we sold them on this targeting You can segment and you can cut down all the rest of it and they’re like, yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do Implemented system straight away. No. No, we just want to send a million emails out once a month
Neale 28:43
We only cope with the intimate…
Greg 28:44
Yeah, I mean, we were talking 10,000 years ago and we had a server in office that was sending the emails out.
Neale 28:53
Back to the 20,000 is okay, but half a million at times.
Greg 28:56
That’s what they bought. I mean we scaled it and we did it and all the rest of it. I used to joke, my colleague used to be in a room like this holding two wires together every night just in the hope that the emails didn’t fall over when they were being sent. But yeah, and that was a really significant marketing department with really good data. They knew what concerts people were turning up to, but they were just still sending that bulk email out everywhere. Reality is, they just didn’t want to miss the opportunity for somebody to buy something.
Neale 29:27
Because I mean chances are if you I was gonna say if you bought Taylor Swift tickets Then you’re not gonna want to watch the rugby game, but yes, but you may want to watch the
Greg 29:35
game. I bought Billie Eilish tickets for my daughter and I do want to watch a rugby club so I’m a customer for two people. So if you can know that then you can be clever with your marketing as well. But they just quite often will just see me as one individual and those buying trends don’t necessarily work. That’s where Customer Insights, Microsoft Customer Insights is a really great tool because you can bring all that data in one place and start to create personas on customers and understand who’s buying what. And actually if you shift your focus you might get some extra.
Neale 30:11
So personalisation, consistency, know your audience really and know what they want to buy.
Greg 30:17
Yeah, exactly. Fantastic.
Neale 30:19
Cool. Alright, I think that’s everything I wanted to cover off. Thank you for coming and thanks for your time.
Greg 30:24
No problem. Great to be here. Thanks very much.