Lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

Where are the lazy days? I don't seem to have as much time to write in here in the summer. I'm running up and down the road during my lunch hours picking up my kids from summer camp and bringing them home. Then I rush back to work for the rest of the afternoon. I come home take my son to either soccer camp or boy scout camp, come home fix dinner. Before I know it, its after 8 pm. Meanwhile, I just want to lounge around the pool, bask in the sun and relax. But part of me wants to get into a project I am working on for after I terminate my employment in a few weeks.

Some of my current co-workers are "busy" taking vacations at periodic points during the summer. I know that a lot of New Yorkers go to the Hamptons during the summer and it is often impossible to make contact with them on Fridays (unless you have "personal" relationships with them and can call them on their cell phones.

What are your customers doing? Can you make deals during the summer, or are too many people away from their offices to get final approvals? I've been wondering how much business gets done before September. What sort of CRM program or analysis tracks when people take vacations and the optimum time to make a sale?

Social CRM

I just read a great blog blog by Brent Leary of CRM Essentials about Social CRM.

He indicates that traditionally CRM is usually broken into three main components:

• marketing automation,
• sales automation, and
• customer service.

Traditionally, most organizations utilizing "CRM" focus on elements such as contact management, opportunity management and activity management. Many of the CRM applications such as Sugar CRM and Salesforce (or even a simple database), concentrate on meeting the challenges that are inherent with these areas. These tools help businesses be more responsive to customer inquiries, close more deals (more efficiently), and more accurately predict when opportunities might result in cash.

But the modern small business is turning to the web and social networking sites (such as Facebook, Linked-in, or Twitter, to improve their reach to potential and existing customers. Knowing more about the customer increases the knowledge of how to reach out to customers. Before blogging became so popular and before the days of Facebook, I used to scour press releases, websites, and articles relating to potential customers in order to figure out how to reach out to the customers. Social networking sites can be such a valuable tool.

"Social CRM adds a whole new dimension to the traditional view of customer relationship management. The focus is undoubtedly on people and not technology. It’s about joining the ongoing conversations our customers and prospects are already engaged in — not trying to control them. It’s about using any tool available that will allow us to meaningfully engage with more people like them. It’s realizing people like doing business with people they like — and understanding we love doing business with people we trust."

So many sales managers think of CRM as a technology that IT implements and then the business miraculously has better customer relationships and increased profits. Businesses should be customer focused with their CRM strategy that is SUPPORTED by technology. Look at what the customer wants. The more a business knows about their customers, the larger the competitive advantage. Accessing social networks may provide a way to speak to customers in a way that is more relevant.

Father's Day

As I reminisce about Father's Day, I think of my own father who died over 20 years ago. I always think about how I didnt really know him as an adult. I think how my husband is with my own kids and about my own parenting. As I was thinking about this, I couldn't help but have the words of Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" come to my mind. Cat's in the Cradle" reached the top of the Billboard music charts in December 1974. It sold millions of copies and earned Harry Chapin a Grammy nomination.

The song's lyric have been fodder for discussion for years. Even my own kids have commented on the words when they've heard the story -- or when they are missing their father when he is on a business trip.

The song tells the story of a father who is too busy to spend time with his son. The son repeatedly asks the father to join in activities and the father always responds with a vague promises of "soon." While the son grows up loving and admiring his father, he picks up his father's habit of putting his own family on the back burner. "My boy was just like me..."

Harry's wife, Sandy, had a hand in writing the words. Its a great read here. The story ends with this quote:

The whole point of the story is that we learn our lessons in life by making mistakes, by trial and error, by experience," she said, adding, "It would be great if we could learn about the future ahead of time, but we have to learn the hard way. It's like the old saying--too old too soon, too wise too late."