ValueRight: examining the business of Social CRM

(Feb 25 2010) CRM Blog

Categories:
Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

Quotes

  1. “ It makes the person running the program a hero. ”

Authors


  1. By Chris Bucholtz, editor-in-chief

    As anyone who’d ever been part of the decision process for CRM can tell you, it’s not about picking the best CRM solution for your company – it’s about picking the best CRM solution for your company that passes muster with your CFO (or whoever it is at your company that monitors expenditures). For many Social CRM efforts, the looming threat is from the money people; as had been the case with marketing, most organizations lack the ability to place a return on investment (ROI) number on these efforts. Marketing automation applications are arming marketers with numbers to defend decisions and get credit for what they’ve contributed, but those of us pursuing Social CRM efforts find themselves in similar straits. How do put a number on the impact of social CRM – and how do you decide if it’s the right course for your company financially?

    This is the issue that Kathy Herrmann and Cynthia Heinsohn took on when they started work on ValueRight, an application that takes a stab at applying the numbers involved in Social CRM – both the expenses and the revenues – to draw a clear picture of the impact Social CRM has.

    The application requires users to enter data in each major category of gain and cost. From there, the system applies the methodology the two PathLight Solutions partners developed to paint a picture of the true value of a company’s Social CRM efforts. “It makes the person running the program a hero,” Herrmann says, “because you can tell your bosses how your Social CRM efforts are paying off – or, if they’re not, you can use real numbers to decide that you’re not ready for a Social CRM effort.”

    The application comes in two flavors – one targeted at solely at social media, and a second, more fully-featured (and more expensive) Social CRM edition that considers CRM and SCRM integration, communities, and secondary social media sources. The solutions also come with an eBook on using the solution, and a second eBook, “the Business of Social Business.”

    Like Social CRM, ValueRight’s in its early stages. Herrmann wants to improve the interface; it’s currently an Excel-format application, and the target audience of business, marketing and financial analysts will demand a friendlier visual presentation, she says. But the mere presence of such an application is great news for the Social CRM space; marketing suffered for years without the ability to associate costs and revenues with their efforts. Social CRM is an even trickier nut to crack.

    From a human perspective, tools like this will be exceptionally important because they address the left brain/right brain issues that Social CRM raises within business. The people put in charge of most Social CRM efforts are creative people who aren’t usually adept at number crunching. Tools like this will allow companies to pick the right people for these efforts and still get a good handle on the numbers.

    I’m pleased to see some thinking being devoted to this subject; it’ll provide a solid business anchor to the flights of fancy that Social CRM can sometimes inspire. I’m also pleased to say that Kathy Herrmann will be a guest writer on Forecasting Clouds in the near future – I’m looking forward to hearing more of what she has to say.

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