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A recent study from Stanford Graduate School of Business warns here that having too much (or useless) information about future negotiation partners is actually worse than having no information at all. As it turns out, the false illusion of knowing how to approach your (sales) meeting made participants 46% less likely to identify important issues in the negotiation. That’s not to say checking out people’s profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook before knowing them in real life is totally bad, but it can very well take your mind off the important issues in the game.
So don’t go running for client intelligence in all the wrong places.
Instead, get yourself introduced to your partners by a trusted third party. Because statistically, clients are willing to pay up to 25% more in an environment that they trust.
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Whether you work in media, programming, Wall Street or, for that matter, anywhere else, you might have noticed that our collective ability to create information exceeds our ability to manage it. There are trillions of web pages out there and the number is increasing exponentially, with every new tweet, Facebook status update, blog or concept that gets invented. And even though you might have been blessed with a very structured mind, when becoming aware of this huge amount of information, your brain will immediately perceive it’s huge potential, but it will also be left with no tools to manage it.
Now. If Web 1.0 was all about desktop computing, pre-networks and limited to e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, images and video, then Web 2.0 took things to the next level, delivering networking through websites and applications (social networks with comments, blogs, youtube and instant interactions). And it’s all fine, up until the point where you start realizing that all these two way interactions and all the user generated content essentially translate into huge amounts of data that first of all needs to be stored and then it needs to be accessed.
Obviously, there is a parallel to be seen here regarding CRM Systems which have developed according to the Web itself. If at first we had desktop CRM systems to deal with, we can now enjoy the benefits of Cloud systems that are far more engaging and user friendly.
Sadly, the problems and implications regarding the amount of data and the access to information are practically the same in both cases. And looking ahead at Web 3.0 (happening now), Web 4.0 (in about 4-5 years) and beyond is, of course, the only hope for CRM Systems as well…
