Interview with Paul Greenberg, Chair of CRM Evolution #crme11

By Blake Landau (@blakelandau) Aug 11, 2011

Paul Greenberg, Godfather of CRM, partner of BPT Partners, author, and now orchestrator of CRM Idol, and visionary for the CRM industry, was a key voice at CRM Evolution, which took place this week, August 8-10, in NYC. Greenberg chaired the event and worked with CRM Magazine to make the event a memorable one for the industry. Every time you saw Greenberg at the event, if he wasn’t speaking, he was being pulled somewhere by one of the many individuals who are mentored by him. This is someone who gets a lot from giving back to the community around him. Greenberg sat down with CMSWire at CRM Evolution to talk social CRM, giving back, and what he calls “mishagas in the market.”

His Thoughts on David Gergen’s Keynote

Blake Landau: What did you think about CNN political analyst and presidential adviser David Gergen’s keynote?

Paul Greenberg: I am a left-wing Democrat. He is a moderate conservative Republican. He is the most honest political commentator in the U.S. without a doubt. Forget party affiliation.

He’s the most astute commentator and proved to be very entertaining for the audience. Gergen is not a social media guy but that doesn’t matter. What his keynote reflected was a focus on the importance and quality of leadership in a business or political environment.

As a leader today — in our industry and outside of it — you can’t focus on managing things. You must accomplish things. Gergen talked about how leadership does matter. But sometimes leadership involves delegating.

The reality is, sometimes you have CEOs that take the role of the key stakeholder in a social CRM initiative. This leader is smart enough to know other people in the company can own the initiative. A good leader will delegate, trust and put faith in their people. That’s a major aspect of good leadership.

His Insights from CRM Evolution

BL: How has the event been for you this year?

PG: The event has been good. Of course there are always the repetitive themes. You hear that everything starts with culture. You hear about change management. There was possibly some overload and backlashes around “social,” which is interesting.

There is an issue with social media — people are past the ideas of using social tools for their own sake. They are turning it the wrong way. People are reacting against social rather than situating social where it belongs — as an additional capability for engaging customers.

There is a lack of strategic placement of social capabilities. On the traditional side of CRM it’s very mature. This is explicit to CRM Evolution — the discussion around process is advanced because it’s been around for 20 years. The other thing that’s interesting — a trend being picked up is the fact that CRM is left-brained. Now CRM as a discipline is swinging to the right side of the brain. There is a renewed focus on customer experience.

Customer experience has always been the focus.

BL: Why is this the case?

PG: Social has been a driver for customer behavior and emotion. Today, customers get more attention through the social tools. You have customers openly talking about how much they like or do not like a given brand openly on social channels.

This is generally called ad hoc influence. Some might be influential Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and no longer influential by Thursday. There’s a tremendous amount of effort right now going into how that all works.

The greatest minds in the world haven’t even figured this out yet. There’s no easy answer on the topic of influence. If you are a business, you don’t have time to focus on each individual behavior of all of your customers.