Wednesday, August 01, 2007

CRM in btob: Customer relationship VS stakeholder relationship


My short career brought me to many btob companies. I am currently working for a mortgage company in Mountain View, CA, called Residential Pacific Mortgage, but I have also worked for ubifrance, the French Agency for international business development, or PB Gelatin, a gelatin producer. I also worked for sanofi aventis, on a marketing mission about the relationships between the pharmaceutical company and retails (mainly pharmacy actually).

I also know to have worked on different case studies on Expedia corporate that the Business to Business is seeking for customer relationship management solutions. In my opinion, talking about business to business more than in the business to business area, we should more talk about stakeholder relationship than customer relationship.

Indeed, in business to business partners and suppliers are as important as the client itself. For example, these partners in the real estate industry, realtor, mortgage agent or escrow officers, gives and trade business each others. That means clients flow might come from your partner or even from your suppliers.

Therefore, I think in business to business kind of company, it is very important to implement a CRM solution, but also to manage the stakeholder relationship, including both suppliers, and partners. You can also check about that issue in a previous post I made about working by referrals (which I made in French) and the Buffini concept. Working by referrals, networking are among the methods to build strong relationship with partners and suppliers.

This solution implies to understand each kind of stakeholders the company has, and what are their specificities. That turns the duty more complex, but is necessary in a b to b world.

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