"Eat what you want, it's all free".  Someone had said the sushi was great but the pizza looked good too.  Have both?  Why not, who said you couldn't mix them in one meal (except possibly Mr Atkins).  

At Google everything is distilled down to a maths problem.  Each employee contributes an average of $1,000,000 in revenue per annum so anything the company can do to save them time, keep them focused or working a little longer has a significant impact on the bottom line.

What about the customers, partners and even the competition?  Of course things are done a little differently.  My host explained that each account is tiered by adword spend per month and this determines the amount of attention you receive, nothing unusual here. What is unusual is that Account Management means analysing the effectiveness of their current campaigns and working closely with them to generate more business, not necessarily spend more money with Google.  The logic being that if they spend more on online media advertising the odds (I'm sure they have a statistic) are they'll spend more with Google.

Now I understand why Google has made tools like Analytics, AdWords and Optimizer available for free.  It's again simple maths, you have limited resources so use them where they deliver the most value, on the big accounts.  For everyone else make it self service with great tools.  Who knows, some of todays small accounts might be the big spenders tomorrow.

Few companies have the revenue streams of Google to spend on free canteens and other time saving services but surely there's a lesson here for the rest of us.  Who said we have to do things the same old way, why can't we have sushi and pizza together for lunch?

How much time/money might a well stocked fridge at work save.  Could we work more closely with our customers on their business and not just ours?  Are our most productive staff wasting time on tasks better outsourced or assigned to other?

While searching around for some new sources on customer relationship management I found a great list of CRM Quotes on small business crm. If even half of them are true it highlights just how important CRM is to every business.  Hope you find them as interesting as I did.

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."
-Bill Gates

"The impact on an organisation can at times be subtle and distributed throughout the enterprise...Cost savings and productivity enhancements can be seen in saving a sales person 20 minutes per week in writing activity reports, or answering four times the volume of web-based service requests in the same amount of time."
-Mary Wardley, vice-president of IDC's CRM applications research.

"On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to
automate for more sales efficiency is absolutely essential. In cases reviewed, sales increases due to advanced CRM technology have ranged from 10% to more than 30%."
Harvard Business Review

"A business absolutely devoted to Customer Service Excellence will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large."
-Sir Henry Ford

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
-Peter Drucker

"We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I."
-Peter Drucker

“..The 17 leading SMB companies all declared they were doing more implementations now than in 2004, with eight of them handling at least 60 percent of customer implementations… Of the winning enterprise vendors all but one does 70 percent or more of its implementations in house… He notes that CRM implementation by vendors is a trend that he predicts will eventually reach 90 percent..”. CRM Award Winners Survey, March, 2005
-CRM guru, Barton Goldenberg

"Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures."
-Tom Peters

"The cost of retention is $180 per customer," he says. "But most automotive dealerships are set up for customer acquisition - which is crazy when you consider the average cost of customer acquisition is $1,000 or more."
-Arthur Hughes, author of several books on using databases to enhance CRM.

As an old saying at PricewaterhouseCoopers change practice used to run,
'OO + NT = EOO' (Old Organisation + New Technology = Expensive Old Organisation).

"Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business' volume."
-American Management Association.

"Successful CRM is about competing in the relationship dimension. Not as an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price- but as a differentiator. If your competitors are doing the same thing you are (as they generally are), product and price won't give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it's a much stickier--sustainable--relationship over the long haul."
-Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corporation

"…. dissatisfied customers would tell between 7-10 people while a satisfied customer would recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends".
– PIMS

"..estimating all customer service problems would double profit growth over a five-year period".
– Ventura

80% of tradeshow leads are never followed up.
– Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR)

The average time a sales representative spends on sales: 47%; on administrative tasks; 39%.
- Selling Power Magazine

Percent of qualified telemarketing leads that have only marginal follow-up: 40%; that are never called 50%.
- LeadMaster

1% of repeat purchases are made out of indifference and not out of loyalty.
- Industry analysts estimate

Dissatisfied customers communicate with 7-10 people while a satisfied customer will recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends.
- PIMS

"The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers."
-Sir John Egan
–
"How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose."
-Bill Gates

Read some more at small business CRM

The importance of a leak-free system for recording the contact details of your colleagues, customers, potential business partners or anyone you know cannot be over emphasised.

The standard response to such a question is they keep it in Outlook, Gmail or some other mail system. Others worship at the alter of Blackberry or have the company CRM forced upon them while others keep it "old school" with a paper address book or organiser. The point they are missing is that these are stores for some of your contact information not a system and certainly not a complete leak-free system.

Ask your self the following questions about your current system, what if:

• You lose your phone/PDA/organiser, could I recover everything in a day
• your employer let you go taking PC, phone, PDA back with no notice
• I need to call an acquaintance that I have never emailed before
• I lost my electronic data, do I have a recent paper copy