If you are interested in registering for either award competition, please email a request for the registration form for the one you are interested in.
It is time to announce the newly revamped 2019 CRM Watchlist and -- probably one of the biggest parts of the revamping -- the shiny new 2019 Emergence Maturity Index Awards competition. This post will cover the Watchlist, and the next one will cover the Emergence Maturity Index Awards, and it will be much shorter.
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The reason I suspended the Watchlist last year -- besides, in all candor, that working on my customer engagement book was driving me crazy -- was that I realized that, after more than a decade of the Watchlist, it was time for a change. I don't know how many of you remember this, knew this, or give a crap one way or the other, but the Watchlist itself started out in CRM at the Speed of Light as what I then-called "The Steppin' Out Awards." ( Here's an example of what it was like with this 2007 Zoho Press release.) The idea was to pick a company that represented a category of CRM technology and stood out as the market leader or the emerging one to watch.
But, over time, that evolved to the CRM Watchlist, which had a different purpose: Companies that had impact in the market as a whole or in a particular market.
The idea was simple: Companies, when they are producing valuable services and goods that are aimed at providing productive outcomes, still have a lot of other things they need to do before they can be called successful companies. They need a public presence, they have to be socially and environmentally responsible, they have to be able to execute against a plan, and they have to invest in things that might have a non-tangible return, but at the same time, will benefit them and their customers. They need a culture that is responsive to the employees and customers -- not because it benefits shareholders, but because it benefits all stakeholders, which include the customers and employees and business partners and the world at large. This has to be embedded at the level of their DNA. They have to understand the greater markets and their own specific markets so that they can be responsive to the changes in those markets. They need to have messages and positions that resonate with their targeted audiences. They need to be able to reach out on a regular basis to those third parties that influence the markets the company wants to play in. I can go on, but you get the idea.
If you were able to do all that successfully, then the likelihood that you were a company that mattered increased a great deal. You would be very likely to have an impact in the market or specific markets that mattered. The Watchlist was the recognition of that. (Here is the latest of the CRM Watchlist announced winners (CRM Watchlist 2017) from January 2017.) The Watchlist was and is recognition of a company in the customer-facing technology world that did itself proud with well-rounded efforts, which drove the success of the company, ranging from its culture to its products/services offering to its ecosystem to its outreach program to... ad infinitum.
Its been going on successfully for more than a decade, and I am honored that so many companies seem so interested in submitting their questionnaires for the possibility of a watchlist award.
Yet, as happily successful as its been, things have been changing in the marketplace, in the world, and even in the nature of the structure of companies. Those changes created the need for me to make changes to the Watchlist, which I now have done.
But, why? I owe you this one especially if you are going to be a submitting company, so you can at least have a framework to understand what I'm looking for now.
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When I started the Watchlist, the trend was traditional CRM, and it was pretty baseline stuff. The only kind of value add was some talk about analytics at the back-end and an expanded offering for marketing automation. Web self-service was coming into play and was classified more as knowledge management than customer service. As time marched on, mobile became a subject of interest, analytics became standard, and social CRM emerged as a new "form" of CRM that in 2008 to 2011 had to be distinguished from "traditional" CRM. Social media was growing so quickly that companies -- beginning with Pivotal's Social CRM offering -- were integrating social communication, listening, and interaction directly into CRM suites and applications, and at the same time, companies were capturing the social data and storing it in the system of record in individual customer files. But, by 2011, there was no reason to distinguish between "social" and "traditional" CRM, because all CRM offerings came standard with social integration.
The Watchlist adjusted to that. Each year, the weights changed, the criteria were tweaked, additions were made, subtractions done, and the bar was set higher and higher.
Now, the world of customers has changed dramatically. Our customers are digital, tech savvy, and empowered. They can communicate with each other and -- more often than not -- the companies that they are interested in as frequently as they want via any channel and in real time. Their expectations have changed. Their demands are more strident. They are willing to go public with their upset and (not as frequently, but frequently enough) their happiness with the brands that they are communicating with, which means that what it takes for a company to impact the market it serves -- as well as satisfy the customers and potential customers it has or will have, retain a true sense of independent identity as a company, and manage the cost of doing all that -- has been dramatically altered.
The things that are impacting the market are significantly different than they were when all this started, too. Back when I started, and all the way through 2011, check out this sampling of terms that were either buzzworthy and/or discussion worthy.
Now look at the 2018 list:
See what I mean? Some of what we are talking about now existed then, such as artificial intelligence, which has been around since the 1950s, but the market/world/people in the world hadn't caught up to it so that it had significant impact or perceived value. Now it does. Not only are all of these ideas conversation grabbers, but many of them are ideas driving what businesses think they need to do. They are real and -- while at various levels of hype versus that of reality -- are all part of the C-level discussions, mid-management discussions, field discussions, and, in many cases, executions these days.
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All this has created an incredible number of companies that are vying for a piece of the action. These are technology companies that are emerging by the literal thousands from not just Silicon Valley, but multiple locations around the globe. Most of them, as has been pointed out in spades by multiple writers and pundits, are going to fail. Some are going to succeed, but they will take years to do so or have to pivot a few times before they hit on the right approach. Many of them will be acquired either for their technology (Recast.ai) or for the impact that their company has had on the markets they serve (Marketo, Smart Communications, Gigya, Callidus Cloud) and their technology.
The one thing that all the companies needed to be successful, either at the beginning of their journey or continue to be successful as their journeys progressed, was that they had to be companies, not just technology with an institution wrapped around it.
That's why the biggest move I've made is to separate the CRM Watchlist from the Emergence Maturity Index. The former is for those companies that are operating as companies and have potentially had a real impact in the market. That means they do all the things that I mention above to be companies. They have been around for awhile and proven themselves to be a fully functioning business that has what it needs to continue to succeed and hopefully continue its impact.
The EMI is for those institutions that have not yet had an impact, but they are getting to the point that they need to be to be considered a true breakout candidate in the market -- one on the verge of an impact in a short enough period to be noticeable. They are not just building great stuff, but they are learning how to tell the world about it, and they are smart enough to understand that engineering at the core -- except in a rare case or two (Zoho being one) -- is not a sufficient business model to guarantee success. Cool technology without much else going on means a cold market. But these young organizations are fluid entities consisting of real people who make decisions every day as to its direction. That means that those decisions are going to make or break the company and its future. The EMIs are designed to identify the breakout companies, and how close to breakout they are now. Not in a time frame (because that would be a forecast, and remember how stupid I think forecasts are), but, instead, how I identify the elements of a business that are in place beyond the R&D and engineering (though including that) and the signs of future impact that the company is making, meaning they are talk and action. The actions, as small as they may be by comparison to the Watchlist, matter a great deal.
One overriding difference is that the EMI after a time will become an actual monitored, ever-changing Index, meaning it will be an ongoing assessment of the burgeoning young company, and as the elements are put into place and the signs of future impact appear, it will impact the individual company's placement in the Index. However, the Award is based, as is the Watchlist, on what the company has done over the immediate year. (In other words, the EMIs 2019 are for what happened in 2018.)
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This is where I must begin to distinguish between the CRM Watchlist and the EMIs. Because, in the past, all companies that provided customer-facing technologies -- or services that were related to that -- were eligible. No longer.
I would say that roughly 50 to 60 percent of the submissions that I received every year were from very small to small companies that may have had great products -- and many did -- but hadn't done even the basic blocking and tackling that companies have to do to impact a market. That means no real marketing or outreach or even sales training. They had their technology offering and wrapped a legal entity around it. But there was no way that they were going to win the Watchlist, because its an impact award that depends on what you do as a company, and not what products or services you offer, per se. Your products and services matter, but they are one part of a much bigger total. Yet, every now and then, one of the companies break out and win the Watchlist. They may be small, but they were able to seriously impact a market, because they were mindful of what it took to run a company.
That said, it was so rare an occurrence, I realized that rather than judge these little 'uns the same way I judged, say, Oracle or Salesforce, I needed to do something else that also had a different outcome as the result. So, the Emergence Maturity Index (EMI) seceded from the CRM Watchlist and established its own state. I explained the EMI in this post in late November 2017. So, I won't make this post any longer than it is by explaining that again. Read the post from November.
Email your request for the registration form
If you are interested in registering for either award competition, please email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com with a request for the registration form for the one you are interested in.
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A lot of what you see below are the same criteria as they were in the past. But there are some new criteria due to, especially, the creation of the EMIs for the younger, not yet fully established companies that no longer qualify for the CRM Watchlist. So, what it takes to qualify for the Watchlist is very important for you to note, because I don't want to waste either your time or my time telling you that "no you can't request the registration form because you don't qualify." I'm too old for having the patience for organizations that don't read what I wrote.
So, first, let's start with the eligible categories, which have been expanded. The CRM Watchlist may be keeping its name, but what qualifies a company to register is customer-facing technologies or customer-facing technology services. Not just traditional or contemporary CRM pillars.
Here's the current list of categories. If you produce any technology that supports even one of these, you can potentially qualify.
Categories
Conversational Interface
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There are a couple of general points to be made: Some of the criteria for the specifics of submission are not outlined here for space considerations, but they will be outlined on the questionnaire when you receive it. The first one here is the most important -- it now frames and limits who can enter the Watchlist.
All in all, this is a tough thing to win, and if you do, I think at least you deserve to be honored for it. If you win in any way, you will get a review on ZDNet about why you won and things that you could do to be even better, if I have anything to say about it.
This is going to be strict, but I hope its well worth it to you. Even though I sound prickly, I'm genuinely honored if you do go ahead and participate in the CRM Watchlist 2019. Despite my grumpy exterior, I'm very gooey inside.
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The rules in this section are unbreakable. What that means, to be clear, is that if you break them in any way at all, there will be some form of penalty assessed, ranging from your final score being affected to disqualification and being taken off my radar. The type of penalty will be in parentheses after the rule. In advance, I apologize for being so draconian, but at this stage, there are still too many registrants and submissions that are ignoring what I ask.
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The bulk of the criteria are the same as the Watchlist: You must request a registration form, and then you have two weeks to submit it. The due dates are the same, etc. The fact that your company provides a customer-facing technology or services supporting customer-facing technologies are the same. Here is what's different and thus notable:
So, one and all, this long-winded introduction to the newly revised Watchlist and the emergence of the Emergence Maturity Index Awards leads me to one last thing: Registration is now open for both the CRM Watchlist 2019 and the Emergence Maturity Index Awards.
To reiterate, if you are interested in registering for either award competition, please email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com with a request for the registration form for the one you are interested in.
Let the games begin!
Ringing in a belated New Year with SAP, Oracle, and the CRM Watchlist 2019
I promised that I would cover my speculations about Oracle and SAP, and to fulfill my obligations for 2017, here they are -- in 2018.
Change agents aren't personas, they are human
This report is really interesting and potentially very valuable to those of you who have digital transformation efforts either underway or are contemplating some version of one.