Embracing CRM as a commodity

Nothing new in the title of this post, but hopefully a new way for you to address the fact that CRM is a commodity leading into a demo. Why in G-d’s name would we want to say that the product we sell is a commodity? Here are my reasons:

• The gorilla in the CRM space, the company whose name we dare not speak, wants customers to think the opposite. The only way they can charge a premium price is if the customer thinks they truly have a differentiated offering. I don’t think they do, and I want to bring attention to how similar their demo will look to ours. If the customer is primed to think they look the same, and then they mostly look the same, it’ll be really hard for the gorilla to demand 2x the price for the same thing.
• Put another way, if you don’t commoditize it, and concede it’s a differentiated market, then the customer will look at the prices of the various offerings and assume the competition must be 1.5-2x better because how else could they get away with charging 1.5-2x the price? If a Ferrari is 2x the price of a Mercedes, it must be twice as good, right? Well, not if the requirement is to get you from your home to the grocery store a couple times a month.
• If we can convince the prospect that CRM is a commodity, it forces them to look elsewhere for a decision criteria. Maybe it’s “the platform” where Microsoft would be strong (although every major CRM vendor also correctly claims to be a platform). Or maybe it’s the “shameless integration” with the rest of the Microsoft cloud (Microsoft 365, Azure, LinkedIn). Or maybe they just decide based on price where Microsoft should also be on solid footing.
• CRM as a category has been around for 30+ years, and all the major players –Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Pegasystems– have been around for at least twenty of them so the main products are mature. Sure, there’s minor features here and there that might be different, but unless someone goes feature-by-feature through all the options, they will look far more similar than different. The less time a company provides to each vendor to demo, the more similar they’ll all look.
• I would NOT make this argument in an opportunity where Microsoft was competing with small- or mid-market solutions like Hubspot or Zendesk as they will cost less than Microsoft; in opportunities against Salesforce, Oracle, and Pega, it’s likely Microsoft will be the least expensive which is, frankly, how you should go about buying a commodity. Obviously I would couch it in terms like “value” and “total cost of ownership” but the end result is the same: if it’s a commodity, the lowest price offering should be chosen by default.

The slides you can download (and video you can watch) at the end of this post I first created for a health care account that had very basic CRM requirements. They wanted to manage and track contacts, activities, customers, and cases. Nothing most CRM systems didn’t have covered in 2003. The reason I put these slides together was the customer had an RFP process followed by a 3 hour demo from Microsoft and two other established, enterprise CRM vendors. The demo needed to cover 18 detailed use cases. The problem, then, was that with strict guidelines like that, there wasn’t much room to show differentiation. There’s only so many ways to show the creation and assignment of a task. Or creation and resolution of a case. How could we differentiate with such basic requirements? Especially when we had to present first? 

We’re all the same

My answer was to concede that all the vendors could meet all their requirements, so to make the best choice, they would need to dig deeper, and look beyond the use cases, to find the best solution for them. Given their investment in Microsoft’s productivity & collaboration suite (Exchange, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.), we emphasized how tight, sophisticated, and seamless integration would be with other systems they were already using. 

I should also add that after developing this deck from scratch, and presenting it the customer, a Health Care industry Global Black Belt within Microsoft asked me to present it to the Health Care leadership team on a monthly call. In addition to getting great feedback, the slides started appearing in some decks given by the industry team. To be clear, I DO NOT use these slides for most presentations. This is NOT my standard CRM deck. But, if the circumstances are right, you know it’s highly competitive, the requirements are fairly basic, and they are already invested in Modern Workplace, Azure, or both, this approach might enable you to focus your energy on the “One Microsoft” story as your differentiation, rather than CRM blocking-and-tackling where there isn’t any. 

The Deck

When the sales team heard I had 50+ slides for my 20 minute presentation, they naturally freaked out. I knew it would be fine because of how the deck was to be presented. This is a deck that is meant to be flown through quickly. The 17 slides shared here take about 5 minutes for an average of 17.64 seconds per slide. You may think that’s too fast, but it’s much slower than a typical TV show or movie. The speed is the point. We’re trying to cover a lot of ground quickly to make the point that, no matter what they might see from another vendor later, we also have it. NASCAR slide? Check. Compelling case studies? Check. Favorable analyst reports? Check. We covered it in our barrage of slides even if they don’t remember it.

Feel free to rearrange the slides however you’d like, but I tried to organize them in a semi-logical way:

• Customer-related assets: logo slides, case studies/videos, customer-facing websites you can visit with links in many cases to the assets in case the prospect wants to dig in after the presentation.
• Analyst-related assets: Gartner MQs and Forrester Waves.
• Industry-related assets: industry cloud home page, industry blog, industry podcast and summit if they exist.
• Product-related assets: customizable reports, customizable lists, customizable forms, customizable mobile apps, and drag-and-drop UIs. If you noticed the word customizable used over and over, that is intentional.
• Why Microsoft I kept in there as a placeholder because…

After the Deck

The most other important thing about these slides is what comes immediately after. The lazy interpretation of the deck is that “we’re (CRM vendors) all the same.” That’s kind of the point, but not exactly. If we do it right, we’re really trying to make two different points:

1. Core CRM is a commodity and there is little to no differentiation at the application level. They all do the basics, and if one has a bell, another has a whistle. None of the vendors have a silver bullet if you fairly evaluate the applications at a feature level. You have to convince the customer to look beyond CRM.
2. CRM vendors tend to rely on the same tried-and-true assets to sell their products: customer logos, case studies, analyst reports, product demos, etc. Here, too, there isn’t differentiation. Is a fair-minded customer going to make a decision based on a PDF case study? The slides are meant to neutralize all that so you can spend precious time on true differentiation.

This begs the question: then what makes you different? You have to be prepared to answer that immediately after these slides. For the healthcare company this was designed for, I offered three main areas of differentiation:

1. Microsoft’s business applications would play better with their existing stack. They were already using Exchange/Outlook, Excel, lots of Sharepoint, and in the process of migrating to Teams.
2. AI for All. Every vendor was going to show AI, a field Microsoft has been investing in for 30+ years, so the democratization of AI is where Microsoft has an edge today.
3. A 360° of your 360°. At the time, Salesforce’s Customer 360 was still new and vague so we wanted to emphasize that they really take a look under the covers of any CDP/Customer 360 solutions they were considering.

Your differentiators will likely be different depending on the industry, customer, and solutions they’re looking for. This is just a friendly suggestion that, should you use this strategy, make sure you make it clear how Microsoft is different immediately after you’ve explained they’re all the same.

If you want to see/hear how I present it, click on the video below:

https://youtu.be/W6nXDmEWY08

Extra Credit

This deck was built for a healthcare company, and it would need an hour or two of work to modify it for another vertical. By my count, 6 of the 17 slides are industry-agnostic (slides 1, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17) so you’re looking at having to update 11 for it to work for Retail, Manufacturing, or Financial Services. I haven’t done that work yet, but should this approach apply to an opportunity in one of those verticals, I will redo it and share it on this blog. If, however, you use this idea in a deal in one of those verticals, and you do the work, it’d be awesome if you could pay it forward by sharing it with me, and I will make sure to promote it while giving you all the credit.