Attaining true market leadership in a customer-driven age

Oracle believes that leadership can be summed up by two changes you need to make to consistently outperform your competitors. You have to empower your employees to continuously improve how you do business and you have to enable your business to be responsive to the many changes and opportunities that come yourway. Simple, right? You are probably saying to yourself, "Well hold on, they told me on-going profitability was the hard part."

It is and it isn't. Oracle helps companies every day become better run, more profitable businesses and leaders in their industries, but true leadership has a unique set of challenges. Even the best-managed and best-intentioned companies end up with many broken business processes. From a management standpoint, it's nearly impossible to review processes often enough to ensure they incorporate your best ideas.

Let's face it, business is moving at an incredibly quick pace. How you make money today is not how you'll make money tomorrow. If you are a cell phone service provider, tomorrow you may be making more money in downloadable games and videos than minutes. If you are a bank, your most profitable product tomorrow may be an insurance offering from a bank you haven't even acquired yet or maybe even one you never acquire but just partner with. If you are a shoe manufacturer, your most popular and profitable shoe style next year may be one that your prosumers haven't even submitted a design for yet on your Web site. To be a true leader you really need to rethink how your business interacts with your customers.

OK, but this all sounds hard. Your employees today may be too overwhelmed with day-to-day work to help you think about how to take advantage of next year's opportunities. Your IT staff may still be reeling from the effects of your last acquisition. You may be struggling just to see your customers and their activity patterns through the many different ways they could potentially interact with you and the myriad systems you now have.

Like most things that sound hard, the solution lies in breaking the challenge down. As the examples suggest, the answer is in readying your organization to hear, digest, and proactively plan for what your best customers and prospects want to do next, all while keeping them delighted in the present. Here's a key: If yours is like most companies, it probably has hundreds or even thousands of employees whose job it is to work with customers every day—marketing to them, selling them things, taking their orders, providing service, answering their questions. What if these employees had better tools and processes to proactively address what customers are telling them? And what if they were always armed with the insight of your best employees?

We'd like to suggest that your solution is in your CRM business practices. Businesspractices? You thought that was software. Well the right CRM software helps you empower your employees to continuously improve how you do business and enable your business to be more responsive to the opportunities that appear in front of you. To leverage CRM software to improve your CRM business practices, however, you'll need to start by absorbing the concept that not all CRM software is created equal, or for that matter on the same evolutionary path.