CRM has been around for quite a while now, and has been a key item in many B2B marketing strategies. It's lost a little of its sexy veneer—no longer the hot buzzword of a decade or so ago. And, let's be honest, the promise of CRM has proved beyond the reach of most companies. Heck, CRM is DIFFICULT. You need to have a CRM system, for starters. And since the system doesn't do anything on its own, you actually need people to USE it. Assuming you can get sales people to share their contact lists, and that you find the time to scrub all those names that were collected at the last trade show, you have to get sales, marketing and operations to work together in managing the customer relationship.

Phew. A lot of hassle. Sure, it works for some organizations. Credit card companies seem to be pretty good at it. But for most places, the promise of a well-oiled CRM machine has proved beyond reach. Even companies that successfully implement a CRM system often stumble in practice, using it as a blunt tool to bombard customers and prospects with information of little relevance.

So, why don't we get rid of the term? Forget CRM. Let's start with a simpler premise. There are people we would like to talk to. We believe that we can offer them some value. Our job is to identify what we can say or offer that will be of value to THEM, and then to find a way to say it in which it will be heard by them. Too many B2B marketing programs lose track of this very simple foundation. If we have nothing to say, it doesn't matter whether we have a powerful CRM machine oiled and ready to go. So let's start with our audience, and what would interest them. If we can figure out something worthwhile to say—something that would intrigue them—then we can tackle the challenge of how to get it to them.

What would pique audience interest? Howard Gossage once said, "Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it's an ad." The same is true of any marketing. Cut through the marketing speak and find something interesting and relevant to say. Or, give something away—people like things. The value of the leads you receive, however, will be inversely proportional to the coolness factor of the gift. Cool gifts get lots of leads, most of whom just want the gift. White papers get few leads, but most of them actually want to read a white paper. You have to decide for yourself whether you need lots of leads or just a few of the right ones.

Let's say you figure out what you want to say. Next, how to say it? There are a few options here, depending on who you want to reach. If your company has no exposure to these audiences, you may need to rent a list or partner with a publication or another organization to get started. But, quite often someone has access to these people. For instance, do sales people call on them, do they go to trade shows, do they visit your distributors? If they do, then start at that point. Meet with the sales team and let them know how you can help them reach prospects by arming them with messages and materials. And ask how you can further support the effort, perhaps by sending a mailing out before and/or after their next meeting. Of course, to help them, you will need a name and address…

And, if you have the name and address, you could create a database. And, if you had a database, then you could come up with more things to say and could create a plan to say them regularly. And, you could invite the people in the database to provide some information in return for something. This would enable you to start to build profiles around the people in the database. You could use these profiles to find even more meaningful things to say to them. Perhaps the profiles can help you let sales or operations know which people they should pay more attention to. Perhaps you could even invite people in your database to suggest ways to improve the company’s products and services. Perhaps, you could do something that seems a lot like CRM…

But one step at a time. Do you know what to say yet?