Why gCRM?

Because Google is getting serious about the enterprise. I believe it is just a matter of time that they will release a CRM application. How serious is Google’s enterprise? Leading VCs are taking notice: Brad Feld: My Increasing Love Affair With Google Apps.

CRM is a logical next step, because of the transactional nature of CRM. Every contact, prospect, account, incident and opportunity are a part of a transaction. A contact point. An opportunity to extend the company message, brand and reputation. Most of those transactions happen today in email. Even social tools like Twitter or real time chat can be configured to work in an email paradigm. Enterprises are realizing that the Office functionality can be handled by Google Docs. When that hits a critical mass, the early adopters will start looking for Google Docs extensions. Google Apps has CRM partners such as Zoho, Applane which offer traditional CRM products. Zoho’s CRM is robust, however, its other products are Google Docs competitors. Applane offers CRM geared towards the sales lifecycle, which from the surface it looks like it does well. The approach, however, is not the holistic marketing, sales and service CRM approach seen in more robust CRM applications like Dynamics, Sugar and Salesforce. CRM is transactional in nature and email is transactional. When enough enterprises use gMail, it can become a platform for more robust, and profitable, applications.

Google clearly sees this. They have even posted a job listing. Google: Enterprise CRM Systems Business Analyst Job Post. Yes, this is internal (for now). If you were Google would you broadcast that you are building through your job postings? I would more likely build a CRM tool in-house and then turn it into a releasable product. Based on the skill set, I have to say that even the “CRM salt” in me is intrigued.

So what does Google need that they do not have today? I see three big pieces. Process across marketing, sales and service, sales pipeline and forecasting and integration to back-end systems. Process is a must. Organizations turn to a CRM system to give them best practices and process flows that they do not have. In my experience, all CRM clients are looking to improve process through technology — not the other way around. Process for marketing, sales and services organizations are very different, but all have a common thread of measuring the cost per call (also called contact, customer, or incident). Sales pipeline and forecasting is an extension of process, but it needs to be more flexible and dead simple to configure. Why? Because the average VP of Sales is on the job 19 months. Every new VP of Sales will want to be measured by his or her own agreed to metrics, not by the old metrics that got the last VP ousted. This is very common and will be so for the foreseeable future. Integration with back-end systems is one of the constants in CRM. This can be any system from ACD call routers to an ERP system. I have been involved with 30 or so CRM deployments, integration has played a part in every single one. Google will need to consider how to approach these three critical pieces and make the robust and flexible enough to gather the market traction that gMail and Goggle Docs are beginning to see.

gCRM will happen.