Latest CRM fireside – Paul Redstone – Solica

October 25, 2007 Richard Boardman

This month’s interview is with Paul Redstone Managing Director of Tonbridge-based CRM reseller Solica Consulting Ltd

RB – Paul can you introduce yourself and how you first became involved with the CRM market place?

PR – I’m a serial entrepreneur. I worked for Logica for many years, before moving sectors and building up a pharmaceutical services business which we grew from two of us to 100 people in four years. It was within that business that I started using CRM technology actively. Then, when we sold the company and my lock-in expired, I retired for two years, got bored and started Solica combining skills in business and CRM.

RB – Can you give me some background about Solica?

We’re a pure CRM company, we don’t do anything else. Our main business is reselling CRM products and our main products are Goldmine, ACT, and Sage CRM. We have around 100 customers, based mostly in the UK but also overseas. We also have a niche business developing add-ons for these products, particularly for Goldmine which we sell mostly via resellers. We also re-sell and incorporate other company’s add-ons in our solutions, for example Inaport for integration services.

RB – How would you differentiate Solica as a reseller?

PR – The main area is in applying our expertise in the business side, particularly in the early phases of a project. We have grey hairs (or in my case not so many grey hairs these days!), and we aim to get inside our clients business, understand what they do and speak their language. That’s very important to ending up with a successful solution.

RB – There’s a trend amongst resellers towards selling both front office and back office solutions, do you see yourself heading in that direction?

PR – I think we will stay with the CRM side and there are two main reasons for that; the first is that there are very different skills and cultures involved in putting in a CRM system and an accounting system. The second reason is in terms of market potential: there is probably only 20% penetration of CRM systems in small and medium size enterprises, whereas with accounting systems there is near enough 100% penetration.

RB – You’ve been selling CRM systems for the last eight years, how do you see the market having changed in that time?

PR – When we started out there was a lot of educating clients about why they needed CRM. Even though that still applies to some extent, more commonly now people know that they need a CRM system. Clients are also expecting more from systems; eight years ago you could put in a system with very little configuration and no integration that would meet expectations. Now most systems have some level of integration, for example with accounts systems or web sites, and clients want to implement much more sophisticated solutions.

RB – What sort of changes are you seeing in the reseller community and people’s approaches to reselling CRM software?

PR – I think that as a market matures you are not selling a product but a solution. To sell a solution you need a portfolio of different technologies to meet different needs, so you are seeing resellers taking on a broader range of CRM software. Vendors who stick with one product only tend not to survive. There’s also a trend to putting together much more complex solutions composed of products and components from multiple vendors.

RB – Goldmine is what you started with and remains one of your core offerings, what made you select Goldmine?

PR – We nearly took on ACT, but decided at the time (8 years ago) that ACT wouldn’t meet the needs of some of the clients we were talking to. We found Goldmine a more extensible, configurable solution – in fact I think the gap between them has converged somewhat over recent years, as indeed have CRM systems from many different companies. Goldmine has excellent out-of-the-box capabilities and is sufficiently configurable to meet the needs of a large proportion of the clients we work with.

RB – FrontRange (the developers of Goldmine), I would imagine rather controversially, recently dropped support for their entry level version – Goldmine Standard Edition – how was that move perceived and how has it impacted you?

PR – We, and many other resellers, were very unhappy with that. Even though the market that the Standard Edition was targeted towards was relatively small for us, it was important because often a small initial system would develop into a large one later. If you are trying to meet a whole range of client needs you need a low end solution and that’s the reason we’ve now taken on ACT. Actually though, it’s had less impact for our business than we might have expected. If you look at the cost of CRM project, though the total costs of a Goldmine based solution have now risen by perhaps 30-50% at the five user level, clients have been prepared still to pay that – in most cases. The fact that other lower end solutions have also crept up in price has also helped.

RB – Over the years there’s been a raft of analyst reports indicating clients haven’t felt high levels of satisfaction with their CRM systems, do you think that’s something that’s got better with time, or is that still an issue?

PR – I think it has improved, at least in the business to business sector (most of our clients are B2B) where the core benefits of CRM are realised by just performing business processes more efficiently and better – not through some of the more subtle functions such as clever targeting which are more common in business to consumer applications. In many ways a CRM is to manual methods like a car is to a bicycle: both get you there but the car is faster and lets you go to places which would not be feasible on a bicycle. The core economic justication is in going faster and saving effort and costs, which is easier to quantify, rather than ‘better’ customer interaction.

RB – What do you see as the key challenges of implementing CRM technologies?

PR – Mostly it’s to do with business acceptance and integrating business processes. If the CRM is imposed on users and they don’t see the benefits, you won’t succeed. You have to get users buy-in and the failure to get this is the most common reason systems fail. There are, of course, challenges around selecting the right technology, and more importantly implementing it in the right way. It is also vital to remember that a CRM should evolve and probably evolve rapidly. A CRM is not like an accounting system, where the processes are well understood and largely static, and you could come back to a system five years after implementing it and find nothing’s changed. In CRM applications in marketing, sales and customer support business processes are much more fluid. CRM systems which work well initially will often fail later if they do not evolve – they become disconnected from the changed business processes.

RB – If you were sat with a client what’s the main advice you would give them about implementing CRM technology?

PR – Understand the motivation of end users and give them something that makes them want to use the CRM. Be rigorous about focusing on the key benefits of the system; sometimes clients get too hung up on areas that will have only minor impact, and don’t focus on the core potential benefits.

RB – What advice would you give about selecting the right technology or vendor?

PR – Those are two different aspects: from a technology perspective, try and define your requirements in as much detail as possible, and find the simplest technology that meets both your current and future needs. Also, involve the users in making the selection to maximize their buy-in. From a vendor or reseller perspective, ensure they have a depth of expertise with that solution and ensure there is a good cultural fit.

RB – Finally, what do you wish CRM software developers did better than they do no
w?

PR – I think key things are responding to developments in the market a little bit more quickly, I don’t think they respond to feedback from resellers or users as quick as they could do. And perhaps also not being radical enough in their development.