Craig M. Jamieson’s comprehensive guide to building a successful social CRM strategy is focused on small businesses. Download your free excerpt here.

The era of small business social CRM is upon us. Can you keep up?

Your business and customers have both evolved dramatically over the past several years. Much of this has to do with the explosion of the Internet and of social media. Quite simply, buyer behaviors have changed, and smart businesses must learn to adapt to these changes.

Whereas customers used to rely on your business and your sales and marketing staff to educate them on your product or service, many of these buyers are now doing this research on their own. They are going online, and even a simple Google search will provide them with much of the information that they seek. Moreover, they are asking and getting product recommendations from friends, family, and from people whom they know and trust, and they are using social networking as the preferred platform to secure these. This book covers:

• Exploring the key benefits of social CRM for small businesses
• Laying the groundwork for social CRM
• How to define your social CRM needs prior to any investments
• Choosing an implementing your social CRM
• Training and best social CRM services
• Craig M. Jamieson’s book is a great guide for social networking for your new buyer. Download this free excerpt now!

Praise for The Small Business’ Guide to Social CRM

This book does a fantastic job of describing why every small business needs to build its brand and grow its business by connecting with customers who matter to turn connections into conversations and relationships into revenue.

Jon Ferrara
CEO of Nimble

Learn firsthand how a fast-growth startup grew sales 200% in the first six months with referral selling.

Referral selling is all about helping you acquire new customers

Referral selling is an effective sales strategy because it utilizes a crucial asset: your past and existing customers. In this ebook, Noel Ledesma, co-founder of fast-growth startup Likeable Advertising, shares how he used referral selling to achieve success. This ebook covers:

• Getting started with referral selling
• Hiring the best people
• Managing customer relationships

Read it through, and you’ll know the skills and tactics necessary to implement and roll out referral selling at your organization, and take it to the next level.

If you’re a member of a sales force, or in sales management, there is always practical information you must know. You need to know as much as possible about your own products. You need to have a firm grounding about your particular industry and market. Today especially you must have as much insight as possible into your prospect companies, their buying processes and their decision makers.

But what about the overall economic environment in which you operate? Seen or unseen, that environment has principles operating every minute of every day. The very idea of sales is actually rooted in economic theory. And while it may seem that such theory would constitute very dry reading, be a struggle to understand and really not needed or desired to operate in the day-to-day sales environment, the exact opposite is true. These principles are in fact easily grasped—and the vision they provide can go a long way to assisting you in understanding the background of your very existence within the business world.

What is Sunk Cost, and What Do You Need to Know About It?

Sunk costs are costs that your company has already invested in products or services that must now be profitably recovered through your sales efforts. What does this all mean on the level of the sales force?

Sales Force, Sales Management and the Opportunity Cost

Opportunity cost is the investment your company must make to achieve a sale, and it has a bearing on every company activity associated with a sales cycle.

Subjective Value: The Key to Insight Selling

Subjective value means the perceived value of your product or service in the mind of the prospect. In sales, subjective value is everything.

Sales Management: What Comparative Advantage Can Do For You

Comparative advantage has an application within the realm of sales management: optimizing a sales force based on differing strengths of salespeople.

Sustainable Value Means Sales Force Effectiveness

Sustainable value has an intrinsic application to commerce, the sales force, and in fact personal lives and even the activities of nations.

Salespeople as Entrepreneurs: What You Really Mean to the World

As a salesperson, you have most likely given little thought to what your activities might mean to the world at large. Believe it or not your role as a salesperson—as an “entrepreneur within the enterprise”—has a more profound significance than you might think.

Download The Principles of Entrepreneurs: How Precise Economic Philosophy Empowers Sales now.

What is a manifesto, and why have we, the developer of a CRM solution, created one?

A manifesto is defined by the dictionary as “a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives.” This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company.

Pipeliner CRM is many things. It is the most visual CRM on the market–we call it Instant Intelligence, Visualized. It is the first CRM that truly empowers salespeople, and has as its goal the freeing of salespeople so that they can truly flourish and succeed.

But why are we really here? Are we here just to develop and sell a CRM application?

No. Behind the development of that CRM application–and, in fact, behind everything we do–we have a real cause.

There are 5 basic parts to our Manifesto.

1. The Driving Force of Globalization and the Digital World

There is a fundamental transformation happening—actually one that’s been happening for a number of years now but which has reached mammoth proportions and only continues. That is the evolution of the digital world.

A primary focus of the digital world is processes. Another very important focus is the harnessing and use of data trends.

But there is another, radical change brought about by the digital world that must be dealt with head-on, as it will overrun anyone who doesn’t. While the whole world has become interconnected, that means that all the information coming from everywhere is literally available to everyone, practically as soon as it is released. What kind of information overload can that lead to? And what is the solution?

There is also a major overload and complexity in sales–and that is where Pipeliner CRM comes in.

2. Trade is Essential to Growth and Economic Stability

It has been pointed out by several leaders in the Austrian School of Economics over the last 150 years that trade has a peacekeeping element. 2 parties engaged in trade cannot engage in war. If they do, the trade, which is benefiting both sides, ceases. Hence you can see that trade, in addition to many other benefits, greatly assists in keeping peace.

You might notice that today there is a great amount of attention not just on trade, but on fair trade. Fair trade would mean honesty—fairness to people purchasing the product or service, and fairness within the marketplace. But it also includes fair wages to the employees of producers, and benefit to the environment in which products are produced. Using this standard, you can see how vitally important fair trade is in today’s world, in which not only war is a threat, but also environmental ruin and depletion of resources.

How does sales fit into all of this? Simple: Trade is conducted by salespeople. As you might see, salespeople are, in fact, a major force in keeping peace throughout the world.

And Pipeliner is there to fully empower them the whole way.

3. The Positive Sales R(Evolution)

At Pipeliner, our main focus has never been to make it more possible to control salespeople (as seemed to be the mission of many CRM applications), but to empower them and, with every release, make it increasingly more possible for them to sell.

Today, the honest salespeople—whom we believe are in the far majority—are winning out. Why? The broad proliferation of the internet has brought transparency to commerce, business…and salespeople.

In an effort to assist the majority of salespeople—the honest ones—in today’s interconnected world, we came up with what we call today’s Network Selling Model. In Network Selling, the elements shared between the seller and the buyer are those things on which they both must firmly agree for the sale to be a total success and, more importantly, for further successes to follow.

Pipeliner CRM is a major component in supporting Network Selling.

4. Only Sound Education Brings Future Prosperity

To say the least, we are big believers in education—not just about our product, but about sales, leadership and anything else relevant to the world of business in which we can help. Most of our materials are provided free of charge—we really want to help educate and change the business world for the better.

In looking through our educational materials, you’ll see that they are totally geared toward application. If you read or learn something, we believe you should be able to turn around and apply it. Otherwise, why learn it? We believe that this is the future of education in general—it will move away from being so theory-oriented and will be completely structured around applicability.

5. The Pipeliner Philosophy Wheel

We think it is crucially important to describe our philosophy because our customer, our partner, the user engaging with us, should understand the underlying concepts that drive Pipeliner. If you understand the underlying concepts, it will empower you to make even better use of the software.

Everything we do is visual–hence we have also created our philosophy wheel to better communicate our foundational philosophy

Author Jeanne Bliss writes the customer experience roadmap to transform your business and culture.

Chapter 1: The Chief Customer Officer Role Is Clarity

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 gives you a proven framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies around the world.

And it will take years off your learning curve.

Written by Jeanne Bliss, a CCO practitioner for over twenty years, and pre-eminent thought leader on the role of the Customer Leadership Executive and customer experience, this book outlines in detail Jeanne’s Five-Competency Model. The same model Jeanne uses to coach the C-Suite, Chief Customer Officers, and Vice Presidents of Customer Experience globally. Using her framework, you will discover how to:

1. Manage and Honor Customers as Assets
2. Align Around Experience
3. Build a Customer Listening Path
4. Embed Experience Reliability and Innovation
5. Lead One Company Accountability, Leadership & Decision Making

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 will quickly get you into action with a united leadership team, shifting your business focus to earning the right to growth, by improving customers’ lives. In Chief Customer Officer 2.0, Jeanne Bliss provides practical guidance on how to embed the Five Competencies into the way your company develops products, goes to market, enables and rewards people, and conducts annual planning. And she fearlessly shares her leadership tools and ‘recipe cards’ developed over thirty-years as a Chief Customer Officer practitioner and coach, to support and enable your business transformation.

Including over forty case studies of how Chief Customer Officers around the world embed these five competencies, this is the book you have been waiting for. The book that tells it like it really is and gives you the framework to begin to build your customer-driven growth engine — today.

If Jeanne Bliss hadn’t written her first book, I wouldn’t be in the role I have today. Now, ten years later, she continues to provide leading guidance for Chief Customer Officers.

Jeb Dasteel
Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, Oracle

It’s really very simple: Anyone in business should be thinking about customers, and anyone thinking about customers should be reading Jeanne Bliss.

Don Peppers
Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

No one knows more about the Customer Experience Leadership Role than Jeanne Bliss. Buy this book to jump-start your learning, get traction and transform your business.

Scott Dille
Senior Vice President and Director of Client and Employee Experience at Northern Trust

Download the first chapter of Jeanne’s book, free!

Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.