I was incredulous. This was the number my wife was supposed to call if there was a burglary attempt while I was out of town! Now I deal with a local company, and my representative is good ole’ Alan. The last time I called him with a problem, he said, “Oh, yeah—that’s the switch over by the window. It’s always been a problem. I’ll stop by on my way home tonight.”

Give me high touch over high tech.

Bankers. Where do I start? I have a credit card from a bank that is now one of the largest in the United States. They were nice enough to give it to me when I graduated from college and had no money (this is either a great investment in me or terrible credit checking, but I’m glad to have the card). I’ve kept it for 32 years. Today, when I put that card into an ATM machine, the very first question the machine asks me is what language I speak. Thirty-two years and they don’t even know which language I speak? How is that for customer intimacy?

When I go in and speak to a teller face-to-face, the first thing he asks me is if I have photo identification. For 20 years in Atlanta I couldn’t get a banker to learn my name. I was running a large region for a major software company where we had a new hire almost every other week. I could have brought in a lot of nice accounts. But not once did I ever have a branch banker come out of his cave in the back to learn my name.

Much less, not one of those bankers — until this year — learned my business and provided advice on how to run it. Finally, I found a banker I like: Jim Pope of Ironstone Bank. He knows me, has invited me to play golf, and checks on me to ask about my business and my needs. I actually walked into the bank building a few weeks ago and was greeted across the lobby by Caren Lightfoot from behind the teller window. I asked to see one of the executives, but when she learned what my issue was (a deposit and a check written at the same time), she handled it herself. She said, “I know your relationship with the bank and what other funds you have. We’ll be fine.” I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Access to information made it possible, but a caring person made it happen.

When I need something or know that someone is looking for a good banker, I have somebody to call. This is why small banks are booming. When it comes to relationships, they are actually doing what the big banks say they do in their ads. My insurance agent is next. He thinks a relationship is sending calendars and refrigerator magnets once a year.

The reason many CRM systems have been implemented poorly is that their objective has been a lie. It was never about customers or relationships in the first place.

The true objective when it comes to many of these systems is lowering costs. The idea is that if you can move a customer to a call center from a sales call, your cost drops from $200 to around $25. Even better, if you can move the customer out of the call center and onto the Web, it drops to about 17 cents. Lowering costs in this age of the “China effect”—the epidemic of cost containment — means that in some cases companies have become more efficient at providing Internet or call-center service for very low margin accounts.

But the disease has spread over to large-margin relationships where companies are treating their best business customers like commodities, making them wait in long hold lines. “Please wait while our agents are servicing other customers” often means “We haven’t hired enough people to take care of our clients, so you have to wait.”

The next objective of the CRM system has been to get the “little black book” out of the heads of salespeople and into the computer so that, if and when the salespeople leave, they don’t take their names and contacts with them. In reality, if they have built relationships with these contacts, they still take the relationships with them.

Whenever you have turnover in your sales force — on your side or on the client’s side — emotional bank accounts, as referred to by Stephen Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, go back to zero.

The real issue is turnover. If companies spent a fraction of the money solving their sales turnover problem that they do trying to automate their sales force to solve customer problems, they might start to build some real relationships.

But getting all the information and contacts into the computer is designed so that no one person has to have a relationship with the client. We can swap people out as the call centers change shifts. In direct field sales and marketing, though, capturing the little black book and ignoring the turnover problem simply won’t work.

While it is true that information is important to relationships, it is only a tool. There are missing links between our objective in the account — account dominance or preferred vendor status — and an information tool (see Figure 7–1).

Let’s work backwards: If you want to dominate an account, what the client wants is trust. Trust is built over time. Relationships are built over time. In complex sales, people buy from people—not computers. You can sell online, but not if you want trust. Not if you want account dominance.

If you want to sell commodities, sell them over the Web and service them with a call center — the same for noncompetitive reorders. But strategic business-to-business (B2B) services and products include greater career risk to the buyer and therefore require trust. In order to maintain trust, you need continuity of the relationship, yet sales turnover in the high-tech industry averages around 30 percent per year.

A CRM system is a repository for information — not a process. Information about problem resolution and purchasing history is very important, but only to the degree that it builds trust and continuity so that clients don’t have to constantly train new salespeople on how to sell to them. In addition to this continuity, the company has to have delivered value because performance on the last sale is the gateway to repeat business. When your product or solution is performing and producing results and value — and you have documented those results — then risk begins to lower.

As risk lowers, trust goes up. This is why IBM was able to sell its products for such a premium in the 1980s. The company lowered risk for IT directors. In order to do this, you have to have a sales process that rewards not just customer satisfaction but also customer loyalty. And there is a big gap between the two.

In some studies, there is as much as a 40 percent gap between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Satisfied customers will still buy from somebody else. As Herb Cohen, the great negotiating trainer, said in one of his speeches, “They care, but not that much.”