Requests

Dirk Van den Poel, Program Director, Ghent University and John Held from SPSS reply to a question -- How to become a CRM Pre-Sales Consultant?

Nadeem Khwaja posed this question in KDnuggets News 01:17, Aug 21:

How to become a CRM Pre-Sales Consultant?

I want to become CRM Pre-Sales consultant. I am not looking for short courses, they are expensive. I need a full time course in a class room and instructor led, which could give me complete insight of CRM technology and help me to work as CRM pre-sales consultant.

I can dedicate my time and money to learn some thing full time. Can I can do these courses in UK or USA?

Here are two answers I got. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

-- From: Dirk Van den Poel dirk.vandenpoel@rug.ac.be Subject: REPLY TO: How to become a CRM Pre-Sales Consultant? Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:54:35 +0200

Dear Nadeem,

We are offering a full-time one-year program 'Master in Marketing Analysis and Planning' at Ghent University, Belgium. This master covers all important aspects about CRM, market(ing) research, database marketing, ...

Some specific deliverables include: at the end of the year, you will possess SAS-programming skills, know how to use SQL to answer 'interesting' marketing questions, calculate LTV's (customer life-time value), use the newest techniques for data mining (including association rules, neural networks, ...). Moreover, you will have completed a real-life project for a real company (3 months part time & 3 months full time). Our program runs from Oct. 1st - June 30th.

Additional information, admission requirements (!!!), and the tuition fee (469 EURO for the full year, this is not a typo, nor is it an appreciation of the quality) are discussed in our pdf-brochure. This brochure as well as additional practical information is available at our website: http://fetew.rug.ac.be/map.htm

Best regards,

Dirk Van den Poel Program Director Master in Marketing Analysis and Planning Ghent University map@rug.ac.be or +32 9 264 35 22

-- From: Held, John held@spss.com To: editor editor Subject: Subject: How to become a CRM Pre-Sales Consultant? Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 11:52:27 -0500

I'll answer from my own perspective, which is probably similar to others on this forum; that is I am approaching CRM from an analytical perspective. There are plenty of companies where CRM analytics are an afterthought; CRM is a much-abused term.

Basically you need knowledge of 3 things to be able to sell software designed or tailored to solve CRM problems.  First, since you are in a software field you need knowledge of base technologies such as databases, and depending on what you are selling, some familiarity with analytics, which is typically OLAP and some exposure to SPSS or related analytical offerings for reporting and segmentation and predictive modeling.  If you'd used a more black-box style analytical tool, that would help somewhat.  What comes next depends a lot on the vendor you work for: some sales require heavy customization of a demo for prospectsthat could mean either learning and configuring a tool, or could mean Java or Visual Basic coding of custom screens. That's four technical skills: Database, OLAP, analytics and possibly some kind of light programming. 

Second you need some business familiarity.  I think database marketing is a fantastic way to segue into CRM, although you'll read confusing things such as CRM is commonly thought to have nothing to do with marketing,   Call center and web are other customer touch-points that are sold as CRM.  Business familiarity with these 3 ways of touching customers is pretty important.  I took a class on interactive marketing through Depaul  University  in Chicago that gave a good survey on major business issues and trends among these thee touch-points.

The last thing is to have some familiarity with both the 1:1 concepts espoused by Peppers and Rogers and other writers, Patricia Seybold and others.  I have a hard time with these writers since they are discussing vast shifts in the way companies interact with their customers and are very much evangelists of their respective views.  Some people tend to get religious about these concepts, independent of how they could feasibly be carried out, not to mention deliver value in proportion to their cost.  Nonetheless, part of pushing through a CRM initiative is some very difficult and expensive choices and companies use the excitement of ideas of CRM gurus to get various camps unified around large and sometimes painful changes.  I would add to the list a guy named Arthur Hughes as well as a lot of ideas he publishes have been part of the CRM strategy lingo, but are much more commonsense.

As far as which of these will be most important, it really depends on the company you are speaking with.  All will put some emphasis on knowing the technology, but knowing the business and the concepts is important, too.  I wish I could tell you there is a course that covers it all, but there is surely not. No matter what track you take, there will be lots and lots of self-learning involved.