Going All Scarface All Over Everybody’s Social CRM

Forward: This post is in response to my friend, Michael Brito. He responded via Twitter to last week’s post about Social CRM and Reservoir Dogs with the following tweet:

Challenge: Accepted….

Goin’ All Scarface All Over Everyone’s Social CRM

Few American movie protagonists are as loved for being evil as Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma’s 1983 classic Tony Montana character. Brought to life by the enigmatic Al Pacino, the displaced Cuban-American worked himself up through the Miami cocaine racket trying to achieve what he felt was his right: the world.

Currently being quoted line-by-line by 1,457 college students as I write this, Scarface is a favorite among anyone who loves drama, drugs and big-ass guns, but what  does that have to do with your Social CRM plan or Social Business adoption?

(Behind the Curtain: At this point I could have taken the analogy one of two ways. The first way would be to approach it as Scarface as the Social CRM hero, starting with no support and, through perseverance, building a strong business and team. But ultimately I decided on the second way, as Scarface as a villainous mindset that will ultimately lead to destruction, as the way we’re going to proceed…)

“You Gotta Make The Money First. Then When You Get The Money, You Get The Power.”

As smart brands and businesses, we all want power. We chase it in the form of subscribers, purchases, click-throughs, conversions, fans and a whole mess of other numbers. But more than anything else, we chase money. That’s completely understandable, too.

A business’s sole purpose is to make enough revenue to keep the lights on and create a nice living for those behind the walls. Anyone who tells you the ultimate goal of every company is anything other than making enough money to run is lying to you. Social Business is still business, after all.

Tony Montana’s fall wasn’t the fault of his drive to succeed or the money he made. His fall was the result of when money and instant pleasure became the only focuses of his life and business. While a major goal of all businesses should be to make money, when that becomes the only goal, things start to fall apart.

Traditional CRMs are built around the singular principle that people are cattle that shit money and businesses need a tool that will tell them when, where and how to scoop it all up. It’s true that all your customers have money and you want some of that money, but it’s also true that all your customers have interests, dreams, families and lives too and the minute you forget that, you’ll lose that connection to it all.

“Nothing Exceeds Like Excess.”

One of the biggest pull-backs I hear about Social CRM and Social Business is that “facilitating all those conversations takes too long,” or “we don’t have the resources to start talking to all of our customers.”

It’s true, you don’t, but you do have the ability to find systems that will help you in those areas and ignoring those channels is doing nothing but backing you into that corner of instant gratification that no longer lasts. Customer mindsets have changed and you need to change alongside them.

The traditional CRM practices of interval contacts and cold calling will be argued up and down with their effectiveness and the high someone gets when a deal closes (kind of like snorting a pile of coke), but those that do don’t take into account all the people being pissed off in the process.

A friend of mine who speaks in the industry uses the following example and I think it’s great: “You could station a guy in your bank to punch everyone in the face who walks in and demand they open a savings account and that may work 1 out of 100 times, but you’re also pissing off 99 people in the process.”

“Say Goodnight To The Bad Guy”

It’s the bad guys that can’t look beyond instant gratification and money. Those are the people in these movies that end up falling. They may seem successful and they’ll have LOTS of evidence to show why their way is the right way, but in the end, they always fall. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you want to build a sustainable businesses.

Well, sustainable businesses can’t be sustained when they disconnect with a majority of their customer bases. That business plan is a continual race towards absolute zero.

Set yourself up to win and be the good guy in all this by subscribing to this blog and reading Michael Brito and learning about Social Business and Social CRM systems. It’s true that every day above ground is a good day, but we can all strive to make it good days for our clients as well by focusing on the theories and practices that make your business truly “social.”

So, say hello to my little friend can leave a comment.

Thoughts?

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