Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The ability to "copy and copy" is a good thing, but unfortunately it cannot be reused in the development of Chinese enterprise service tracks.

Just like CRM, countless Chinese "Salesforce" were born with "copying ability" before, which seems to drive the market to take off in the next second. However, the subsequent capital ebb, the inability of small and medium-sized customers to pay, and the inability of large enterprises to cope with all kinds of objective realities have crushed the beautiful wishes of China's "Salesforce."

"Copy" ability is not effective, change another "banknote" ability "make new," also by many manufacturers as a way.

After establishing this kind of thinking, the "new CRM" built on the basis of "banknote ability" frequently emerges. The start-up CRM manufacturers based on various capabilities such as socialization, mobility and AI begin to emerge, and even create a new category of SCRM unique to the Chinese market. The voice of "winning by surprise and overtaking in corners" is endless.

However, six years have passed quietly, except for three or four waves of new CRM, China CRM still has not ushered in rocket-like progress. In the recently released Gartner SFA Magic Quadrant evaluation, Chinese manufacturers are only easy to sell, which means that most manufacturers '"new" strategy seems to have failed.

So how does CRM develop in China?

How to catch up with international products?

Shi Yanze, founder of Sales Easy, believes that CRM is like a straight-line race. There is no shortcut to overtake in corners, and strange moves cannot control the enemy in one move. Every step needs to be considered based on customer needs. Only when customers succeed, the enterprise service brand that cooperates with them will succeed.

CRM does this not by understanding the industry better than customers, but by solving customer business problems, process problems, and optimizing the user experience.

Do not look at the answer, right? Learning from predecessors, this is a good idea, but do not consider the differences in real problems, blindly copy the solutions of predecessors, this is like copying the answers to different problems, can be correct is new.

However, although the truth is simple and easy to understand, there are countless histories to refer to, but on the development of CRM track in China, there are still many manufacturers, still imitating the products of overseas well-known manufacturers, for their own title of successful overseas competitors to compete in the market.

"After so many years of entrepreneurship, I have really seen too many friends being crowned with the name of Salesforce in China. Even if the functional names of many products are directly translated into English, they are Salesforce in Chinese version, but the question is whether Salesforce's product functions are really suitable for the Chinese market? They obviously don't realize this problem. "Shi Yanze said.

In his view, China is the most complex market in the global enterprise service software, and countless overseas famous SaaS products have been lost here. The main reason for this phenomenon is that they are mostly functional products, but Chinese enterprises need business products.

In terms of development, whether large enterprises or small, medium and micro enterprises in the European and American markets, they are all a set of standardized processes, maintaining the same actions in many links, and also clear what to do next. They are recognized for the process logic of thinking,"Put a nail in the wall and find a hammer yourself."

Therefore, for overseas enterprises, in the case of process determination, it is good to find corresponding functional products to solve which demand.

Chinese enterprises are different. Shi Yanze said that through two distinct experiences of overseas work and domestic entrepreneurship, he can obviously perceive Chinese enterprises. In the previous stage of pursuing growth, he neglected the precipitation and summary of processes. Now entering the period of high-quality growth, the perceived demand is which business is "painful" and needs to reduce cost and increase efficiency.

However, the problem is that most Chinese enterprises are not clear about the "pain" and do not understand how to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Under this unclear "pain" demand, functional products have little effect and cannot solve business problems, so it is not surprising that when countless functional "Chinese version Salesforce" appear one after another, another wave is photographed on the beach named "failure."

In addition, every time these "competitors" appear, they will basically compete in a low-price and bad way, stirring up the market that is not very clear, making the situation of "bad money driving out good money" often happen, but also making the enterprise customers on the demand side unable to raise confidence in the ability of CRM in China.

This has also prompted Chinese enterprises to make a sound of "it doesn't matter what kind of product it is, solving problems is a good product".

Shi Yanze believes that to serve Chinese enterprises well, it is necessary to make a business-oriented CRM that can help enterprises refine processes and provide tools for process pain points. To achieve such goals, PaaS is imperative.

In fact, PaaS has good system connectivity and industry experience abstraction ability, which can visualize all the relatively vague business development processes of enterprises online, so that products can record the business development steps through data accumulation, so as to classify the processes in detail and discover pain points in the processes.

In addition, PaaS has powerful function extensibility, which enables products to respond quickly to the summarized process problems and form corresponding solution functions, so as to solve the problem of "business pain" of Chinese enterprises.

Therefore, in summary, in order to meet the business needs of Chinese enterprises, it is necessary to solve business online and process online, and PaaS is the foundation for both.

II. Technology follows the trend and cannot solve the fundamental pain point. This is not an exaggeration. In the domestic ToB software circle, many people believe in innovation miracles, naturally including CRM manufacturers who rely on "innovation" to seek the market.

At the beginning of Salesforce, Marc Benioff chose to transmit the application purely via the Internet and access it directly through the browser, and suddenly entered the "SaaS", thus harvesting the story of huge market achievements, which has inspired countless start-ups.

Indeed, innovation is important. ToB industry headlines have been mentioned in previous articles, innovation point is often a good "entry point," in the rapid establishment of the first batch of users, and this short-term foothold in the market.

For example, mobile CRM gives users the ability to operate portability anytime and anywhere; connected CRM gives users more efficient collaboration capabilities; social-based SCRM, which accesses communities through the concept of extending private domains, achieving more efficient one-touch, two-time conversion effects.

Including AI CRM, it further improves the product emphasis on "strong control" effect, regardless of the user experience problem, through intelligent recommendation, summary, reduce the user's work content, improve the convenience of work.

These changes are innovative points, but also indeed with a brand-new look, short-term harvest of a wave of market recognition, become VC eyes sexy single point, industry eyes corner overtaking opportunities.

However, the problem is that these sexy single points are "value-added points" in the Chinese market, which is the icing on the cake of a good CRM product. After the customer purchases, the user is indeed "cool" at a certain point, but in retrospect, technology has not been combined with business processes to help the intelligent management of enterprises.

This also means that business problems are still there and process problems have not been solved.

Shi Yanze said that CRM core solution is customer relationship management problem. From mining customers to obtaining clues, then forming orders, and finally completing the transaction process is the top priority of this management system. In the Chinese market, we should first do a good job in the basic process, instead of focusing on a single point. After meeting the management needs first, we should optimize the user experience corresponding to a single point, and improve the online and intelligent new addition of people.

As we all know, Sales Easy is the first batch of mobile and connected CRM products in China. It used to be a sexy single-point CRM representative. However, after booming in the early stage and encountering expansion barriers in the middle stage, they realized this problem. While focusing on innovation, they are also developing PaaS.

It is also aware of the importance of basic online processes, improved this part of capabilities, and accumulated in the "value-added point" of innovation. In 2017, sales easily became the first manufacturer in China to be listed in Gartner SFA Magic Quadrant.

After that, sales easy, which has the basic ability of complete process online, also continues to consider the importance of user experience, and constantly extends towards socialization, collaboration and intelligence.

For example, cooperate with enterprise WeChat, deepen their own connection and social construction through the natural and powerful community ability of enterprise WeChat. At the same time, product Mini programs will be integrated into enterprise WeChat, and the portability of product use will be enhanced while further deepening the connection between oneself and social surface through fragmentation. Make yourself a leading, new enterprise app.

In addition, in terms of intelligence, Sales Yi has also made great efforts. In the 2022 Gartner SFA Magic Quadrant evaluation, Sales Yi's achievements in enhancing CRM intelligent analysis and sales process automation with artificial intelligence technology were highly rated, among which visual analysis ability ranked first together with Sales Yi's traditional strong ability Complex Product Configuration Quotation (CPQ).

Shi Yanze said that intelligence is the key technology to strengthen enterprises to realize digital CRM value perception and value output. It can improve the automation level of sales links, help sales to play a higher quality ability, and efficiently complete signing orders, which is very needed by enterprises, so we must do it well.

And this is back to the correct logic of "customer-centric," that only when customers succeed will the enterprise service brand they work with succeed.

Of course, from Gartner's list of candidates, it can be seen that such excellent local CRM as Sales Easy is only a case, and there are still very few close levels in the market.

Third, the gap with international manufacturers is still there, but there is hope that the performance of China CRM in expanding the market has always been somewhat unsatisfactory, and the industry frequently sighs for it, which has become more and more obvious in the cold winter of the market today.

According to ToB industry headline observation, affected by the big environmental changes, repeated epidemic situation, calm of capital and cold silence of the market, the overall growth of many local CRM manufacturers slowed down, revenue decreased, losses expanded, and renewal rate was less than expected. For a time, the sound of CRM in China has been exhausted.

But even so, we do not have to lose confidence in the development of CRM in China.

In terms of market environment, many industries have adverse market impact due to repeated epidemic diseases and changes in international forms. CRM in China is not a case. However, because everyone is experiencing cold winter, the demand for digital upgrading of enterprises has become strong, and the reverse cycle development of CRM industry is obvious.

Focusing on revenue growth again, according to normal business logic, the second quarter of each year is the key market cultivation period of CRM in the middle of the year, which can be affected by the environment, and the short-term decline of growth is a normal phenomenon.

Even so, Sales Easy and other excellent SaaS companies have demonstrated their ability to withstand cycles, achieving good revenue growth in the first half of the year, simultaneously adjusting their thinking and strategy in the face of the market, and more clearly understanding how to develop their business is a benign business.

As for capabilities, it is true that there is still a gap between China's CRM products and international heads, but through these years of deep market cultivation and hard work, China's CRM has been able to keep up with their pace, and is more suitable for the characteristics of the Chinese market demand, with hope of catching up.

For example, in recent years, a large number of enterprises have put down SAP and Salesforce and chosen CRM in China. Enterprises such as Shanghai Electric, Hikvision, Lenovo, Shengu Group and Schneider have seen the rise of CRM in China and the supplement of product and service capabilities, and have chosen Sales Easy as an alternative partner.

Other Chinese CRM brands have also gained favor from large enterprises such as China Putian, Netease Youdao and Digital China in recent years.

In addition, China CRM has also begun to serve the business of overseas enterprises, and even compete with international friends in overseas markets.

ToB industry headlines learned that the current sales easy Southeast Asia branch has been in the local service Huawei cloud, Prudential Mega Life, UKISS, GreaterHeat, Firmus and other enterprises.

At the same time, Huawei Cloud's excellent product sales ability attracted Huawei Cloud's attention and became an important strategic partner in the Southeast Asian market, and jointly launched a one-stop SaaS solution to jointly explore overseas markets and help local enterprises solve the challenges encountered in traditional marketing and customer management.

The rise of CRM in China and the overtaking of curves do not exist. They can only move forward step by step. Only by attaching importance to innovation and continuous innovation can they become the existence side by side with international giants on this straight track.

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