 | You make money in business by building the right technology and building it around a people-focused environment. |  |
In fact, even while he notes that his company's focus is the technology relating to CRM and other systems, and while he agrees that there should be a high level of integration among CRM, supply chain management, ERP applications and all the rest, O'Gara stresses the issue of people and culture. "Anything you do has a connected value," he says. "It goes up the pipe to your suppliers and down the pipe to your customers." The object is to balance the needs of all—including your own—making a sacrifice in the short term to boost the long term.
"The goal is to keep the customer coming back. Retention and upselling are 10 times easier than finding a new customer," says O'Gara. As business development manager, he'll every so often talk to someone who's been oversold on GoldMine, perhaps by someone at a retail store who was never properly trained on its capabilities, he says. Because FrontRange's name is on the box, he gets the call. "When they're yelling at me about the money they lost, I could just say caveat emptor and be done with it. But instead I have someone from the customer support team call him back. Guess what? We eat up any profit we would have made solving his problem, but now we have a long-term customer."
More frequently, O'Gara has to adjudicate between a customer and a partner, and that's where his relationship management skills really come into play. When an irate customer calls, he listens to the problem and says he'll look into it. Then he tries to find out who's responsible. "If we've made the mistake, we correct it. If it looks like a partner made the mistake, I get their side of the story," he says. That's important because you have to balance respect for your partner with concern for your customer. You don't want to embarrass your partner first by confronting his mistake and then rehashing it in front of the customer. "It's usually a misunderstanding, so once you have the facts, you set up a three-way conversation to figure out how to fix it."
"In a way, it all comes down to the Golden Rule: Treat people as you want to be treated. Just as it's important not to have siloed applications for different kinds of management, it's important to remember that you are not a silo in the value chain. What you do and how you behave affect not only your partners and customers, but also your employees. In fact, O'Gara believes that how you treat your employees models how they're going to treat your customers. "I would advise keeping a picture of your mother on your desk," he chuckles, "just to remind yourself not to do anything that you wouldn't want her to witness."
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