As far as I am concerned, having a website without having a CRM/sales system behind it is like having a shopfront with no shop. People can view your products, but they can’t offload their hard earned cash. Why do that to yourself?

Unfortunately it seems that companies need to literally see people banging on the store door (via hits, emails, phone calls etc.) before they will open the store. How many customers have you missed in that time? You’re paying for the store location, so why not fit it out inside?

Salesforce announced at Dreamforce that they are taking this view to another level. Your website should be linked into the core of your company. Every process your company runs should be accessible (and deliver value) to the customer at all times. Zdnet give it good coverage, but I think Smoothspan explains it best. The basic premise is know your customers, and then deliver the best experience you can to them. CRM’s have always tried to get close, but it requires a company to be completely online and committed.

It is all happening in the world of Australian Online RealEstate tonight! The Realestate.com.au board have announced the immediate departure of their long serving (since 2001) CEO, Simon Baker. This was a huge surprise, although the fact that he sent out about 50 LinkedIn recommendation requests to people (myself included) late Friday night should have been a bit of a warning. Anyway at least Domain isn’t having the last laugh, their website is currently completely broken, simply stating that “an unexpected error has occurred”. I would say their support team are going to wake up to hundreds of thousands of error emails and a big headache tomorrow.

Some would say this is the silver lining to a US economic slowdown, a clean out of global mega-companies that prevent local competitors from entering the market. Starbucks seems to be the first to suffer publicly, with an announcement to close 61 of their 84 stores in Australia. The few stores that they are keeping (for now) are listed in this PDF. Looks like they are focusing on their more profitable inner city markets in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Some commentators have had very strong words for Starbucks, particularly Chris Berg from The Age. He wrote an article putting Starbuck’s demise down to the vibrant coffee culture already present in Australia. It seems to me that Starbucks failure is a case of producing a sub-par product, rather than any local competition. Gloria Jeans for example is just as commercialised as Starbucks and has continued to grow rapidly over the last six months, but maybe they get a bit more local help.

Hopefully we are going to see more cases where fundamentally better products prevail. One could argue that GM and Ford are heading down this path too. I am definitely not anti-american either, I would love to work in the US at some stage in my life. I am simply an engineer, so I like to think that the best product will win at the end of the day; regardless of the marketing and sales pitch surrounding it. I have been in business long enough to know this isn’t always true, but cases like this make me feel less naive and more motivated to put that extra bit of effort into everything that I produce.

A company culture is something that is very difficult to describe, let alone create. One of the blogs I read, systematicHR, posted up an interesting response post which covers the top-down flow effect that a CEO has on company culture. I think the closing lines sum it up very nicely:

The CEO absolutely defines culture whether they intend to or not.  HR then further defines what that strategy will look like.

So what are some ways that a CEO can do this? Well I like realestate.com.au’s approach of having a CEO blog and bi-annual company conferences where the CEO presents the company achievements, strategy and goals. Just engaging in this open communication helps create an open culture, but the real key is in the actual organisational strategy. As the post says, this strategy will directly dictate culture and will change depending on the nature of the business.

Having worked in a sales organisation almost 5 years I would say there is a very fine line between a competitive and a demoralising organisational strategy (and therefore company culture). The nature of sales people and cycles makes this line a fluctuating target. The two biggest things I believe are:

• Consistency - client spread, discipline, sense of fairness
• Communication - Competitive but still collaborative (teams help)

In the end I guess the key is to clearly communicate and inspire passion for what you do. People will pick this up whether it is active or passive and positive or negative. The moral of the story is be aware of your influence.