Big vendors miss the mid-market point, at least on CRM

“Vendors successful in the Tier One market think all they have to do is repackage their product and the mid-market will queue up to buy. This arrogance is common among Tier 1 vendors,” he says. And he adds: “Some vendors have at least realised that their sales methods may not suit the mid-market. The knee-jerk reaction is to appoint a channel [division, or distributors], as JD Edwards has done, but this is just another recipe for failure: a channel strategy cannot work from this starting point.” SSI, of course, has a vested interest – in the form of its own CRM for SMEs, and this outburst is essentially a thinly disguised plug for its view of CRM. And it’s probably not a million miles away from the truth to describe mid market manufacturing’s approaches to customer management as less than perfect. But the firm, like others in the sector, makes a fair point that some of the big boys in the IT vendor community are inclined to dictate sales messages without properly understanding the buying criteria or problems of SMEs in manufacturing. “Mid-market companies want to deal with a single supplier who can take responsibility for supplying the solution, implementing it, providing systems integration, support and managed services,” opines Merritt. “They don’t want to manage the risk associated with implementing a solution with many partners involved. Buying applications from SAP, implementation from KPMG, and managed services from Cap Gemini may be fine for global corporations, but the mid-market needs value for money, low risk and quick returns. “There is no fat in the system to absorb problems. Users want to be able to look their supplier in the eye, and to have the phone number of their supplier’s MD on the speed dial.”