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Domestic CRM companies are easy to announce sales, and they are once again favored by Tencent Capital.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Morketing” (ID: Morketing) , author: Innocent Roland .

On September 5th, Sales Easy announced that it was once again favored by Tencent Capital, and this is Tencent’s third investment and sales. This year, Tencent also frequently shot in the To B market, showing that it became the major shareholder of the six-degree people. Later, it also took advantage of the micro-alliance and the income of the company. Now it has once again invested in sales and became its second largest shareholder.

And earlier this year, Ali also entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Salesforce, becoming the exclusive software provider for Salesforce in Greater China, and selling its products in its corporate CRM product suite.

In July of this year, Baidu also launched its own CRM product “Love Fanfan”. Take a product positioning similar to Salesforce, the SaaS+PaaS model, especially the marketing CRM led by the PaaS platform. At the same time, it has absorbed 10 different CRM vendors including HC360, Red Circle Marketing and Handan Technology as ISVs. As a company with paid search advertising as its core, Baidu will use a large amount of traffic accumulated in search products for many years to focus on front-end customers, and ISVs such as Red Circle are responsible for the operation and management of customers.

What exactly is CRM?

Shaping the story of Salesforce’s valuation of over $100 billion, what is the CRM of BAT and bytebeat in the layout?

To answer this question, we had to return the time to 1999. Gartner Group Inc emphasized the overall management of the supply chain when applying the ERP concept proposed earlier.
  However, due to the limitations of the function of the ERP system itself, coupled with the limitations of IT technology development, ERPIt is difficult for the system to effectively manage the downstream of the supply chain (client side). For the diversity of many corporate customers, ERP systems do not have a good solution.

By the end of the 1990s, with the popularity of the Internet, CTI and customer information processing technologies (such as DW/BI) have been greatly developed, and Gartner Group Inc has proposed CRM with the development of new economy and new technologies. concept.

From the “customer-centric” business model,CRM is the abbreviation of Customer Relationship Management. But when people walked into the world of CRM, they found that countless different companies have completely different definitions of CRM.

For a long time, good business people have always been able to better understand the relationship between them and loyal customers, and these customers will maintain long-term relationships with the company and become repeat customers. The company brings continuous profitability.

Customers always feel that good business people remember their names, phone calls, birthdays and a series of hobbies in order to recommend the most reasonable products in the most appropriate way and in a more suitable location. In order to increase the possibility of a deal. The significance of CRM is to use emerging technologies to extend this customer-centric concept to a broader scope.

< Strong>Why is CRM hot?

But the part mentioned above, although it sounds temptingBut what exactly caused the company to start to popularize CRM? To answer this question, you need to answer three questions.

First, why do giants choose to invest in CRM?
  Although Chinese companies are relatively mature in marketing digitalization compared with most overseas companies, in the digital management of enterprises, To B track still has sufficient growth space compared to the relatively crowded track on To C.

According to Mary Mickel’s market value in the 2018 Internet Report, it is not difficult to find out among the top 20 Internet companies in the world, among the Chinese and American Internet companies that account for half of the report. Most Chinese companies build their core business around personal consumption. But Microsoft’s giants, Slesfrce and Amazon’s AWS’s core business are almost all To B businesses.

With the gradual roll-out of cloud technology in the country, enterprise-level SaaS services will naturally usher in a period of rapid development. Coupled with the economic contraction in recent years, companies are beginning to pursue more refined marketing. In order to reduce their unnecessary marketing budget, there will naturally be more and more CRM SaaS service providers for different types of enterprises.
  Tencent and Ali have been deploying cloud business for some time, and the company’s thirst for growth, as the Internet dividend peaks, BAT layout CRM seeks more benefits from To B. Naturally, it is also reasonable. in.

Second, why is it investment rather than personally? Lia Linghui, president and CTO of Midea, mentioned in a speech that the most important thing for Salesforce is that it relies solely on Salesforce’s direct sales, even if the technical capabilities are strong enough to meet a large number of Customer demand. Salesforce relies on PaaS to share the cost, package sales are more suitable for the company’s SaaS services, and rely on the ability to build PaaS to attract more partners.

Similarly, for CRM target companies, efficiency and cost are increasingly important for companies, and each company needs to conquer the stars in their own areas of expertise and focus, rather than all problem. To give a simple example, even if you are a more realistic cook, there is no need to grow tomatoes for the sake of making tomatoes and scrambled eggs, and then raise some chickens to lay eggs.

Any industry will gradually move towardWith a more precise division of labor and cooperation, the field of enterprise information is no exception.

Third, does CRM really have a market? The answer is obviously yes. First of all, with the changes in media and other publicity channels, more and more user information is placed on the desktop of marketers. For a long time, traditional marketing thinking Changes must be made, and customers expect the company to have a clear and clear understanding of them than any time in the past.

In this regard, companies are beginning to try to adapt to this change, whether it is disruptive innovation in the early years, or this year, large-scale enterprises began to replace the original CMO with CGO, in fact, all corporate thinking Changes,From the past, the product-centric concept has gradually turned to a customer-centric growth thinking.

This means that the company’s marketing has changed from a strategy to the company’s overall strategy, the company needs clear and easy-to-use tools to manage its customers, and CRM as a maintenance company and customer The bond of long-term cooperation, the status is naturally rising.

At the same time, for domestic companies, a large number of SMEs have a relatively low willingness to pay compared to the “money-saving” software that helps companies manage. Coupled with the domestic mobile Internet wave, a large number of industries such as App, e-commerce, finance, real estate and retail, Companies that have strong growth, acquisition and retention needs in Internet companies will naturally be more willing Pay for growth.

In summary, it is not surprising that BAT will place the first stop of the To B business on investment CRM.

The same layout CRM, what is the difference between BAT?

Even if you invest in CRM, the investment ideas of BAT are still completely different. The reason for shaping different ideas is precisely the difference between their investment philosophy and the business logic behind them.

• Tencent

For a long time in the past, the logic of Tencent’s foreign investment is very simple. Through investment, we will lay out every new track that is possible in the future. Diversified into the industry, a huge amount, from games, entertainment, content, sharing economy, transportation to AI, almost all companies that may have a wide track in the future, have become the goal of Tencent investment.

In fact, Tencent began to make defensive investments many years ago, and most of the investments are constantly replenishing the foundation of music and dance. Ali’s investment in the past seven years is very extensive. It can be seen that Tencent’s subtext is also very clear, to ensure that the potential of subversive innovation opportunities exist in their own vision, and can be discovered as early as possible, in order to protect their own security in the process of continuous updating of the Internet, and Opened a new track for Tencent. Just as Ma Huateng once said at the Tencent Partner Open Conference, Tencent will be rebuilt in the next decade.

Tencent’s investment is also quite representative: investing in a complete industrial chain. Taking the e-commerce field as an example, Tencent concentrated on investing in a large number of e-commerce companies including Compliance, Gaopeng, F Group, Haole Buy, Fight More, Like, SEE Small Electric Shop, and At this time, it is not surprising to invest in companies that provide e-commerce channel tools. Similar to interoperability, sales of CRM, and Changliang Technology, it seems that Tencent hopes to achieve a WeChat social e-commerce. New track.

Similarly, through the investment together, open the channel from B to C, the integration and influence of the whole ecology can not be ignored.

• Ali

Different from Tencent, Ali chose the “integrated” road. Although Ali is cooperating with Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM vendor, the current discussion on the industry seems to be It is too early. The cooperation between the two is more like simple mutual benefit.

For Salesforce, even though it still occupies the world’s largest market share of CRM, this year is considered to be a storm, on the one hand, the growth slows down, on the other hand, the painful failure in the Chinese market in 2006. Memories. Let’s let go of ChinaThe CRM market is growing wildly, and it is better to use the powerful power of Alibaba Cloud to further expand its market in China. Naturally, for Ali, the deep binding of Alibaba Cloud Service and Salesforce will naturally bring more benefits.

But it’s interesting to note that although Ali Propaganda and Salesforce are strategically cooperating, the current direction of cooperation is only reflected in the sales cloud, service cloud, business cloud and Salesforce platform. Whether the vital marketing cloud will become the core point of Ali’s next step is still unknown.

Even if Ali and Salesforce jointly seem to solve the past lack of experience in Salesforce in the Asia-Pacific region, and the lack of data ecosystem capabilities, it seems that the two strong alliances It seems that the formation of crushing in the industry is a foregone conclusion. But before Ali’s acquisition of Easy Media, it seemed to have achieved a similar situation, but so far, the influence seems to be very limited. How much influence this cooperation with Salesforce can have, I can only wait until the dust settles in the future.

• B:Baidu has bytebeat

When the AT in BAT is finished, when it comes back to B, it seems that there is already some special content. As Baidu is seen in the industry, BAT B is ByteDance or baidu, it seems to have become an industry. Discussion hotspots.

The layout on the industry Internet seems to be another core of the two disputes. Baidu launched CRM platform after love Fanfan, including Baidu itself, Thinking of Baidu, which has accumulated the most B-side advertiser resources and advertising service experience in the past few decades, after all, paid search advertising This is a very important part of marketing, Baidu layout CRM seems to be completely reasonable. With the information resources that can be called horror, the layout on CRM seems to be a breeze.
 

But the industry seems to have different voices that have never stoppedHowever, as Internet traffic peaks, Baidu will make its own traffic more refined, and provide more services for advertisers, so it seems that it is not difficult to achieve the goal of increasing revenue. But in fact, if you want to do this well, just provide a platform, Baidu may need to be more radical.

In contrast, BateDance, as a former App factory, is currently facing a similar dilemma as Baidu, and its CEO has always maintained “anxiety” in the current byte hopping and In the case that an app with the same level of vibrato is not produced, when the internal staff used their own B-side instant messaging product Lark and the response was good, trying to further lay out the B-end market seems to be a foregone conclusion.

Obviously, Lark, which has launched the “Flying Open Platform”, has begun offering developer services such as applets and app stores; and has opened interfaces to SaaS partners to further manage and mine customer data.

And similar to Baidu’s entry into the CRM market, the huge engine + pangolin has created the resources and advantages of byte-hopping for the B-end service, while its own huge traffic blessing, plus the recent recruitment platform for SaaS developers. Recruitment, it seems that the byte beat further in the B-end market to make a foregone conclusion.

Conclusion

CRM’s fieryness seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of the industry’s Internet. With the further acceleration of enterprise information transformation, more and more new concepts and services will emerge.

In the future, whether in CRM or other areas of the industry Internet, competition will be more intense with the completion of the giant layout, the further maturity of cloud technology, and the arrival of the 5G era. And the marketing of enterprises must change with the changes of the times.

When Huawei and UF, as well as bytebeats, really begin to enter the SaaS space, the SaaS market will quickly mature in more intense competition.