Foreword

You’re not in charge. Sorry. Someone had to say it. The delusion that you are still in charge of what your prospects (and consumers) see and think and do is costing you money. Consumers have a real choice today. They can choose to ignore your ads, your messages, your follow-up messages, your phone calls, your coupons, and your begging.

CRM, if you haven’t noticed, appears to stand for “Consultants (making) Real Money.” It’s positioned as an arcane black art, something both technical and artistic, and something that you couldn’t possibly understand without their help.

But that’s not true. CRM isn’t hard. It isn’t complicated. It’s just foggy. It’s foggy because too many companies persist in believing that CRM is just a tactic, something to be installed. Once companies get it nailed, they believe they can go back to business as normal.

All you need to do to really get it, of course, is to abandon that thinking. Realize that a sea change has occurred, that “permission” is not just a buzzword invented to get you to buy books and stuff. Instead, recognize that the empowered consumer is here to stay and we all better get used to it. That realization, together with a large dose of common sense (provided for you here by Fred Newell) gets you almost all the way there.

Last thought: quit studying the issue and go try something. You can set up a simple e-mail solution on your desk for a dollar. See what happens when you interact with 100 consumers a day by e-mail—treating them like real people and doing what you need to do to grow their business. The results will surprise you.

—Seth Godin
Author, Permission Marketing