If someone told me that Google has discontinued an astonishing 166 products since 2006, I would have called his/her bluff. We all know that some of the most frequently used products in the world come from Google. Think Google Maps, Gmail, Search and Chrome.

But it’s true. They really did.

Looking into these failures (Google+, Google Hangouts, Orkut), we can gather hints that maybe the highly engineering-focussed company doesn’t have it in its DNA to build social products.

Instead of forcing its way in, Google should instead harness its prowess in business software to build an end-to-end CRM tool which I believe can blow its competitors (even Salesforce!) away by 10x.

The best thing? They already own most of the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle. I will discuss more about this further down in the article. But first, let’s talk money.

💸 A Well-Oiled Revenue Generating Machine

According to Gartner, CRM remains the largest and fastest growing enterprise in the world. Salesforce alone, pocketed $13.3B of revenue in 2019. In comparison, Google Cloud brought in $8.9B for the same financial year. There’s clearly money to be made here and everyone wants a piece of it.

Even as I hold my day job as a CRM data analyst, I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t keep up with the number of different CRM vendors there are. Everyday, a new name pops up. Each serving a very specific purpose in a cobbled mess of systems interlinkage, sometimes leaving companies with redundant tech.

I think Salesforce has done a pretty decent job in identifying what systems are required and being the glue that unifies them all together. One thing they don’t have control over though, is data.

💾 It All Starts With Data

It is needless to say that the most important aspect in any enterprise software is the data. The tool can only be as good as the amount of enriched data flowing within it. From what I’ve seen of the big CRM marketing clouds, data needs to be ingressed (either as streams or batched) into these platforms from data warehouses to then be used for customer segmentation or personalisation.

But what if your CRM marketing cloud is tightly baked into your data warehouse - specifically Google Cloud Storage and Google Bigquery? You wouldn’t even need to ingest data from a separate data warehouse. Much similar to how you can run Tableau (which coincidentally was acquired by Salesforce) dashboards from directly querying your data warehouses.

According to usage statistics by builtwith.com, 29,134,826 websites use Google Analytics. With so many companies already tracking data events with a Google product, what this means is that Google’s CRM tool could be integrated to ingest real-time events fired with a proper set up of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. This is especially important for customer communications that are time-sensitive.

This is huge for a few reasons:

There is no data latency between the data your CRM tool can use and what’s already in your data warehouse or happening live on your site/app.
As a data engineer, you don’t need to maintain multiple data pipelines to vendor platforms. You only need to focus on ensuring your data warehouse is up and running.
Doing data transformations specific to marketing campaigns can be easily done through SQL scripting via Bigquery’s interface.
CRM campaign performance data can flow back straight into Bigquery as a ‘feedback loop’ for storage and processing and viewed in Data Studio or Looker as reports and dashboards.

No company, possibly other than Amazon, can offer this advantage.

🤖 Using Machine Learning to Make the Data Work Harder

While solving data ingestion into the CRM stack should be considered an accomplishment, companies are looking to Machine Learning (ML) to remain a cut above the rest. Research conducted by Freshworks Inc., the customer engagement software company, found that 75% of CRM users are wanting more out of AI and are comfortable switching to a different CRM platform to take advantage of AI capabilities.

Google remains at the forefront of AI and ML research and to leverage Google’s expertise in AI and ML specifically for CRM use-cases would be a big differentiator against other competing CRM products. With Google’s existing Tensorflow and AI Platform, training and deploying models is already taken care of. This significantly lowers the barrier of entry for businesses of all kinds to use ML in their CRM stack.

✉️ Getting the Message Across

Here’s the part where Google may have to devote a bit more time and resource to building out a service that allows for orchestration amongst all client messaging (email, push notifications, Adwords, Facebook Ads, social media etc). Campaign journeys and prioritization need to be built out in an easy, simple to use interface for marketers so that they can manage multiple campaigns across multiple touchpoints.

They are not starting from scratch, though. Already owning the most popular email client in Gmail, Firebase Cloud Messaging (for push messaging dispatch) and Google Adwords gives them a legs up. Not forgetting that Google invented the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology that allows for interactive and dynamic emails. What it seems to be missing is an email dispatch service and journey builder.

🏁 Conclusion

I think a lot of things point to why Google should build a CRM tool and I can’t think of any factors from a technological point of view that should convince the company otherwise. I mentioned a whole bunch of existing Google products that if can be integrated together, will make Google the most dominant CRM tool. But that definitely requires a lot of different teams in the company to be working very closely with each other to tightly integrate everything. I’m not familiar with how teams in Google work, but that could prove to be a stumbling block.

I still think that it’s worth the shot for Google giving how bundling all these disparate products together could be the answer to raising adoption for these services. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Cheers.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I hoped you enjoyed it and if you did, it would mean a lot to me if you’d share this post with others (or maybe some folks at Google?). I’d also love to hear any feedback as well which you can shoot to me via twitter at @markjrobert.