Frank Schultheiss

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, it provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors. Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors seems to be next Big Thing.

Doc Sears wrote some catchy explanations in the VRM Blog:

What VRM proposes is shifting appropriate relationship responsibility to customers, for the simple reason that the customer is, for many purposes, the best point of integration for his or her own data and the best point of origination for what can be done with it.

For example, a customers VRM system should be able to say, globally, I want receipts emailed to me. Here is my email address. You can do business with me if you don’t share that address with anybody, and if you don’t send me unwanted emails. Sign here (digitally) if you agree to these terms. Yes, that may sound scary to sellers, but guess what? The customer-control horse left the seller’s barn as soon as the Internet came along. All that precious customer data that sellers think they own is a tiny fraction of what they can gain from customers in a relationship where both sides are open to whatever the other brings to the table. In other words, one in which the seller does not speak of acquiring, managing, controlling, owning or locking in customers as if they were slaves.

Much more money to be made in VRM than in CRM:

My point: it’s early. The Net is a giant zero between everything and everybody. It takes distance, connectivity and the costs of storage and distribution all toward zero. There is still plenty of money to be made at the commodity level (just ask Nick Carr, or Amazon), but that’s one more reason why the Giant Zero is a great place to build all kinds of new businesses. And why it’s still very, very early in what Craig Burton calls the terraforming of the Net’s new world.

The point [...] is that there is much more money to be made, in this Giant Zero world, in helping demand find and drive supply, than in helping supply find and drive demand. And that this will be much better for the supply side than the old system, where suppliers have to do it all.