This sounds really familiar...

If you have kids of a certain age and watch Disney, you will have seen Frozen II at least once.  And if you are of a certain age, Generation X and listened to Western pop music, you would have noticed that the song "Lost in the Woods" sounds eerily familiar.  It sounds like songs by Chicago, or REO Speedwagon, and for good reason.  As detailed in this blog post, the composers were inspired or at least big fans, of these 80's power ballads.  It reminds me of "Will You Still Love Me?". There's another 80's song that has a very similar lick, but I can't recall the rest of the song to find the title.

On the one hand, I can lament that nobody comes up with truly original songs anymore.  Everybody is singing some variation of I-V-viii-IV these days.  And the chord cycle is not new.  You can watch this clip to understand what I'm talking about.  And while reusing chord cycles are excusable, (after all, how many combinations can you make from seven chords in four bars, or twelve bars?), sounding almost exactly like another song is not.  The courts found Robin Thicke and Pharell to have ripped off Marvin Gaye, as detailed in this Rolling Stone article.  I personally didn't find that too close, but some of you may remember the Led Zeppelin vs. Spirit, "Stairway to Heaven" vs. "Taurus".

On the other hand, hearing familiar sounds soothes our brains.  When "Hey Ya" by Outkast was introduced, radio stations had to sandwich it between familiar songs, because "Hey Ya" was so different.  (Read this for more detail.)

What is the point of all this?  And how do we bring this back to business?  My point is, while companies are different, at a certain level, they are all the same.  They have the same challenges and business problems they are trying to solve.  Each company may just be at different stages of their journey.  If they were all different, then business applications like CRM and ERP will not find much success.  Everyone would be building custom apps for their own businesses.

And so while the song sounds new, it still sounds familiar.  The things you learned - skills, business processes, solutions - from previous companies are portable.  (Unless it's like "Hey Ya" - a highly specialized type of skill or knowledge that has narrow applications, like video compression codecs.)   

Customer Master and data cleansing is a common problem.  And it's not new.  Before web domains were commonplace, you would define an account as their headquarter location - a name and address.  Preventing duplicates is a challenge.  In the B2C world, (I worked for an insurance company), before email addresses, and without requiring people to give social security numbers, we relied on a name, a birthday, and an address.  And that's not perfect either.  I could have two policies, and on one, I gave my middle initial, and on the other, I did not.  Or I may have since moved.  How do we have one record for one person so we can treat them as one person?

And guess what's like a subscription business?  Insurance!  You want people to pay yearly, or quarterly, or monthly - whatever payment term they agreed to.  And you have to keep engaging with your customers, not just come around when the premium is due.  Otherwise, they could cancel, or just choose not to pay the renewal.  You also want to up-sell or cross-sell, or "land and expand" as they call it these days, as their financial needs evolve, you start offering other financial products.    

So, whether it's B2C, B2B, insurance, financial services, software, hardware, subscription, XaaS, pay-as-you-grow, consumption, everything is familiar!