Helping personnel enown their customers

This story on ZDNet says CRM for small businesses is growing:

Global CRM spend among small and medium-sized businesses will be close to $2 billion by 2008--more than double what it is today.

The more interesting bit is this realization:

Wettemann demonstrated her point about sharing by asking the audience, mainly comprised of RightNow customers, to swap pens with the person next to them without looking. "How many people want to keep the pen they have been given now?" she asked. "Companies implementing CRM need to overcome people's natural barriers -- we all like our own pens. People with really nice pens need incentives."

But the insight is lost here. It's not just people need incentives (or bribes, as the title puts it) to share. At some level people need incentives to do anything. It's not merely about incentives to share what you have. The insight is that people are attached to what they own. Not own in the sense of owning valuable property, but owning in the sense of assimilating something as one's own. That's what CRM software needs to do, to lead users to make customers their own.