Year: 2006

As Francis Buttle notes in his article for CRM guru ‘who is educating the next generation’ – ‘So, what’s going on? Why is a fundamental and widely applied business discipline – CRM – not being taught in our universities?’. I’d take that further – why does the whole issue of Continue Reading

I came across a couple of posts on a similar theme – the absence of magic bullets. One from Steve Yegge, and the other from Joel Spolsky. They resonate with how I see the CRM industry. Hundreds of millions of pounds are spent promoting CRM software as providing instant gratification. Continue Reading

One of the presentations I give (when I occasionally get invited out to some independent perspective on the market) is ‘15 keys to a successful CRM implementation’. I’d put a link in to a copy, but I’ve adopted a minimalist approach on my slides – al la Beyond Bullets – Continue Reading

As poacher turned gamekeeper I’m only too aware what a pain preparing responses to requests for proposals (RFP’s) can be. However I get to read a lot of responses these days, and it can be tough on the other side of the table as well, so I want to set Continue Reading

It seems like I’ve seen more than my fair share of CRM software demonstrations of late. We’ve been involved in several vendor selection exercises and have been sitting through a lot of presentations as a result. So for any vendors who happen to be passing my thoughts on the keys Continue Reading

Just a quick post to note, should anyone be interested, the latest edition of Conspectus Magazine has an opinion piece from this correspondent, on software as a service (SAAS). This is the link should you wish to browse it on the web. It does require a sign up though.

It would be a nice feature for my own CRM system if it populated my calendar with significant events such as bank holidays, international public holidays, and other noteworthy occurrences, like say major sporting events. That way I might have avoided scheduling a workshop for the day of the England Continue Reading

Several of our current projects include deployment to international offices and users. This tends to make the implementation more challenging, and I’ve seen a lot of projects get tripped up because they didn’t appreciate the additional complexity. On the one hand requirements are generally a lot more diverse, not just Continue Reading

As I touched on in an earlier post we are moving close to live day on one of our major projects. This week we got to see the fruits of the development work that’s been ongoing for the last month or so. We put a lot of effort into gathering Continue Reading

It’s a much hackneyed phrase, but we live in a world of unparalleled change. A couple of random facts derived from copies of The Economist currently sat on my desk – a feature on Goldman Sachs, notes that 30% of the company’s revenues in 2005 (i.e. a small matter of Continue Reading