Year: 2009

I’ve heard the concept of the golden sales sausage machine articulated many times in my career. In essence it goes like this: our sales people currently average say four appointments a week and they close one in four. Therefore if we crank up the lead generation to eight appointments a Continue Reading

The phrase ‘CRM is complex, not because people want it to be’ which appeared in a tweet from Mitch Lieberman last week caught my eye, and, though I suspect I am using the quote outside of its original context, I wanted to write a piece about CRM complexity at least Continue Reading

In the last few posts I touched on why effective CRM requirements specification was important, and how to approach it. This week I want to wrap up this series by suggesting how this can be brought together in the final CRM requirements document. Given that the structure of your document Continue Reading

As I covered in my last post on CRM requirements gathering, the first goal is to define what sort of problems you are looking to fix, or what sort of beneficial outcomes you are aiming for. The next step, which I will cover in this post, is to define how Continue Reading

Last week I described why I felt a detailed set of business and functional requirements was essential to a high pay-back CRM project. Over the course of the next few posts I intend to set out some thoughts on how you can go about creating them. The ‘big’ point in Continue Reading

Earlier in the year I wrote a series of posts entitled ‘Why Bob got fired’ which was meant to culminate in a piece about how to write a business and functional requirements specification for a CRM system – something I’ve seen people consistently struggle with over the years. Anyway somewhere Continue Reading

So you’ve been given a CRM project to deliver. How do you manage the risks associated with managing an implementation on time and on budget that also delivers value to your organisation? Part Two (Part One here). Break the project into bite size pieces. There’s only so much resource that Continue Reading

So you’ve been given a CRM project to deliver. How do you manage the risks associated with managing an implementation on time and on budget that also delivers value to your organisation? Understand there is complexity. A lot of money has been invested by the CRM software industry in promoting Continue Reading

BusinessWeek adopted a rather surprised tone in its commentary on number 43 Amazon in the ‘100 best global brands’ issue. It notes Amazon is both the fastest mover in this year’s ranking, yet spends virtually no attention on advertising, preferring to invest in technology and distribution capability. I think this Continue Reading

Nice piece on Gartner’s take on marketing resource managment MRM software in SearchCRM.