Year: 2009

Many, many years ago, in my pre-CRM days I worked for the incumbent PC supplier to a very large financial services company. One day alarm bells started to ring. Our customer was evaluating another supplier. We knew where: behind locked doors in the basement. But who, was a mystery. Our Continue Reading

Once upon a time when people wanted something built they went to their local builder. At some point in history though, people found this wasn’t working so well. Builders might be great at building, but they weren’t so great at designing buildings and the role of the independent architect was Continue Reading

Just back from spending some time with friends in Barcelona, one of whom is a senior IT executive at one of the larger FMCG companies, and one which I consider to be one of the most effective users of IT technology out there. As they are currently in the midst Continue Reading

In his post ‘Are we solving the same problem’ Seth Godin brilliantly sums up one of the fundamental problems of the CRM industry even though he’s not actually writing about IT. The point he makes is that people are much more comfortable discussing the solution to a problem than the Continue Reading

In the early days of Mareeba we were working with a client to help them create an extension to their CRM system. As we usually do, we had created a detailed specification and circulated it to potential vendors for their proposed pricing. The quotes that came back seemed astronomical compared Continue Reading

Conspectus Magazine asked me for an opinion piece that was published this week under the title of ‘Could do (a lot) better’. I suspect they might have preferred a more gentle piece on CRM and social media for example. Instead they got something of a rant: Could do (a lot) Continue Reading

‘Phase your CRM project’ is one of those frequently offered pieces of advice to would-be implementers of CRM technology, but what does this really mean in practice? So, seven quick tips for phasing CRM projects effectively: Do the minimal amount that gets results – it’s easy to over-engineer CRM systems, Continue Reading

I was asked to speak on the topic of CRM failure this week. The following summarizes what I covered. The occurrence of outright failure, where no system ever sees the light of day is exaggerated. I’m only aware of a few instances of outright failure and this normally occurs when Continue Reading

One of my training partners was telling me about one of his client’s purchase of a Microsoft CRM system, as we were out running this morning. As the story went the client had settled on MS CRM as the preferred technology and then went on to find an implementation partner. Continue Reading

Conspectus asked me to write an opinion piece for them on matters of my choosing pertaining to CRM technology. While I suspect they would have preferred something rather more topical regarding CRM and Twitter, or CRM and H1N1 for example, I warmed to the topic of the CRM vendor’s fixation Continue Reading