Year: 2014

Last time out I described what I’d expect to see in a decent CRM requirements specification. Putting this sort of document together isn’t a trivial exercise, but the payback from the time invested can be huge. Here are some of the key benefits of this sort of approach: Increased return Continue Reading

In the fourth of this series of posts about CRM requirements gathering, I wanted to cover content. So what needs to be included in a CRM requirements document? The following covers the main areas I’d hope to see: Approach This section sets out how the requirements were gathered, and, importantly, Continue Reading

I promised in last week’s post that this week I’d set out my views on what should be included in a CRM requirements specification. However, I’m going to put that on hold for a week. I realised there were some points that merit some articulation first. So, to help set Continue Reading

In last week’s post I covered some of the common problems with specifying CRM requirements. In this post I want cover purpose. In other words what are we trying to achieve with a CRM specification. In this respect, I believe there are five key objectives: 1. Identify suitable technologies – Continue Reading

As an independent CRM consultant I get to read a lot of CRM requirements documents, and it seems to be an area that most would-be buyers of CRM technology struggle with – probably because there’s little guidance out there about how to approach the exercise successfully. This would be less Continue Reading

In case you missed them, here’s my 60 second bullet point round-up of the main CRM software stories last quarter: April Salesforce.com take a cue from Amazon’s ‘Mayday’ customer support feature on the Kindle Fire to add a new SOS capability to its Service Cloud which enables customers to be Continue Reading

I’ve been having one of those ‘I’d long known it was important, but I’d forgotten just how important’ moments in recent weeks. One of our clients has recently gone live and, in the absence of a colleague who was away on honeymoon, I found myself providing go-live support which involved Continue Reading

If you’re not sure how well your CRM system is being used, here are five ways to find out: Look at usage stats If people aren’t using the system, it’s not going to be adding any value, so a good starting point is to understand usage patterns. Most CRM applications Continue Reading

Last year I wrote  a series of posts called ’99 ways to get more from your CRM software’. They were designed to help existing users of CRM to find new ways to get value from their systems. In order to make the content a little more consumable I promised to Continue Reading

With Microsoft recently announcing that social listening will be a key component of its spring 2014 release, following last year’s acquisition of Netbreeze, and Salesforce.com’s Radian6 already a well-established part of their marketing cloud, social listening capabilities are set to become an increasingly important part of the CRM portfolio. But Continue Reading