I’ve started to keep a rough tally of late. I’d say a third of the companies I make a sales enquiry to don’t follow it up. A third do, but badly. And a third are pretty on the ball. Which led me to write this piece on CRM and lead Continue Reading

I was listening to an interview with Tony Hsieh when I was out running this week, and he was asked the question about the things he would have differently when Zappos was a start up. One of his responses was that he wished he’d rolled out the core values of Continue Reading

Someone asked me recently how long they should pilot their CRM software before they rolled it out to the rest of the organisation. Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to first identify when it does (and doesn’t) make sense to run a CRM pilot. There are two Continue Reading

The words had been thoughtfully picked out for me by the sender in yellow, but it would have been pretty striking without the highlighter. It was notice for an invitation to tender, and it contained the interesting condition that for anyone choosing to enter a cost of up to 2,000 Continue Reading

He was the last of the Mohicans. As I watched him he followed the prescribed process. The system hadn’t been well set up, so it was a prolonged and laboured procedure, but he followed it to the letter, key stroke after key stroke. This would have been great if everyone, Continue Reading

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: A man, driving through the countryside, stops to ask a farm worker for directions to a local town. The farm worker scratches his head thoughtfully, and after a while, says ‘you know sir, if I was going there I wouldn’t start Continue Reading

For those of you currently planning a CRM project, I thought it might be helpful to indentify some of the areas where things tend to go ‘off-piste’, but before I do perhaps it’s a good idea to suggest why we might care in the first place.If the CRM project team Continue Reading

The following is an interview I did with Raju Vegesna at Zoho Corporation. Some interesting thoughts, particularly on CRM software as a commodity: [RB] Could you give us an introduction to Zoho Corporation and your role? [RAJU] Zoho Corporation (formerly AdventNet Inc) was founded in 1996. The company is headquartered Continue Reading

One of the first projects we undertook after I set up Mareeba was to review a client’s call centre. The call centre supported computer equipment across the UK, and was something of a victim of success, struggling to cope with a series of large orders that the client had recently Continue Reading

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