The following paragraph in Joel Spolsky’s recent post caught my eye: ‘Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, “are you sure?” and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, “is this what you want?” and Continue Reading

There are plenty of points in a CRM project where things can go astray, but one of the key ones is the design phase. To give this some context, let’s quickly cover what happens in a project leading up to the design phase. At the start of the project we Continue Reading

Despite the fact that a lot of our engagements are focussed on our CRM planning, requirements gathering and vendor selection services, we also get involved in a lot of project implementation work. Some people find this surprising – they figure once the CRM software vendor gets underway there’s little left Continue Reading

When clients ask us to help them plan CRM projects, there’s a general anticipation that our biggest contribution will be helping them cut through the fog of competing vendor claims to identify technologies that will best suit their needs and budgets. While this is an important part of our planning Continue Reading

Customer Relationship Management is a term that means very different things to different people, and these perspectives were powerfully contrasted at a Netsuite briefing I attended this week. On the one hand Jennifer Kirkby, independent analyst and editor of the Customer Management Community, was a powerful advocate of organisations shifting Continue Reading

There’s an awful lot of hype in the world of CRM, and it can be a pretty insightful, and potentially humbling, exercise to re-visit a project to see whether you’ve genuinely added value to a client’s business. I spent a morning last week reviewing how a client had fared since Continue Reading

Michael Bosworth/John Holland make the following observation in their book ‘Customer Centric Selling’ – ‘Because of the predominant perception that selling is more art than science, few companies have sales processes that traditional sellers can execute. We believe that this deficiency is the single most significant factor contributing to the Continue Reading

The recent bankruptcies of Rover, Red Letter Days, and EU Jet, are a painful reminder that when companies go into administration the customer can get hurt, whether that’s the sudden depreciation of a recently purchased car, the un-experienced experience of a life time, or being marooned in a distant international Continue Reading

An entry in Joel Spolsky’s ‘Joel on Software’ blog caught my eye the other day. In ‘Hitting the High Notes’ he sets out some of the research he has undertaken, which seeks to establish the magnitude of differences in development productivity. His conclusions, which were well in line with other Continue Reading

I’ve spent the last few days putting together case studies based on some of our assignments from the last several months. One thing that struck me hard, was how much of our work has been around helping our clients budget for projects and work out what internal resources will be Continue Reading