CRM Like Teenage Sex?

I got passed on the vendor’s eye view of what is going on in this industry the other day.   Thanks again to an acquaintance of Paul Magee, apparently….

“crm is like teenage sex; everyone’s talking about it, yet hardly anyone is actually doing it, and those that are, aren’t doing it very well”

And I thought how right this is.  Even the new ‘daddy’ on the street, salesforce.com, are said to be losing customers at the same, if not accelerated pace as everyone else.  Examples of sales chiefs losing their jobs over a botched crm implementation are legendary.  Yet I recall a Forrester research document a couple of quarter’s ago that claimed:

“On-demand computing is taking off in companies ranging from smaller businesses moving off ACT! or Excel to divisions of enterprises that are dissatisfied with their inflexible, corporate IT-controlled on-premise system.”

Leading to their poll results showing around one-quarter of large companies, almost one-third of medium-sized ones and one-fifth of small businesses were imminently buying new software for their sales efforts.

So I thought it’s about time I looked further into what the deal is with sales software.  For my part, as I sell into salesteams, over the past couple of years I’ve seen so many expensively assembled solutions lose their compliance with the emergence of ad hoc spreadsheet processes.  No software seems immune, with this applying to the big boys at the high-end, including SAP & Siebel, through the medium players, Saratoga & Pivotal, right down to the smaller solutions like ACT & Goldmine.  So guys, I’m on the look-out for anyone that has a spreadsheet process that’s grown up alongside of, or because of, a sexy system you’ve got in place….