Topic

crm

A collection of 54 issues

Find A Useful Quotation

Silly-season surfing dropped me off at a sales-orientated site where one recent article listed twelve quotes [http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/content_display/sales/e3idb676dc68387c3add77e4c9d17de098b?imw=Y] that the author liked to use in sales situations. They focus on things to say when needing to manage and motivate salespeople. I

Keeping Your Expert Scrapbook

Round at a friend’s pad for a spot of lunch over the weekend, I noticed a flash looking glossy lying about with the seemingly dull title Global Foreign Exchange Quarterly. It was produced by a bank eager to prove themselves as thought leaders to their target marketplace, within which

Attention Scarcity

Here’s a thought-provoking concept I read from a Frenchman’s blog, Macro Principles [http://www.macroprinciples.com/2009/04/user-adoption-risks-are-growing-rapidly-for-it-projects/] , quoting Herbert Simon: > What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need

Sales Reporting Opportunity Cost

Here’s an interesting discussion I had the other day. A company with a field-based salesteam bought salesforce.com a while back with the usual lamentable side-effects. Then they wanted their post-sale delivery people to fill out a new form on potential lead opportunities that their privileged access detected at

Cloudforce London

I’ve always wanted to admire salesforce.com crm. Yet I remain unconvinced that their flagship product helps salespeople in my b2b solution arena in the ways they suggest. My experience needs context. This is that traditional sales automation software is even worse. And that I firmly believe support of

How Much Of Your Time Is Truly Selling?

I’ve just come across a current piece of research (I believe attributed to CSO Insights) that suggests reps today only get to sell for 37% of their time. A little over a third of your day seems so counter-productive, doesn’t it? (What manufacturing business would tolerate a key

Sales Admin & Parkinson's Law

I met a paper-selling pal of mine for a cheeky pint or two the other night, and we got to talking about the devils of sales admin. One particular gripe was that he’d been given an extra remit (frighteningly close to a marketing role) to work out how to

Avoiding Torrid Times

I had a long chat the other day with a fella that ran a dozen reps in the field. The team were smilingly talked of as ‘long in the tooth’. This time last year, he finally opted (using his words) to switch from manually kept sales records to an electronic

Giving Up On CRM Adoption?

I read my latest Selling Power [http://www.sellingpower.com] newsletter on crm last night. They mentioned a piece of PR they’d received from the boss of a crm vendor [http://www.itworld.com/tip/53695/top-5-ways-get-your-employees-use-crm-software] . It was satisfying that they disagreed with a third of what he

Consider Your Shadow Reporting

During a thoroughly enoyable meeting with a chap that ran a salesteam of eight about their reporting needs as a company, the issue of Shadow Reporting arose. I was exploring more knowledge of what makes crm installs collapse so dramatically. In this case, they’d tried Salesforce, Maximiser & Netsuite. There