Topic

crm

A collection of 54 issues

Another Forecast Spreadsheet

One of my customers shared with me the parallel reporting that has since resoundingly taken the place of their ditched Goldmine crm. It’s a single worksheet they call the Schiffman Board. It seems that with usage of Goldmine having tailed off to practically no use at all, a new

Head Off Boardroom Embarrassment

Met up with someone influenced by over a dozen years of sales management and talked crm for a while. We lamented how so many crm implementations go pear-shaped by virtue of attempting to re-build the space shuttle. In addition, one key criteria gets left off specs by those leading sales

Admin Burden Overload

I’ve a client that has highly expensive sales software across the globe. Their management has long lamented that the reps never fill anything in on it. Not only should it have detailed transactional reporting of what happened on calls, but it should also hold key intel on what the

Selling To Sellers

“When I were a lad…” Yes, buckle in for a trip down memory lane. In the 80s I was involved in selling computers. They were easy to spot. No matter how new they were, they always looked grubby. The screens weren’t much better. Epilepsy inducing green flickering text on

CRM On Hold

Met a thoroughly engaging chap running the £109m salesteam at a major 30,000 industrial products supplier. They seemed to be doing well according to the numbers. Their crm though, has fallen in to disrepute. Their main database was Pivotal. They also had some data mining capability, including from Cognos.

What Are You Losing In The Shadows?

I was trying to work out ways of helping a customer with their crm headaches yesterday. Depending on which scare story you believe, a quickfire trawl around any one of the several sites trying to be crm info portals will throw up all sorts of alarming figures. They often claim

CRM Malaise Not Restricted To Reps

I am really made up that I’ve just hatched a new product idea, given the experiences from two of my customers recently. Both have around 20 sales people in the UK, strewn all over the place. One has Goldmine as their crm – the reps only use it when they

More Compliance Trauma

Someone showed me how they use Oracle’s Sales Online the other day. Or more accurately, why they don’t bother with it. Part of a $500m technology-related business, founded in Chicago back in 55, all their global reps are expected to use the system. Yet none do. Whenever the

Support, Don't Obstruct

Spent an engaging session with a newly appointed sales manager called Mark at a London prospect, who amongst many things, bemoaned why at his last place they mysteriously ripped out a bespoke system (despite it having universal rep approval) and replaced it with a Siebel one (which all the reps

Track Your Propositions

Had one of those delicious moments of dawning earlier today. Many sales teams I meet are disillusioned with their ‘crm’, to the point of jettisoning the whole shabang. In their place, quasi-random spreadsheets or word process docs float around. One omnipresent reason for such abandonment, is that reps simply hardly