crm

I know a group of sales trainers/consultants that have a system for key account management.  They’ve ‘automated’ this by creating a spreadsheet to track every opportunity and account in their suggested way. They sought to create something a bit more professional than a mere spreadsheet, looking at software

Back to my customer that has Saratoga’s Avenue gear, which all the reps naturally avoid using as much as they can.  This isn’t news.  Nor is it restricted to this one software vendor’s code. At a recent sales meeting of theirs I attended, they were all moaning

I recently discovered a chap I befriended when he was a client of mine many moons ago was now at the sales helm of Europe’s largest lighting manufacturer/distributer.  I caught up with top fella Brian and was delighted to hear him in fine fettle. We naturally got to

Another addition to the sales software/crm space, this time from Entelegen [http://www.entelegen.com].  Their blurb on what they term ‘sales pursuit’ software was eventually fascinating, as it says what every sales person already knows; crm is rubbish ….. but we wish it wasn’t. They have a six-point

Saw two companies in a day recently for first meetings, and both moaned about their sales software.  Apparently, “no bugger uses it”…. Case One – Goldmine Wonderful kit, about a dozen historical databases all rolled into it with a call plan generating front-end, even having a link somewhere with SAS’s

Through my subscription to cool US rag Selling Power [http://www.sellingpower.com], I got an enticing offer to read all about the 100 key questions SFA consultants are paid to ask, courtesy of one of the plethora of crm vendors; Entellium [http://www.entellium.com/crmwhitepapers.asp]. Was this

7-8 March saw the 2-grand a ticket Gartner crm conference [http://www.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/crm8i.jsp] in London.  I spoke to a highly experienced fella the day after that’d been one of the speakers.  His slot examined current implementation issues with a case study from his

Here’s a tale I picked up late Friday night, when speaking on the phone with a recently recruited sales manager at one of my customers. He has two particular charges tasked with penetrating a prospect community of around 60 organisations.  To track what’s occuring with them, the pair

Two conversations this past week re-affirm what a nightmare sales systems become when an internal, technical resource wields more power about them than they deserve. The first features a sales trainer that’s been supplying mind-mapping software to a client of his for a couple of years for sales-idea generation

Another day, another prospect, another first meeting and yet another guy saying they’ll not bother again with crm. This time it was with the MD (and notional head of sales) of a trendy commercial lighting operation.  Four years ago they came to the UK from Denmark with one salesrep.