The conventional wisdom has it that that CRM requirements gathering consists of assimilating lists of functional requirements and then prioritizing and ranking them. On the surface this all seems very logical, but in practical terms it doesn’t work. Since this is the approach that most organizations take, I thought I’d Continue Reading

In a recent post on CRM and social networking, I suggested that the growth of forums, blogs, wiki’s etc. will mean companies have to pay greater attention to the customer experience, because never before have customers had as much scope to broadcast their opinions, and never before have people been Continue Reading

One interesting question that came up this week was ‘when is it right to change my CRM reseller?’ To position this a bit, a lot of CRM packages, Microsoft CRM being a good example, are sold through resellers and implementation partners rather than direct from the software vendor. This approach Continue Reading

Mycustomer.com asked me to do a guest blog-post for them. The piece I put together was around how CRM technology can support the growth of business from the existing customer base in a business to business environment. Since this can be reasonably accessible ‘cash in the attic’, it seemed fairly Continue Reading

Once upon a time it was pretty simple. If you wanted hosted CRM software you paid per person per month. If you wanted your CRM software in-house you purchased a perpetual license up front. In ‘The Knives Your Sales People Should Have’ Brad Feld points out it doesn’t have to Continue Reading

It’s always good get positive feedback on the blog, and it was gratifying to make it to number 5 – up from number 10 last year – in InsideCRM’s top 20 CRM blogs of 2008. Thank you InsideCRM, who’ve done a great job themselves this year on the blogging front, Continue Reading

SearchCRM has kindly invited me to join their CRM ‘expert’ panel. So if you are interested in my answers to questions such as: The pro’s and con’s of developing a CRM system in-house The challenges of implementing open source CRM The top 10 implementation pitfalls How to measure CRM effectiveness Continue Reading

I get the impression that most CRM vendors are at best deeply suspicious of CRM consultants. Not surprisingly, as a CRM consultant myself, I’d argue the negative impression is undeserved, and that we provide considerably more benefit to vendors than they realize. The common complaints are that access to the Continue Reading

I was quoted in Computing the other week making somewhat unsupportive remarks about the CRM vendor’s attempts to harness social networking. In essence my feelings are that companies need to understand the impact of social networking rather than concern themselves about taming it. If we go on a brief historical Continue Reading

The following is a copy of an article I wrote for Winning Edge Magazine published by the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM) under the title ‘Can we fix it, yes we can’ where I attempted in 700 words to explain how to revive a failing CRM system: Can Continue Reading