Nice piece in BusinessWeek entitled ‘Just say no to drug reps’ about a programme to help doctors to resist the influence of pharmaceutical salespeople. The article cites some interesting research: ‘A doctor who spends just one minute with a sales rep typically ends up prescribing 16% more of that rep’s Continue Reading

I had a phone call from a lady yesterday wanting to know what background/qualifications she needed to become a ‘CRM Consultant’. Before I could give her any advice I thought I’d better clarify with her the various definitions of the term CRM consultant, since it means very different things in Continue Reading

One aspect of implementer/vendor selection to get right is to choose a vendor where the potential project is of sufficient size or profile that it’s going to attract the vendor’s attention and interest, while being within their technical capability to deliver and support it. You may feel your investment in Continue Reading

I’m not too far into Jeff Thull’s ‘Mastering the Complex Sale’ but picked up several points which resonate with how we see the world. To quote Jeff: ‘Even if your customers could Diagnose their problems completely and Design optimal solutions, they may not have the ability to implement the solutions Continue Reading

One of our customers recently won a particularly large contract for the self service systems they manufacture, and had a post project de-brief with the customer last week. They were surprised when their Commercial Director observed that in a commodity market place their service capability was a key differentiator. While Continue Reading

Volker Hildebrand’s article on the MyCustomer.com site encapsulates all that confuses me about SAP’s approach to the CRM market. Entitled ‘CRM market trends: what buyers need to know’, the article’s first identified trend is that the CRM market is consolidating. This knocked me back a bit because my take is Continue Reading

I’ve had the phrase ‘sold to you by a gentleman with spiky gelled hair’ playing in the back of my mind for some while without being able to pin down where I read it. Perhaps it was the New Year’s celebrations that finally jolted my memory but I’ve tracked it Continue Reading

I caught myself ignoring my own advice just before Christmas. We’ve been helping a client improve their handling of customer support calls. This lead us to look at their stock management system, which we quickly found was not set up to help them achieve what they needed to achieve i.e. Continue Reading

In a recent article for the BBC Bill Gates made the following point: ‘So if you look at how progress is made and where competitive advantage is created, there’s no doubt that the ability to use software tools effectively is critical to succeeding in today’s global knowledge economy.’ I’m hardly Continue Reading

Well it’s always nice to get some recognition. InsideCRM has kindly listed us in their top 20 CRM blogs – at number 10 in fact. They note the following: Richard Boardman has worked on both sides of the CRM fence — first at a major CRM provider and then as Continue Reading