An effective plan for entering, cleaning and updating the data for your salesforce.com (SFDC) system is critical for achieving success with SFDC. According to industry experts poor planning for managing the data entry/data quality issue has historically been one of the largest reasons for failure with CRM systems.

Last week, one of my clients—we’ll call him Rick—had a demo scheduled with a prospect. The standard "show up and throw up" they typically did early in the sales cycle.
Trying to shorten the sales cycle, I asked naively, "Why does the customer want to buy? What are they trying to accomplish?" Rick couldn’t tell me. […]

Once you get your streamlined sales force up to speed, it’s going to need more people to talk to.
You already have a lead generation program in place. But is it working? Is it sufficient? Probably not, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading an article called "turnaround tactics." So you have to stoke the lead machine.

Every management authority on the circuit says that loyal customers and their repeat purchases are the cornerstone of your long-term successful business. The reason is obvious: it is less costly to get your existing customers to buy more than it is to find new ones. The lower cost of sale leads gives you higher operating […]

“Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company,” –Erwin Frand
During our recent weakened economy, many businesses have seen declining revenues and declining budgets. Declining budgets often lead to reduced staff levels and diminished services. To me, this does not make sense. I believe that it is during the down […]

Remember the 80:20 rule? You may not get everything perfectly right, but getting most right will be much, much better than the majority of your competition. These Top Ten Tips for Customer Service will get you well on the way.

When people ask, “What is CRM?” the literal answer is, “Customer Relationship Management,” but that doesn’t really convey much in terms of what all CRM does for a business. This CRM definition is too narrow to really explain everything the system does if it is working to its fullest potential and is user-friendly enough to […]

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Today, CRM
encompasses most of the earlier customer centric practices such as
Sales Force Automation, Contact Management, Marketing Automation, and
Customer and Field Service. It is typically a suite of software used
to manage a customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop
stronger lasting relationships with them.
There are many different areas in which […]