Qualifying Sales Leads

One of the points I made in a recent post on CRM requirements specification, was the part that education plays in CRM requirements gathering. In brief, the more people understand about the use of CRM technology, the better their contribution to the requirements gathering process.

Expanding on that a little; the more people understand about CRM technology and the realities of implementing it, the more likely the overall project is likely to be a success. The question is ‘where do you get that education?’. And that isn’t so easy.

Sure, it’s no challenge to see as much CRM software as you care to view. There’s no shortage of vendors more than happy to show you their wares, but what about the ‘realities of implementing’ part; now that’s a challenge.

In fact the realities of implementing CRM are something the CRM vendors would probably prefer you didn’t know. They are inconvenient details that can interfere with the main event – selling software. Since the vendors tend to dominate the airways, then there’s not much ‘reality’ available.

Anyway, this all leads to my last plug for a while at least. We’ve launched another new service (the last for a while - I promise) the ‘elegantly’ named CRM Executive Briefing service, which is designed to provide would be implementers, or indeed re-implementers, with an executive primer on the realities of implementing CRM technology.