I did miss the meeting, but not the slides. Worthwhile slides, video and post by Bryan Starbuck: Phone Sales Strategies for new Startups

Been very busy and unable to blog as much as normal.

Solid read today worth checking out by Jessica Vascellaro in the WSJ Why Email No Longer Rules…

In a recent conversation, the topic turned to the future direction of CRM. Normally, I would wax philosophic on this but it is really pretty simple.

Marketing is taking over more and more of the traditional sales cycle. Sales will spend less time educating and more time selling qualified prospects. Marketing will own the wide part of the sales pipeline more than it ever has before. Prospects can gather a wealth of information by themselves and they will do it. Prospects will self-qualify more than ever before. Sales Enablement solutions are finally getting traction. Sales will adopt CRM because sales enablement will finally offer them value rather than “sales accounting”. Social CRM plays to the marketing side of CRM and early indications are that it will lead to bottom line results.

The enterprise can and will learn from early adopters. In the end it all comes down to the community of customers that your enterprise builds and nurtures. How do you grow prospects? How do you nurture them into customers? How do you show the love to those customers post-sale? These will be the macro-trends that CRM will see in the next few years.

All of these new services will be hosted software as a service solutions in the cloud and the challenges around integration will still be there. I look forward to checking this post 2-3 years from now and seeing how I did.

Avoid the project road to nowhere with these 3 common sense tips:
- Align technology and business process.
- Proactively drive user adoption.
- Never “package slam”.

…are your customers. They have credibility that your sales team will never have — and amazingly they pay you.

Nice read on this topic at Marketing Donut: Turn your customers into your best sales people.

What does it mean to be proactive in customer service? The goal is simple. Customers do not want to have to tell you there is a problem. To get there is long and often elusive. Understand your support process. Take the time to truly understand what causes customer support problems and then fix those problems.

Most of the time an enterprise customer is calling because a service is down. They want it back up — fast. I have never known a customer who wants to follow a support process that inconveniences them, such as collecting log files. They want you to know the issue, and your credibility is at stake. Focus on proactive. You may find out that it improves your customer care metrics and support process at the same time.

Increases in customers means increases in customer support. An effective tactic when starting a self-service initiative is to reassure Customer Support that the organization has to do more with less. Positive and forward looking initiatives will gain traction. More with less does not mean less people. More with less means more support with the same number of people. It is about getting more efficient. Simply it is about getting better.

Several clients have enjoyed a lot of success with this forward and positive looking idea. Try it out. The results can be surprising.