We are a management consultant firm using an exclusive business Intelligence and process reengineering approach, applied to Marketing and Sales. To stay neutral, we don't sale any software, we work with our customer's existing software and interface them to crate powerful dashboards in Excell through Crystall report. So as you can imagine we see all kinds of situation and CRM.

What strikes me the most is I still keep meeting sales force with manual activity reports filed by hand and sent by fax, in 2009?!?!? At the same time I meet enterprises with the latest upscale CRM, but they barely use 10% of their CRM’s potential. A lot of the “less than 1 year installations” are really not a success, because of poor training, a total lack of objectives and expectation, or no planning at all. It leaves the business totally breathless financially and unable or uninterested in reopening the working processes.

I agree, there are no excuses not to have a CRM today, but software alone is not a magic wand, it is only a tool, but a hell of a good one. The true return is the simplicity and efficiency of the reports they produces. Since I’m rarely impressed, we have to build our own.

A good report should present only the key indicators and business drivers in a 1 page format. A drill down function is essential and please no gages, clocks and lights.

Norman