The Sales Enablement Challenge Max Effgen, October 19, 2009 Sales Enablement offers some unique advantages to drive Sales user adoption. The ability to create new and custom collateral and to effectively collaborate on accounts address big pain points for sales. The CRM world has not implemented these technologies on an industry scale. Sales Enablement also addresses today’s market realities…. Continue Reading
Social CRM Questions Max Effgen, October 15, 2009 My $0.02 on questions you need to answer in mapping out your Social CRM strategy: Where are your customers? Where do they go when they have issues with your products and services? How open is that conversation? How are you making them successful? What keeps them from flaming the CEO?… Continue Reading
CRM Trends Max Effgen, October 9, 2009 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…. Continue Reading
The best salespeople… Max Effgen, October 7, 2009 …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. Continue Reading
Proactive service Max Effgen, October 6, 2009 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… Continue Reading
How to scale support Max Effgen, October 5, 2009 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… Continue Reading
Is SaaS CRM Privacy Moot? Max Effgen, September 21, 2009 A few conversations on SaaS based CRM have recently centered on privacy. The SaaS problem regardless of solution is privacy and integration into core corporate systems. Always has been. Always will. There needs to be a dose of reality though. Cloud based e-mail is reality and many companies are moving… Continue Reading
CRM: It’s *Still* Not About the Technology Max Effgen, September 17, 2009 A solid read by my friend and former colleague Eric Heine on the Integra Technology Consulting Blog. Eric and I delivered a very large Siebel implementation in record time many, many moons ago. He is a true leader in CRM implementations and decries “package slamming”. To add my $0.02, user… Continue Reading
Gist beta going live Max Effgen, September 15, 2009December 2, 2013 Gist makes the move from private beta to public this morning. I have been a beta user for awhile and think highly of the product. If you are in Sales, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement or just want your inbox to be more functional, try it out. Check out my earlier… Continue Reading
Solid read: Social Media is from Mars… Max Effgen, September 14, 2009 Check out this solid read on social media and the enterprise Gia Lyons’ Connected blog. Interesting stuff. Social Media is from Mars, Enterprise 2.0 is from Venus Happy Monday. Continue Reading