Put Some CEx Into Your CRM — The Job to be Done in my Pantry

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For as long as I’ve been involved with sales force automation (SFA) and then customer relationship management (CRM), there have been so many easy stories to tell. The kind of stories that customers used to gobble up, and required very little intellectual muscle on our part (the resellers). Stories like “sales force automation will enable your worst sales person to sell more! “ eventually evolving into “a 360 degree view of your customer will enable your customer facing employees to know exactly what to cross-sell and up-sell!”

I’ve also heard desperate, or confused, messaging in the sales process, marketing and other presentations suggesting that research shows a significant increase in top line revenue across all companies that have implemented CRM, and almost in the same breath differentiate themselves by quoting analyst firms, such as Gartner, that somewhere between 50–70% of CR…