The sales process from lead generation to opportunity management has always been a difficult one to enforce, as sales reps are not people who tend to be process-oriented.  Thus, many reps do not bother to do more with a CRM system than to use it as a digital Rolodex – schedule activities, write notes about [...]

A few years ago, one of the biggest hot-button items for sales force automation that rarely produced satisfactory results was offline synch.  The process of creating synchronization modules, coupled with data consistency issues and the dependency of the reps to initiate the synch (some offerings had automatic sync, but that brought its own set of [...]

CRM is focused primarily on relationships with customers for the purpose of driving revenue and profits.  As such, in typical instances of CRM implementations, Sales Force Automation typically becomes the central focus, with all other aspects of CRM becoming secondary.  Indeed, in most of the cross-departmental CRM implementations that I have been involved with, Sales [...]