If you're doing a CRM system conversion, expansion, or initial implementation, there are some things you need to look for — and look out for — in a vendor proposal. We'll help you sort it out.
The discovery phase is the weakest part of any cloud project, but getting it wrong can cost you dearly.
How do you separate quality cloud consultants from the clowns? If you don't have a screening checklist in place — and let's face it, you probably don't — this short list of behaviors and policies is a good place to start.
You might not have noticed it, but cloud implementation consultants and contractors have been acting increasingly stupid over the last couple of years. If you think this doesn’t affect you and your project, you’re wrong.
In many industries, the revenue generation function — sales and marketing — is the single biggest cost of running the business. Yet it’s also the most unreliable. That’s why tightening up the business processes with CRM systems is so important to profitability. Here’s how to tell if your company’s revenue generation process is up to modern standards.
In theory, the two methodologies don’t mix. In practice, they almost always have to. Here are four tactics to make these opposites work together.
We all know about zero-day attacks. But what about when the zero-day attack is in the form of a subpoena or other legal notice regarding the data in your CRM system? Don’t panic.
To misquote Tom Lehrer, your company’s sales pipeline is a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
In a consulting project, the customer is always in charge, right? Not so fast.
Every once in a while, somebody comes up with a great idea that is really dangerous. Here’s some ammunition you can use to counter one we’ve encountered.
We've seen it all before: Whether it's a part number, an account number, an order number or an identifying number for nearly any real object, the users ask for a number that isn't abstract, arbitrary and essentially meaningless. They ask for numbers that are short, significant and "intuitive" for the business user. Because they ask for the wrong thing, the IT pros always give them the wrong answer. That's the inevitable outcome of asking the wrong question.
Agile projects involve close collaboration and very fast feedback loops. When it works, users' expectations are closely aligned to the project deliverables, and very little time is wasted on nice-to-haves or perfectionism that has no business impact. Agile done right is a thing of beauty, and economical to boot.
If you've read any of my articles, you know that the agile practices I advocate are rarely even tried in government projects. How can the guys who popularized the Gantt Chart and the PERT diagram help modern software projects? Oh, and don't forget the folks behind Healthcare.gov.
'The Producers' profited from an idea that was supposed to lose money. Most companies are happy if their call centers produce zero margins. It doesn't have to be that way.
What could be less news than the end of Windows XP support? Everybody on the planet has been told about it a hundred times. This article concerns the real danger you haven't been reading about.