One thing I know about myself is that I am better when I have a full plate. To stay busy, I enrolled in the Evening MBA program at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business last fall. I have been impressed with the curriculum and faculty. The Blue Ocean Strategy…
Tag: thoughts
Simple Truths: KYC
When you know your customer (KYC), good things happen. – Example, Client A increased user adoption to 70% of total call volume. ROI increase 25% in one quarter. When you know your customer, you can spot trouble a mile away. – Example, Client B re-organized and has a new executive…
Life isn’t…
Weekend thought… “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” ~George Bernard Shaw
“Joel on Software” blog is coming to an end
Big news that Joel Spolsky is ending his Joel on Software blog as announced in Inc. The money quote: To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It…
iPad, the Kindle Killer?
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass. Look at some of the advantages Kindle has: Battery Life. Kindle can last up to 7 days without…
Keep it simple
One of my rules is to always consider the front office and the back office needs and desires of any CRM project. I recently came across a service process that generate a large volume of automated tickets. The process was over-engineered. Nearly all of these automated tickets were not true…
Cloud SLA
Taking a look back on Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) from approximately a year ago and seeing what has changed for the enterprise. The SLA is nothing new and have existed in information technology for many, many years. I can tell you firsthand that SLA remains critical to the selling…
Spot Instances
Amazon AWS announced Spot Instances of EC2 a few weeks back. I have been very interested in this concept. Auction pricing should be natural for the cloud computing utility model. They will be selling spare capacity from moment to moment. The cloud is attractive since servers often site idle. Sharing…
5 Questions
All consultants like to ask questions. Sometimes too many questions. Here are 5 that I keep on hand for initial client engagements. What do your expectations of a service provider? How do you see out team helping you address challenges and opportunities? Why are you changing providers? How do we…
CRM implementation priorities
The first priority of a CRM deployment should be to learn about existing customer data within the enterprise. It is obvious, but often overlooked. I often make it the top priority when scoping CRM services. Is all that customer data in all of the right hands? 99% of the time…