Liz Roche

Customers Incorporated

Liz and Jim Roche are the founding partners of Customers Incorporated, a CRM research and consulting firm. Liz has 20 years of IT and business experience. Jim's approach is driven by more than 25 years of sales, marketing and management success. They are based in Stamford, Connecticut.

If Sales Effectiveness Were Baseball, the World Series Would Still Be a Few Years Away

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Posted on 2006-12-11

If CRM were a baseball game, what inning would we be in? We were asked that question way back in 1999. Our answer then: maybe the first or second inning. Today we'd probably put CRM somewhere in the sixth inning. And it seems to us that, despite years of work, the discipline of sales effectiveness is in the first or second inning.

The thing that has most surprised us as we look back at sales effectiveness in 2006 is how much work sales organizations recognize there is to do to improve performance but how little activity they're actually undertaking. This inactivity is pervasive across industries, company size and channel systems.

We recently completed a study in partnership with CRMGuru that underscored what we've been seeing anecdotally for the past few years: There is a meaningful disconnect between under-performing sales organizations and the implementation of readily available solutions.

The study, which examined trends in sales effectiveness,...

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Don't Wait for Godot: You Can Make Sales More Effective Without the Latest Killer App

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Posted on 2006-09-17

The most misunderstood of all CRM domains, sales effectiveness, continues to be a just-out-of-reach goal for thousands of organizations despite years of having tried and failed to implement "sales effectiveness" technology. Therein lies the mistake every organization we've ever worked with makes: Waiting for Godot.

So how are sales effectiveness mistakes like Samuel Beckett's play? In the play, two characters wait by a tree for Mr. Godot, whose arrival they expect imminently. They learn that Godot's arrival is postponed until tomorrow, then the day after. But they, nonetheless, continue to wait with high expectations.

That's not so different from IT and sales organizations that are essentially waiting for some vendor to develop a sales effectiveness "killer application" that will be easy to implement, elegant to use, appealing to the intractable and invaluable to the enterprise. All the while maintaining the status quo under the guise of current state inertia. Sound...

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