Two volumes from the CRM bookshelf

A couple of books on the subject that we all follow have been released this week. Long-time proponent of leanness in the industrial CRM world, Commence Corporation and CEO Larry Caretsky have released a tome they’ve entitled “Smart Practices That Pay: Leveraging Information to Achieve Industrial Selling Results.”

The virtual dust jacket for the book “focuses on the three key elements of a successful industrial sales effort: marketing strategy, sales management, and sales optimization through technology.”

“Smart Practices” was put together from forty tales of industrial selling, culled from interviews with executives from high-growth companies. Says Caretsky: “Today’s industrial sales environment is characterized by intense competition, strategic sourcing contracts, online auctions, customer pressure for self-service, and the ongoing debate over fee-based services. To thrive in this environment, industrial distributors and manufacturers need more than leading technology or efficient warehouses to achieve long-term growth.”

Meanwhile, Research and Markets has released a volume called “Implementing CRM: From Technology to Knowledge.” This book focuses on the “actuality of implementing CRM” and claims to “[connect] CRM systems implementation with organizational change for the first time.”

Noting that there is no product-based agenda at work, authors David Finnegan and Leslie P. Willcocks look into the factors that distinguish firms which gain customer loyalty with those unsuccessful. It also describes the micro-processes.

Finnegan and Willcocks note that CRM implementation is not a straightforward process, nor easy, and suppose that the failure rate of large CRM projects may be as high as seventy percent. Through the lens of two detailed case studies, the authors investigate why "CRM is no panacea."

David Finnegan is a CRM and Systems Integration Specialist with twelve years senior management experience. Finnegan works internationally as an integration consultant and trainer, while developing postgraduate academic programmes for universities in the UK and US. He is also presently working as an assistant professor at Warwick Business School.

Leslie P. Willcocks in known for his work in outsourcing, information systems, IT strategies, evaluation and organizational change. Willcocks is a professor in Technology, Work and Globalization at the London School of Economics and a visiting professor at the Universities of Erasmus and Melbourne. He has co-authored 28 books and published over 150 papers in journals ranging from Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review to MIS Quarterly and Journal of Management Studies.