CHAPTER 1CRM, Reporting, and a False Sense of Control

THE WAR ROOM

So there we were. The war room.

Our Fortune 100 client was showing us the sequestered conference room where the company’s senior leadership gathers weekly to review business performance and set strategic direction. On the walls hung a sea of performance reports showing everything from current financial projections to the number of customer-facing calls the sales force had conducted year-to-date. Literally hundreds of data points culled from the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) tool were reported in vividly colored charts for the leadership team’s real-time consideration.

There was data at an aggregate level. Data at the sales manager level. Data sliced by product ...

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