Now the holidays are gone and we have come to the close of another business cycle.  It is particularly interesting that there are many new planning sessions going on and people are recounting what has gone right and what has gone wrong and some will even come up with a list of things they will do differently.  The reality is that most people might make a few small adjustments but for the most part next year‘s efforts and results will be within a stone’s throw of this year.

What I just wrote can either be potentially sobering or uplifting or neither.  So why did I write it?  Truthfully, it needed to be said.  And why did it need to be said?  Hopefully, because someone will read this blog and understand that the way to exponential change is not through incremental thinking.  If you want next year to be significantly different then spend the next two weeks  ripping through every process you have and question everything that you do and question everyone else on their processes and ask them why they do things a certain way.

The best part of working in the world of CRM and the worst part of working in the world of CRM is the lack of rules and the stringent structure in other business applications. If you approach CRM with the knowledge that everything is up for change then you might have a fighting chance to make this year a game changer.  How in the world would you do that?  Rather than ranting about process, process, process and change management and twenty other buzz words I will simply start my blog this year with a simple survey that you take as a self assessment to find out whether you will land within a rock's throw of last year's numbers or if you will, in fact, look back at 2010 and say, "Why in the hell didn't we do this sooner?"

Here goes:

1.  When was the last time you had a group of your customers sit down in a room together with the "gloves off" to give you a real picture of how they see your organization and just sit and listen to their opinion of the customer experience?

2.  Better yet, when was the last time you invited in a group of customers that fired you in the last couple of years to do the same thing?

3. Have you ever taken the approach to manage the different customer "buying processes" rather than trying to figure out the magic pill to the optimal "sales process"?

4.  If you locked your top 10 producers in a room and told them that they were only going to be comped if their revenue split between new accounts and existing accounts was 50/50 this year how would they react?

5. Have you actually taken an inventory of how people actually spend their week and then worked backwards through what it would take to remove all of the non-value added activities to worry about only getting them in front of customers and prospects?

6. Did you ever evaluate your bottom 10 percent of your installed base customers and consider firing them based on the lack of profitability to your firm?

7. Do you know exactly how your marketing efforts track back to sales and are you willing to cut certain marketing efforts and put money into others midstream rather than just sinking money into these efforts until their conclusion?

8. Can you identify the deals in your pipeline when they turn against you and decide whether or not you need to bail out or do something drastic to try and change the outcome?

9. Are your producers spending way too much time being overpaid lead qualifiers or do they have a list of target accounts that match the profile of your most profitable customers?

10.  The best for last.  Will you simply read this blog and go back to your same old routines and reach the same results or will you do something drastically different this year to reach your goals?