WHEN I was speaking at the recent DCI CRM conference in New York City I was asked by one of the sales executives attending my session to share my thoughts on why CRM continues to generate such mixed results in terms of impacting sales performance.

I had the feeling from his demeanor that he had some strong opinions on the topic himself, so before I gave my answer, I asked if he might want to share his views first. His answer intrigued me. He said he thought the problem is that CRM focuses way too much on who and what, and not nearly enough on how.

Consider for a moment the most commonly used components of a CRM system: contact management, account management, lead tracking, opportunity management, forecasting, sales activity tracking, etc. These applications help reps do two important tasks: figure out who's who within an account and figure out what to do with them in the sales process.