Birch Blog
birch.co · Company blog · on HN since 2010
Birch is a startup blog covering sales, startup strategy, and hiring, written by the company's author.
What HN saysCommenters discuss CRM usability and sales tool compliance; the post author also appears in a thread to correct a claim about education and free markets.
18HN people shared it
2linked it in comments
17stories submitted
28story points
13 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
michael2855 · 2012-07-13
Agree on the need to make sales tools more usable by sales people. The two biggest issues we've identified with CRM usage are around (1) compliance (e.g., Inputting sales info per company policy) and (2) currency (e.g., keeping the sales information fresh and up to date). The design point for most CRMs is as a corporate reporting tool, in essence a static db of outdated or missing data. The reality is that most CRMs fail to add value to a typical sales rep’s daily effort, and the output (typically exported to Excel) fails to provide the level of insight or information to correctly "money ball" a sales team or manage a pipe. This requires a herculean effort of people and time with layers of sales management and sales ops to provide the rigor and discipline required to forecast a quarter. Net, net -- a hairball. Here's a good read if you are interested in a well thought out understanding of the issue: http://birch.co/post/19234996380/the-failure-of-sales-analytics. As CEO of Foretuit (www.Foretuit.com), the selling process is ripe with inefficiencies and inherently ineffective. Hence a huge area for disruptive tech. While no one vendor (established or startup) has cracked this code, the opportunity to leverage the $18 billion each year that orgs spend on CRM presents a solid opportunity now and in the future.
hcribkram · 2012-07-30
Time out, I am the post author here and I never inferred anything about free market anything. In fact, I have written extensively on this topic and have stated on many occasions that education needs to remain public in order to provide fair opportunities for all.
However, that does not mean that US public schools are without problems. Teachers actually should receive higher salaries, but they also need to be better qualified. Unions are not an evil that diminishes educational outcomes for students, but they do need to recognize that teacher standards have steadily eroded over the past few decades instead of protecting the status quo. I could go on with statistics and such, but you can read the full post here: http://birch.co/post/10127535253/the-us-education-conundrum