Rich's Favorite CRM Gurus

This is my own personal list of the "best of the best!" I have known each of these folks for more than 10 years; I trust them totally and recommend them without reservation!

Gil Cargill

After concluding a spectacular sales and management career at IBM, in which he led his sales team from a dead last rating among 220 branch offices to first place in less than a year, Gil Cargill launched his own consulting practice in 1978. Cargill Consulting Group, Inc. was built on the same strategies that produced Cargill's outstanding sales results at IBM.

Gil Cargill has spent the past 27 years as a consultant, speaker and sales trainer helping thousands of businesses achieve dramatic and permanent improvements in sales productivity. Cargill has taught salespeople across diverse industries the importance of developing sales processes, the advantages of implementing new technology, and the benefits of tracking sales performance. Cargill has been a frequent speaker at national conventions and consultant to such organizations as Toshiba, ComputerLand, Micro Age, Apple Computers, Borg Warner Weyerhaeuser, and many thousands of small-to-medium, growing businesses.

http://www.cargillsells.com/

Jim Cecil

Jim Cecil, founder and president, is an acknowledged leader in the field of loyalty marketing and customer-relationship strategies. Cecil addresses conferences and meetings, and conducts strategic sales process training sessions for corporate teams and individuals.

Cecil is an expert observer of trends in marketing and selling. His development of the Nurture Selling Process is the result of a need he saw spring from dynamic changes in the business-to-business sales process beginning in the late 1980's. It became clear that the sales cycle is growing longer each year while cold-calling has ceased to be an effective form of selling. The impact of traditional media marketing is diminishing. Cecil has discovered a cure for the common cold call -- it is Nurturing!

http://www.nurturemarketing.com/

Jim Dickie

Jim Dickie is a partner with CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in analyzing how companies are reinventing the way they market, sell to, and service customers. He has over 25 years of sales and marketing management experience. Jim began his career with IBM and Sterling Software and then went on to launch two successful software companies.

Jim is also a contributing editor for CRM Magazine; and the author of The Chief Sales Officers Guide to CRM, Insights into High Tech Sales and Marketing, and the co-author of The Information Technology Challenge, and a board member for Baylor University’s Center for Professional Selling. Jim is a guest host on World Business Review seen on PBS, and an often-requested keynote speaker at CRM and E-Business conferences.

Over the past ten years,CSO Insight's survey of over 4000 customer relationship management projects has become the benchmark for tracking the evolution of the marketing, sales and service automation initiatives. CSO Insight's clients span multiple industries and include such firms as 3M, GE Capital, Great West Life, Federal Express, IBM, Accenture, StorageTek, Xilinx, Hewlett Packard, McKesson, Unocal, Cessna, Bell South, Vishey Electronics, and Intel.

http://www.csoinsights.com/

Dick Lee

Dick Lee is founder and principal of High-Yield Methods, a trend-setting consulting firm focused on helping clients achieve external alignment with customers and internal alignment around customers. To deliver these outcomes, HYM’s innovative consultants employ a range of proprietary tools—including a customer-centric approach to strategic planning; a field-tested, collaborative approach to implementing customer relationship management; and Visual Workflow, the first formal approach to business process improvement designed specifically for use in highly variable front office and service sector environments..

Dick was among the pioneers of the relationship marketing movement—starting his customer-centric work in corporate sales in the late 1970s and progressing through field sales and call center process management, database marketing and strategic planning roles before founding HYM (originally High-Yield Marketing) in 1994. During the 1980s, he also developed the first university course in customer-centric business planning, which he taught for 10 years at the Graduate School of Business, University of St. Thomas

While leading HYM to prominence in CRM circles, Dick developed two proprietary methodologies now in common use: The Four Steps to CRM Success™ , the first strategically-oriented, formalized approach to planning CRM implementation; and Visual Workflow™, an approach for aligning business strategies, business process and information technologies that includes a highly accessible, mapping system that enables business and IT managers to collaborate effectively in creating business/technology alignment.

http://www.h-ym.com/

See also:

http://www.h-ym.com/Customers_Tell_Companies.htm

Barry Trailer

Barry Trailer is a Partner with CSO Insights, and brings over twenty-five years of professional selling experience to this role. He is an expert on sales processes and methodologies for complex business-to-business environments. Most recently, Barry was president of the GoldMine Division of FrontRange Solutions. Prior to that, he held other senior positions at FrontRange Solutions including Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Vice President of North American Sales for GoldMine Software Corporation (prior to corporate name change to FrontRange Solutions).

Before joining GoldMine Software Corp, Barry was a principal in the consulting firm Trailer Vavricka, Inc. (TVI). Clients included Commerce One, Corning Cable Systems (formerly Siecor), DoubleClick, The Tennant Company, Onyx and Arbor Software. It became clear that beyond mapping sales processes a mechanism was needed for sustaining and improving these processes. Beginning in 1994 the company began developing software to provide operational performance metrics to sales reps and their managers. This work led to the formation of SalesWare, Inc. and the product Vital Signs™ which were acquired by GoldMine Software.
Barry has presented to more than ten thousand sales reps and executives at over a hundred companies, including HP, Sun Microsystems, Conner Peripherals, and Hitachi Data Systems. From 1983 to 1991 Barry was a leading associate with Miller-Heiman, Inc. and served as president of Miller-Heiman in 1986.

Barry's writing includes Sales Mastery a novel, published in 1991, serving as Contributing Editor (1997-1999) with the monthly column "Can We Talk?" for Sales & Field Force Automation (now CRM) magazine and several white papers on sales process. In addition to writing, speaking and consulting Barry also now serves on several advisory boards of emerging companies. He lives in Marin County, CA.

http://www.csoinsights.com/