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Willy 2007 Award Winners

My wife, Jean, and I love a good awards show. She'll make a nice dinner. We'll open a bottle of wine and then kick back and watch something like the Academy Awards. As I watched the show several years ago though, I kept thinking about the awards I once gave. In the early days of my newsletter, Computer Aided Selling, I gave out several awards. However, in the mid-80's we were a little ahead of the curve though and I stopped giving the award.

Then, back in 1999, I decided it was time to BRING BACK THE WILLY! If you don't recall, that was the 50th anniversary of Arthur Miller's great play, Death of a Salesman. For many folks in sales, this was our first exposure to sales.

Everyone remembers the line near the end of the play, "riding on a smile and a shoeshine." The line that always stuck with me though comes just a moment later; "A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory." I know when I was having a difficult day on the road or just lost an order I was counting on, remembering those dreams I was chasing always kept me motivated. "The Willy" is awarded to honor products that genuinely help salespeople take better care of their customers and Sell More Now. In other words, "The Willy" is awarded to honor products that help salespeople achieve their dreams.

Some analysts offer awards such as the "Top 15 CRM Solutions." That may be a good way to make the first cut in a beauty pageant, but it doesn't narrow things down in a meaningful way to help folks make better CRM purchase decisions. So, the first step we take is to break things down into logical segments for different sized businesses. Then, we consider both on-premise and SaaS alternatives. Here is how we break things down:

Segment	Metric		Business Count
Segment	*Employees*	*Revenue*	Business Count
SOHO	1 – 10	< $1M	9.0M
Small Business	11 - 50	$1M – $5M	3.0M
Mid Market	51 – 250	$5M - $50 M	400K
Small Enterprise	250 - 500	$50M - $100M	35K
Medium Enterprise	500 – 5,000	$100M - $1B	25K
FORTUNE 1000	5,000 – 10,000	> $1B	1000
Global 500	> 10,000	> $10B	500