The secret to CRM success

You can have the best intentions, understand of the value of CRM and be prepared to spend big money to buy and develop it, but at the end of the day, there's one key group that can sabotage it -- its users, the sales force.

That's the view of American software entrepreneur and executive Mike Muhney, who has been involved with CRM since the 1980s.

"Sales people want things simple, so a well-intentioned but poorly developed CRM user interface is, more often than not, a burden to the sales person," says Muhney.

"You're making their job more difficult."

Muhney is currently executive vice president and GM of international operations at Aquire Inc.

Aquire, formerly called TimeVision, is a vendor of "internal CRM," or information management within companies, Muhney says.

Internal CRM has been his focus since he joined TimeVision in 2004, but he has spent most of his career in traditional outward, customer-focused CRM.

Muhney started his IT career as an IBM salesman and then worked briefly for another vendor before going into business with a friend.

That first entrepreneurial venture failed, but after returning to salaried roles with two other vendors, in 1986 he had another go at starting his own company, co-founding Contact Software, which produced the Act! contact management package.

Contact Software was acquired by Symantec in 1993, but when Symantec signalled in 1999 that it would exit CRM to focus on security, Muhney joined with others to form a company to buy it back.

By this time, Muhney was working at SalesLogix, the mid-range CRM vendor founded in 1996 by Pat Sullivan, his partner in the start-up of Contact Software.

Act! became part of SalesLogix after the 1999 buy-back and was finally sold to British CRM vendor Sage in 2001.

Muhney has been involved in CRM in many different guises since selling his holding in Contact Software in 1993; after a brief retirement, he got back into the scene and was invited to join Deloitte in 1998, when, he says, "CRM was really exploding."

At Deloitte, his role was as one of three worldwide spokesmen on CRM, which means "I helped with their CRM implementation business