Join industry leaders, conference sponsors, and CRM magazine editors for breakfast and small-group discussions about best practices in sales, marketing, and customer service. A moderator at each table will facilitate a topic of interest. Start your day off right. Don’t miss this great networking
opportunity!

Eric Acree presents his company’s CRM success story from a “sales best practices” perspective. Prior to deploying CRM, sales results at Vantage were typical for the industry due to existing “fire fighting” processes. As the business grew, it became apparent that improvements were needed to facilitate sales and service to meet management expectations. Many opportunities for improvement were identified by improving lead, opportunity, and interaction management processes. Today, Vantage’s improved sales processes, supported by CRM software, bring a more sophisticated and effective methodology to its sales and service functions.

Hear from Gustavo Martinez Lira, the CRM director at HSBC Mexico, about how cutting-edge CRM initiatives have been responsible for 71% of new  personal loans, 64% of new credit cards, and 10% of new  auto loans. HSBC Mexico is a  profitable bank with 1,400 branches  and 6.2 million customers that has fully embraced the CRM philosophy of creating and maintaining the "right relationship with each customer."  Martinez will tell the story of this successful implementation and outline lessons learned.

The Department of Defense is engaged in customer support every day, twenty-four hours a day. The support ranges from delivering food, ammunition, and medical aid to providing unique and innovative intelligence and communications systems to customers that are changing every six months to a year. Department of Defense activities are essential for U.S. national security, with a mission to empower warfighters and provide customer support using a combination of “just in time” and long-range support built on innovation, training, education, and increased customer service. Thinking creatively, Joe DeYoung has helped establish an agile and responsive customer-focused support organization that often executes in real-time. In this intriguing case study, he will share with conference participants how the one Department of Defense agency employs customer service and support best practices that have been benchmarked with other government organizations.

Hear the strategic visions of more leading-edge technology solution providers and understand why it matters to you. Learn what you need to know to plan your company’s customer-facing strategy as you move forward. You are invited to actively join in this discussion with the industry’s leading CRM solution vendors, so be sure to bring your questions.

A number of influential United Way leaders in Canada faced a daunting task.  They gathered five large United Way operations from Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver under a Business Transformation Coalition (BTC) umbrella. The BTC CRM initiative aimed to coordinate key sales, marketing, customer service, and executive reporting needs across the five organizations, which was no small task. Ken was involved in developing the project and assisted in defending the business case for this CRM initiative to his board of directors.  Hear how the BTC organizations proved the ROI and obtained needed funding for this CRM initiative.

Can’t everyone just get along? In the competitive world of CRM capability deployment, which should come first—sales, marketing or customer service? How can a company mitigate the inherent conflicts between driving revenue, exceeding service standards, or implementing a critical marketing campaign? Hear practical solutions, including how to: 1) identify the optimal sales/service model for different customer segments; 2) balance the art and creativity of selling versus the necessary rigor of marketing; and 3) manage the competing interest of sales, marketing, and service with a shared (best practices) capabilities roadmap. Learn tactical tips for integrating the views of the account executive, marketer, and customer service representative. You will take home some practical tools to help manage these issues along with a succinct best practices approach for integrating the worlds of sales, marketing, and service.

CRM’s current success formula includes implementing sound customer-facing business processes, securing user buy-in for these processes, and then applying appropriate technology. The new success formula, real-time CRM leverages the availability of real-time technologies, giving an organization instant access to all the customer-related information required in the exploding, always on, always connected business environment. Hear why real-time CRM is crucial for building long-term customer loyalty and prosperity — and for the future success of your CRM initiatives.