Looking at the Tom Peter’s site today I was interested in his musings about business academics who had the potential to win a Nobel Prize. The issue he points to is that there is a Nobel Prize for economics, but not one for business management. He goes on to say:

“Make no mistake: Management is an art . . . not a science. (Frankly, it’s not all that clear to many, even those in the field, that economics is a science)”

I find it interesting as to how broadly the metaphor of “art” versus “science” can be applied to just about any profession. In sales automation done right I specifically use the metaphor as it applies to sales. If you are a natural salesperson it infers that you rely on the “art” of selling, in the same way as if you were a natural politician, or a natural criminal lawyer. The “art” of mastering something mostly depends on talents you were born with—sure, they can be honed and polished with some training (using the science?). Mastering a science however is based on learning an established rule book about a subject, such that you can use this knowledge to spring board into new ideas that add to the rule book. The ability to innovate within the realm of a science probably depends on the natural ability of the individual (art?).

These ideas are used in SADR to illustrate how good salespeople can intuitively rely on different degrees of the art and science of their selling experience. If salespeople understand how their interaction with the customer is generally dominated by art or science, depending on their comfort zone, they can learn to “tune” the balance to achieve the optimum results. This concept is one of the driving theses in OPM sales methodology.

I have been in the high tech industry for all of my life, and have always had the luxury to choose my own computer. As I always worked from both home and the office so I gravitated to portable computers.

I must have worked with all the so called portable computers since the early eighties, although I confess I never had an Osborne, which most computer historians claim to be the first truly portable device (1981), with a five inch monitor and a weight of 24 pounds. Although I did not have one, I bumped into them a lot in my career of a high tech lab instrument salesman. Seems to me that they were light years ahead of their time.

I went through a number of machines of all weights and sizes, but one of my favorites was “the Brick.” The idea of the brick was to put the computer into a very small package (3″ x 8″ x 11″), which could then be transported. When you got to the office you plugged in your keyboard, monitor, and printer and started work. This was in 1990. I loved it, although you had to hold your breath when you plugged it into the docking station, which had a gazillion connectors, anyone of which, if bent, could bring the system down. I must have been through a dozen different portable, laptop, or notebook variants over the years, but my favorite is the one I have now – the Sony Vaio TR3A. I like tiny computers—before the Sony I had a Fujitsu B-Series Lifebook, which is actually smaller than the Sony, but doesn’t have the same features.

My Sony weighs just three pounds, has a 10 inch high resolution display and a built-in optical drive. My requirements are simple—give me the smallest computer that will allow me to touch type and read the screen. Battery life is important too, but I settle for three hours and the ability to replace the battery. It seems to me that the overwhelming factor in of this size thing is the keyboard. I am a new touch typer as I picked the talent up late in life; touch typing is liberating. I’m glad I gave it the three months of effort needed to pick it up. But, if you can type at the rate that you can think quality thoughts, the world opens up. It definitely makes writing a book a bit quicker.

I received a comment to a previous post that got me thinking. It seems that there needs to be parallel efforts in maintaining both Acquisition and Retention, with equal focus, and not one at the expense of the other. In my post I said I thought that Acquisition was the mandate of Sales Force Automation (SFA), whereas Retention was in the realm of CRM. I did that, because I am fixated with trying to disentangle these two terms.

If we drive down to the departmental level, it seems that Marketing and Sales should drive Acquisition, and after sales service should drive Retention. In my book I discuss the “long winded title of Acquisition and Retention loop” (page 27) – long winded, because I could not find any other description that was suitable.

So after I write this, I realize that I was wrong—sales is not the only group responsible for acquisition, marketing is in there too.

Definitely everything falls under the umbrella of CRM, but that term has become so all encompassing that it is tough to look below and see what it all means.

Perhaps, if companies are focusing too much on Retention at the expense of Acquisition, or vice versa, one department may be more powerful than the other, in other words they don’t have a unified CRM program that’s working well. If they did the normal departmental interplay would help them achieve the right balance.