Bang for buck

If you're at a small organization, limited funding is a perennial problem.

The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us.

— Oakland A's General Manager Billy Bean (as played by Brad Pitt in Moneyball)

In the film, Beane and his assistant manager turn around a struggling small-market baseball team with an elegant implementation of a fairly simple principle:

Hitting your goals is not about spending lots of money; it's about taking the most effective action you can with the resources that you've got.

In terms of your CRM, that means prioritizing the improvements that will get you the biggest bang for the buck.

Fancy new feature? Not a bad thing, as long as you can clearly articulate exactly how it will pay for itself.

If you can't, it's probably worth considering alternatives: creative use of existing features, better training for your staff, better analysis of the data you're already tracking.

The specific steps you take will depend on your actual goals.

But the principle is the same:

Put aside the notions of “how we’ve always done it” and “how the big players are doing it,” and focus instead on actions that will get you measurable results toward goals that you care about.

All the best,
Allen