A few good resolutions

One of our absolute favorite youtube clips is a few good expenses ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OTgb3KO7QM).

Here a sales manager has to defend the expensing of a lapdance session to corporate finance (represented by Tom Cruise).

We often use this short movie fragment to illustrate the areas of friction between sales and the other business domains that hamper business growth in many companies.

But I am not going to discuss organizational alignment issues in the first blog of the new year.

I will limit myself to a few good resolutions - some of which come at little or no expense.

First we will further standardize our approach and further invest in the automation of our diagnostics and account management process.

This will help many of our customers to implement our recommendations faster and to monitor progress more in detail.

Secondly we will continue the transformation of our commercial benchmark program CPS. and achieve our ambition to turn it into a European-wide information source for better sales and marketing.

Last but not least we will work hard to restore the fun factor in our daily work and projects.

2009 was a difficult year and a year to forget for many companies - including CPI - but the first signs of recovery are demonstrated and many of our clients tell us that the first Quarter of 2010 looks better than any of the quarters in gloomy 2009.

I hope this revival will continue and look forward to helping our customers and contacts to adapt their organizations and approaches to the post-recession business environment.