I’ve read and heard a lot of sales gurus and even hired some. Very few of the gurus talk much about CRM. If you analyzed the top ten books about sales, I bet you’d get fewer than 100 pages talking about this technology at all. Huh? What?

CRM is viewed as a speedbump on the road to sales success rather than the racecar that takes you there. Why? We all sell our products or services on the phone, sometimes we sell in person, but not on a keyboard. Maybe emails, sure, but is that really selling? Managers implore reps to clack in their funnels and pipeline reports, which they reluctantly do at the end of the month.

CRM does nothing when it is a passive part of the Sales process. Passive means CRM is sleeping or in a coma, if you will. This is now showing up in industry growth. One of my friends and clients, Yacov Wrocherinsky has built one of the best CRM consultancies around; 30%+ annual growth that is amazing compared to the CRM industry which has slowed to single digits.

Linking our CRM to the phones was one of the single best things we’ve done all year. All of a sudden, our CRM became a real-time active system,not a passive one. Reps want their data in salesforce – they can even dial out of it, and when the prospect calls back they have their notes appear in front of them in Salesforce while the phone is still ringing.

I think this “mashing up” of real-time tools and software will be a major development. The signs are there – look at BT’s recent $100million purchase of Ribbit, a pre-revenue company that specialized in this sort of mash-up. Isn’t this what twitter does too – make social networking real-time? The iPhone apps store, Facebook API, the Salesforce Appexchange all are filled with people working on this type of thing. It seems to me that an old technology – the phone – could breathe new life into a relatively new one – CRM.