The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide Everything You Need to Know, Before You Need to Know it

Few books have influenced an entire industry as much as "The Customer Relationship Survival Guide." Survival Guide has pushed the practice of CRM toward business strategy and culture change – and away from process- and technology-based CRM projects that meet predictable fates. Many companies already owe their CRM success to lessons learned from this book. Many more will before Survival Guide is finished doing its work. And yet more will find in this book the reasons why their CRM implementations failed - and how to rescue them.

But there’s more to the Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide than expert advice. Through his many speaking engagements, magazine columns and other writings, author Dick Lee has distinguished himself as both a wry humorist and a business visionary. Lee’s irreverent commentary and keen business insights make reading Survival Guide an entertaining and valuable experience – for anyone in business today.

Internationally-acclaimed consultant/author/speaker Dick Lee is principal of St. Paul, Minnesota-based High-Yield Marketing, a consulting group that mentors and clients implementing customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and supporting systems. HYM starts a strong focus on the strategic side of CRM—helping clients develop new customer relationship strategies and determine appropriate new departmental roles and responsibilities. With this foundation established, HYM then helps clients re-engineer work processes and deploy appropriate CRM technologies.

Dick was among the founders of the relationship marketing movement, dating back to the early 1980s. Although he built a very successful advertising/direct marketing agency that he led until founding High-Yield Marketing in 1994, Dick’s overriding interest has long been the melding of sales, marketing and technology into a powerful force for lengthening and strengthening customer relationships. While his clients have included 3M Company, American Express, Fidelity, General Electric, Microsoft, Pitney-Bowes and Toro—he has a special appreciation of working with middle market and small businesses that have the will and flexibility to become customer-driven organizations.

Dick is author of three books that together provide comprehensive support for self-guided CRM implementations: an overview book, The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide, plus two instructional workbooks, The Customer Relationship Management Planning Guide and The Customer Relationship Management Deployment Guide. He also wrote a groundbreaking first book, The Sales Automation Survival Guide and writes a monthly columns for “CRM” magazine and “CRM Guru.”

Dick’s work and perspectives have also been featured in “Business Week,” National Public Radio’s MarketPlace, “Newsweek,” The Wall Street Journal and numerous print and web-based publications. He holds a BA from Reed College, Portland, Oregon and an MBA from Suffolk University, Boston, and taught for 10 years at the Graduate School of Business, University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.