Pain...

In my last post I was lamenting the absence of a focus on business benefits in many of the business requirements documents I get to read. Joel Spolsky echoes that point in a recent post albeit in a slightly different context:

“Don’t start a business if you can’t explain what pain it solves, for whom, and why your product will eliminate this pain, and how the customer will pay to solve this pain. The other day I went to a presentation of six high tech startups and not one of them had a clear idea for what pain they were proposing to solve.”

If I may paraphrase in a CRM context:

“Don’t start a CRM project if you can’t explain what pain the system solves, for whom, and why the system will eliminate this pain, and how the value exceeds the cost of solving that pain….’