Articles by Dick Lee

Dick Lee is founder and principal of St. Paul, Minnesota-based High-Yield Methods, a boutique consulting firm focused on helping clients achieve external alignment with customers and internal alignment around customers. To deliver these outcomes, HYM employs a range of internally developed tools, including a field-tested, collaborative approach to implementing CRM; Hyper-Planning, a short cycle time customer-centric strategic planning method; and Visual Workflowsm (VW), the first business process design approach developed for use in office work environments, which include both white collar and "no collar" employees in roles ranging from management to sales, marketing and customer service to order processing, HR and beyond. Over the past several years, an increasing number of clients have engaged HYM to apply VW outside the CRM and customer realms in areas including supply chain, finance, accounts receivable and payable and order-to-cash.

Lee was among the architects of the CRM movement, starting his customer-centric work in corporate sales in the late 1970s and progressing through field marketing, outsourced contact center management, database marketing and strategic planning before founding HYM (originally High-Yield Marketing) in 1994. During the 1980s, he also developed the first university course in customer-centric strategic planning, which he taught for 10 years at the Graduate School of Business, University of St. Thomas Over the years, HYM's consulting approach has produced outstanding returns for clients including 3M Company, American Express, H.B. Fuller, Honeywell International, Microsoft Corporation, the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Standard Register, United Way and U.S. Banks, as well as many small and mid-sized businesses.In addition to consulting, Lee has also shared his experiences in books and journal columns. In 1997, he wrote The Sales Automation Survival Guide, which gave the CRM movement a major shove in a strategic direction. In 1999 he followed up with an industry best-seller, The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide. In 2002, Lee put his innovative CRM consulting methodology into the public domain with the release of Strategic CRM. Over the past several years, Lee has partnered with author and customer research specialist David Mangen, Ph.D., to produce several influential research studies assessing customer purchase decision triggers. He is currently writing a new book, Process To The People.As an outgrowth of his work and his writing, Lee travels widely delivering conference keynote addresses and workshops. His work and perspectives have been featured in Business Week, National Public Radio's MarketPlace, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other print and web-based publications. He is a faculty for BPT's "CRM-Certified" training course and a member of the CustomerThink Advisory Board.

Lee holds a BA from Reed College, Portland, Oregon and an MBA from the Sawyer School of Business at Suffolk University, Boston.