Last week I was beside myself with excitement. On Wednesday morning, a team of scientists from around the world ‘turned on’ the largest and most ambitious scientific experiment ever conceived.

I find it difficult to get excited about physics, or chemistry, but the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), sometimes referred to as the ‘Big Bang’ machine has such an air of mystery and excitement that I’ve become completely absorbed.

Indeed, I’m so engrossed in the project that I will quite happily bore anyone that will listen about the project, the drama, the controversy, the exciting possibilities it opens up. I’m sapping up everything I can read, every documentary I can watch, and every radio show that even mentions the name.

The LHC has some key questions to answer, namely – what is mass, what is the universe made of and what happened during the first few seconds of the universe’s existence? The scientists are hoping to prove/find the existence of something called the Higgs boson – at the moment a theoretical particle that could unlock some of these answers.

It got me thinking. Perhaps the LHC scientists could leverage some of the principals of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in order to discover, acquire and nurture this slippery little Higgs boson!

Microsoft CRM can help track prospects right from your first introduction or connection. Whether it’s a website visit, a business card you pick up at an event, or a contact name on a list that you buy from a data reseller.

Now, depending on the source of your data, you’ll quickly be able to ‘disqualify’ or rule out based on their initial response (or lack of one) a percentage of these prospects. You’ll also be able to identify the ‘hot’ prospects on the same basis.

Exactly the same principals (sort of) apply to the LHC! 100 metres underground the Large Hadron Collider will be whizzing protons or lead ions around this huge 27km particle race course at staggering speeds just shy of the speed of light. Some of these particles will be lost (they’ll simply dissipate away), some will be smashed together in a collision (that’s the objective, incidentally) and others will just carry on whizzing round for a little longer.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that like the scientists running the LHC, you’ll want to know what happened to every last one of these particles….I mean prospects! Microsoft CRM can help you manage them.

With Microsoft CRM you can run a report on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, with a complete breakdown of your sales funnel. How many leads did you put in? How many were unsuitable? How many were un-contactable? How long were they in the funnel for? What’s the average conversion rate? How much have you spent on marketing and what is your average ‘cost of acquisition’?

All of these key statistics, and more, are built-in functions of Microsoft CRM, and can offer some seriously useful insight for your business. The good news is that with Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can get access to all of these answers with just a few clicks…without a team of IT technicians, trained CRM managers, servers or even a 27km long particle accelerator.

• BBC Radio 4′s Big Bang website
• CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) – The Large Hadron Collider
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Sales