Archive

Bank of America may have hoped it could quietly slip a $5 fee past its customers. If so, it was woefully wrong. This week, the bank announced it would charge debit card customers a $5 monthly fee when they use their cards to purchase goods. The bank pointed to new financial regulations as a reason. ...

StayinFront has been offering users mobile functionality for 10 years. However, its apps were not optimized for the latest generation of mobile devices, Ken Arbadji, vice president of North American sales, is quick to acknowledge -- such as the iPhone, iPad and Google Android devices. So, earlier th...

To many, the term "sales executive" conjures up images of five-star dinners and long afternoons on the golf course. But, as I'm sure any sales executive would tell you, the job entails more than simply schmoozing with clients and courting prospects. In reality, sales executives face enormous pressur...

CRM is a business tool. Lke any business tool, its objective is tied to money -- either making more of it through increased sales, or saving it through greater efficiency. Perhaps because CRM is rooted in sales force automation and hard sales, the customer's path through CRM has mirrored the custome...

Last week's doings at HP exposed a lot that few of us ever think about. The basic story is that board member Meg Whitman replaced recently minted CEO Leo Apotheker. The company's stock price has been floundering for a long time, and many people on and off the board had little confidence in the job...

Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Tele...

Marketing automation is not science. It is a badly coined term that describes the automation of push marketing. The name is often associated with a class of cloud software that helps marketing become more efficient and effective. Marketing automation is simply software waiting for someone to app...

One of the great conundrums about CRM is the disconnect between its stated intention and what it's usually really used for. Theoretically, CRM is supposed to help businesses build better and longer-lasting relationships with customers. In actuality, it's usually used to simply manage customer data a...

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

Relationships are the lifeblood of any business. As a small business achieves the success of a growing network, the question often turns to how to choose the best system for managing the information captured across multiple devices, digital files and scribbled notes. A contact management systems or ...

Responsys has beefed up its email marketing, social media, mobile and channel marketing Interact suite with a retargeting application for display ads. Generally speaking, ad retargeting refers to the ad strategy of showing ads to consumers who may have visited a website, lingered over a product or t...

There is a lot of hype around marketing automation, and it's for good reason. An effective marketing automation strategy and implementation can help drive more qualified leads, and therefore increase revenues and decrease sales cycle times. But many organizations fall into the trap of believing all ...

Social CRM has been contemplated and debated, defined and refined, cussed and discussed. These many years of excited conversation about what SCRM could do for businesses and what businesses need to do to make it a reality have created more questions than answers for many companies. That's created an...

The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That's not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last 10 years that rival this year's Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference, that was also ...

The Durbin Amendment is well-known throughout the financial services community thanks to extensive media analysis over the past year. Originally scheduled to take effect last month, the Durbin Amendment, an addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will now take effe...