Archive

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or...

During the past few years, customer service organizations have faced increasing amounts of pressure to deliver better service over a broader range of channels including the Web, email and phone. Customers expect to get service at any time of the day or night and assume that customer service teams wi...

NanoRep, the developer of a help-desk application that employs a self-learning knowledge base, has just taken its fledging product global. An automatic language conversion feature now translates information into 34 languages, explained nanoRep CEO Doron Herzich. "The system can learn which language ...

Sales has had a rough couple of years. Although customers have been harder to find, the pressure on sales pros to produce has become ever greater. In some U.S. firms, the lowest-performing 40 percent of the sales force is replaced annually. In other businesses, departures or layoffs of sales staff a...

The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and it...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...

Assistly, a SaaS customer service company, started out with the goal of helping its user base incorporate communications from all channels into the customer service hub. That means messages sent via social media, including tweets and Facebook posts, and even replies to routine transactional emails s...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

Maybe I'll take some heat for this, but I am trying to live by Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' ideas, especially concerning transparency. Let me digress already. Tapscott and Williams wrote a very good book called Wikinomics and followed it up with a better one, Macrowikinomics. As the titles...

For more than 15 years -- since the dawn of the Internet, really -- display advertising has held promise, but it has often underperformed with boring, static banner ads whose value diminished greatly as consumers became trained to ignore them. Today, innovative technologies are pumping new life into...

InsideView will be announcing several upgrades to its SaaS social sales and intelligence application in the coming weeks. Some of the changes, including social profile features, have already gone live. The company has been turning them on over the past month, as soon as they were developed, said Ral...

By this point in the evolution of e-commerce, most e-tailers know the benefits of live engagement. Website visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase when they have the support of a sales representative. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, interacting with a knowledgeable person in real...

"Half of the marketing money you spend is wasted -- trouble is you don't know which half," said William Lever of Lever Bros. in 1885. With due respect to Mr. Lever, we know a significant portion of the wasted half is made up of opportunities qualified in an initial lead qualification initiative -- b...

As companies head out into the brave new post-recession world, the top two goals for marketers are organic revenue growth and margin growth. To help achieve these objectives, marketing budgets grew by an average of 4 percent for 2011. The crucial question, then, is this: How do CMOs invest that mar...

Xactly has updated its Express product, a sales compensation management application designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Xactly Express 2.2 comes with more ways for sales reps to customize their dashboards and more features for administrators to manage the information flow to the reps. Si...