Archive

For the past few years, many companies have taken advantage of Google AdWords and other pay-per-click platforms to generate sales leads. The barriers to entry are low for these services, making PPC advertising a relatively easy and cost-effective lead-generation strategy for smaller businesses. Popu...

I hate to sound like Dr. Doom and Gloom, but have you paid attention to the cost of gasoline lately? Of course you have. It's sickening to watch as prices resume their inexorable climb. The last time we saw prices spike was the last time the economy was in decent shape -- right before the wheels ...

You invest in a state of the art CRM platform. You spend months tailoring it to the needs of your organization. Weeks of data mapping and migration tests ensue. You plan, build and deliver rigorous user education. Sales leaders are excited. Salespeople ... don't use it. Or at least, they use it to t...

With its social software platform Mzinga OmniSocial, Mzinga's goal is to deliver a role-based application with CRM capability that a company can then repurpose to collect information from its customers. Rather than concentrating on traditional CRM, Mzinga focuses on the enterprise network side to he...

eGain recently introduced a multidimensional search function to its knowledge agent and its self-service product lines. In essence, it is two sides of the same coin in that it provides the same functionality to both the agent desktop and the computer screen that a customer uses when searching for a...

I'll admit it -- I have a secret life. In addition to being a CRM reporter, I'm also a small businessman. A tiny businessman, in fact; my goofy, niche company grosses about $5,000 a year. We make detail parts for scale model airplanes -- and while you can't get much more niche than that, you also ca...

Marketing has become the new hot spot in CRM. During the recession and even before, there was a great flurry of interest in customer service and related things. Consequently, we have seen a lot of attention being paid to customer experience, and much of the social-media-oriented growth in that per...

Computer software requires an enormous amount of support. That fact has enriched companies such as Oracle and SAP, which levy annual support fees of about 20 percent of the sale prices of their applications. That's one of the things that just sticks in the craw of Clint Oram, chief technology office...

The Lithium Social Customer Suite is designed to help companies identify and manage a group of dedicated customers using social media channels. Referring to these types of social customers as "superfans," Lithium helps companies turn them into advocates for their products and services. With the adve...

CDC Software has upgraded its sales module, Pivotal Sales Force Automation, with enhancements that the company developed by borrowing from the best practices it observed in its clients, said Ehab Samy, director of product management for CRM applications. In addition, it rolled out these upgrades th...

Applications delivered as Software as a Service are great. They allow businesses to scale their operations, reduce up-front costs, relieve themselves of tasks like backups and software updates, and speed up deployment of applications. They're simple to implement (in most cases). But, oddly, I think ...

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, ...

The more we invest in something, the more committed we are to a successful outcome. Obvious enough, but what this investment of time and effort means is that we are now more motivated to follow through on our initial interest in the form of action. Enticing your shoppers to stay on your site and e...

Fast-growing Jive Software offers businesses an extensible social business solution that integrates social networking, collaboration software, community software and social media monitoring across the entire enterprise. The company recently bolstered its board of directors with a number of executive...

One of the great promises of the social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. There's a gulf between small businesses, which may speak or eve...