Archive

In the Aberdeen benchmark report "Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling," the research among 528 end-user sales organizations revealed that the most frequently used delivery models for sales intelligence were limited to remarkably traditional, if not predictable, applications: email, sea...

Salesforce.com released its Q4 figures last week, peppered with the usual positives: growth, acquisition, more growth, and so on. Specifically, the company reported that earnings per share were 31 cents on revenue of $456.9 million. Year-over-year revenue increased 29.1 percent. Much of the focus fo...

For companies looking for sales force automation software, NetSuite offers a cloud-based system, NetSuite CRM+, that can be easily integrated with financials and e-commerce. The SFA solution is part of NetSuite's broader product suite. By allowing sales executives to see the sales pipeline, opportun...

Avaya has made enhancements to several Avaya Healthcare Solutions products -- adding tools to automate patient outreach for chronic disease management and follow-up. Built on Avaya's workplace collaboration and patient care lines, the new products were unveiled this week at the 2011 Annual HIMSS Con...

As I've written before, social CRM best practices don't exist -- but only because in order to be most effective, each business needs to tailor its social CRM approach to its specific customers. However, that doesn't mean you're doomed to a long evaluation process and a tough spell of trial-and-error...

The upheaval in the Middle East is roiling the energy markets, and that will affect CRM. Year-over-year, the price of a gallon of regular is up over half a buck nationally, and the average price for said gallon is $3.18. As gas goes, so does jet fuel. The confluence of rising prices, political un...

Communication is the key to the success of customer relationship management, and it lays the foundation for customer satisfaction and business growth. Today, we have a wide range of CRM communication channels that organizations effectively utilize for communicating with their customers to offer thei...

Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides customers with rich sales force automation capabilities in addition to marketing automation, customer data management, customer service and analytics, Bill Patterson, director of product management for Microsoft Dynamics, told CRM Buyer. It offers customers the choice...

Zendesk, a Web-based help desk software provider, has not shied away from the mobile market, despite the traditional view of a help desk or customer service rep working at a desktop. It has introduced applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android and now, the iPad. This application is the...

One of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer relationships, to be sure, but in reality it's a link in a chain of decisions and ...

Sage took a major step in clarifying its position in the market when it hosted an analyst day in Boston last week. The company has been around for a long time and has been one of the higher revenue generators for many years thanks to an assortment of products that span the front and back offices of...

The cheapest available resources no longer necessarily come from the business next door. Any product or service that can be outsourced is more than likely being offered in some other region of the world for a competitive price, and it's up to consumers to decide where to spend their dollars. This m...

For companies seeking a sales automation solution, Salesforce.com offers a system that is 100 percent cloud-based and can help companies make smarter decisions, said Salesforce Senior Director for Product Marketing Scott Holden. Salesforce wants to bring contact management out of the ivory tower an...