Archive

One of the great things about CRM is that it allows you to discover who your best customers are -- and not just who the best ones are on a regular basis, but who are best over time. Knowing this allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts more precisely and ensure the loyalty of these custo...

Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everythi...

While we're on the subject of the customer relationship, it's important, even vital, that we do a better job of teasing apart customer types. It seems to me that the vast conversation about social CRM and the social customer has focused on the end consumer -- the business-to-consumer relationship -...

The relationship between a business and its customers is determined by the interchanges that occur between them. These interactions are complex. They occur over a wide range of communication channels, such as phone, email, Web and text, including some outside of organizational control like social me...

There's a growing trend among companies to use the cloud to manage and store not only simple business processes like email, but also higher-end, more sophisticated ones. Indeed, in some cases demand for such functionality is outstripping supply. In response, vendors are turning to a long-standing tr...

As our lives grow more connected and more complicated, we strive to manage the influx of information and detail that consumes our daily living. In our everyday life, handling work, bills, family schedules and more is a daunting task even for those with exceptional organizational skills. For those of...

When CRM first came into being -- before it was even an acronym -- it was intended as a way to streamline and organize some very basic and essential processes and data. Those underlying features are still there today, and we take them for granted. Once things like contact information, sales historie...

OK, some people thought my last post was somehow bearish on social CRM, but I don't agree. I am trying to be accurate about what we ought to reasonably expect, nothing more. A bandwagon effect in early markets often has predictable results. Often people become adopters of new technologies not beca...

One of Salesforce.com's challenges in driving Chatter's acceptance comes from positioning it for the buying public. That's a tall order since the company is simultaneously trying to establish a new product and its category. The product and the category are classified as social networking and levera...

You could be forgiven if you thought Salesforce.com was done with announcements if you attended the soiree in New York last week, but if you thought that you'd also be wrong. Kendal Collins, CMO of Salesforce, told me that there will be another announcement on April 27 in San Francisco, and accordi...

While telecom operators provide a means for improved interpersonal communications, the operators themselves still have a long way to go to make communications with their customers more personal.

Companies seeking to steer highly qualified leads to their "closers" are faced today with a combination of competitive threats, information overload and hesitant buyer behavior requiring new strategies and tools to succeed. The never-ending economic pressure for sales organizations to increase produ...

Salesforce.com has launched ChatterExchange, an app marketplace for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform it introduced earlier this year. It is built on "Cloud 2" -- the company's name for the next generation of cloud computing: social, collaborative, and capable of delivering real-time ac...

The old cliche is that CRM is supposed to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. I debate that -- I think it gives, at best, a couple of overlapping 270-degree views, and 30 degrees will always be hidden. However, that's all geometric digression. My real point is this: Having a 360-degree vie...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the un...