Archive

From early origins of cold-calling into purchased contact lists, to contemporary methodologies incorporating Web 2.0 enablers, companies seeking to steer highly qualified leads to their "closers" are faced today with a combination of competitive threats, information overload and hesitant buyer behav...

Finally, Paul Greenberg's new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light hit the streets last week, and with it, my description of him as our Walt Whitman remains intact. To promote the continuing franchise, the fourth edition's cover has the same design as the third edition but with a different color sc...

As anyone familiar with CRM knows, adoption is the key to whether you live or die by your CRM solution. You can make detailed plans, do arduous research, negotiate great deals, execute a deployment plan flawlessly -- and then see it all go for naught when your users fail to use the system. The reaso...

Retail pharmacies in the U.S. filled 3.65 billion prescriptions in 2008, and another 238 million prescriptions were filled by direct mail. Each Rx was issued by a physician -- which explains why the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. spends heavily on marketing efforts aimed at doctors, including c...

The economy is finally recovering. This should mean that projects that were sidelined for the past year or two can come off the bench, and there might be more money to go around. As a project manager, are you confident that you will be able to put the right people on these projects? Not only that,...

Most marketers will accept that some portion of marketing will always be an art that is tricky to measure. However, it's difficult to deny the overwhelming need for marketers who can "crunch the numbers." Aberdeen research from the past five years suggest marketers are getting more savvy, more tech...

Just as the legal slapfest between Verizon and AT&T was put to rest in court, consumers rendered their own verdict -- the latest Consumer Reports customer satisfaction survey of wireless carriers ranks Verizon first and AT&T last. The ratings are based on more than 54,000 responses about con...

This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey and concluded that 16 out of 19 of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular site...

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differen...

What U.S. business wouldn't want a customer base of 37.5 million prospects? In 2008, hospitals in the U.S. registered that many admissions -- a number that equals 12 percent of the U.S. population. Yet the hospitals in the U.S. have largely underutilized the customer relationship management tools t...

Many small businesses fail to fully utilize automated time-reporting tools or shy away from them altogether. However, once a business starts to reach about 30 staff members, time reporting helps them understand costs, improve efficiency, and focus on the right areas, said Journyx CEO Curt Finch. It ...

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." What he meant was that tren...

Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. How do you stay in front? If you come from a traditional software background, your default answer is likely to be "new fea...

Companies considering CRM systems often view them as a way to improve customer satisfaction and retention, boost sales and accelerate employee productivity. However, as with many technology-enabled business process, success is a complicated and interdependent proposition. When companies are winning...

CRM has lagged in the health insurance industry, but a major transformation is imminent. "There's been a reluctance to make comprehensive investments in technology compared with other sectors," said Gartner analyst Joanne Galimi. "Generally, the firms in the sector have been very tactical, only inve...