Archive

Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that la...

It was a man-bites-dog story in the summer of 1999. An interesting headline at Red Herring on July 30 read: "Head Count: Salesforce.com gets Larry's blessing." Marc Benioff was leaving Oracle to start Salesforce.com, and Larry Ellison was not only giving his blessing, he was going to pony up some ca...

As social media become more embedded in our lives, tragedies like the Megan Meier case -- the Missouri teenager killed herself after a fictitious friend invented by the mother of a neighborhood girl left nasty messages on her MySpace profile -- may be the inevitable fallout. Corporate Web 2.0 usage...

The proliferation of marketing channels represents a key challenge for every CMO seeking to optimize return on marketing investments. Today, the marketing department is tasked with maximizing return across dozens of marketing channels. The use of multiple technologies results in silos of valuable in...

ATG is building out its personalization feature set with the $10 million acquisition of best-of-breed vendor CleverSet. It is the first acquisition the company has made since its $48.3 million eStara deal in 2006. CleverSet is an automated personalization engine delivered in Software as a Service mo...

It's long been a management axiom that the knowledge and abilities of employees are among the -- if not the -- most valuable of an organization's resources. While this is generally held to be true -- even in capital-intensive industries -- it is particularly valid for knowledge-intensive businesses....

I was speaking with a CRM vendor the other day about positioning and messaging for sales force automation. The vendor was telling me that the company wanted a back-to-basics message that would focus on the importance of SFA in helping salespeople recover some of the time they invest in unproductive ...

Optimizing the value of customer data and respecting customers' privacy are two immutable and opposing forces that companies always try to balance -- usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to avoid challenging the privacy boundary when captivated by the lure of data...

Alltel has joined the ranks of service providers offering mobile CRM functionality to their business customers. The wireless company has introduced SalesNOW, a contact, activity and deal management Web app designed for the BlackBerry mobile device. Most of the application's features relate to contac...

Voice over Internet protocol has recently become more common in corporations large and small. By combining separate voice and data transmissions onto the same line, this new communications option enables companies to lower their telecommunications costs and, after taking advantage of the savings, co...

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, once began a conference in San Francisco with a surprise keynote address by a George W. Bush impersonator, so when I was invited to this week's "Tour de Force" announcement I had inklings that we might see a facsimile of the New French president, Nicolas Sarkozy,...

On the heels of Oracle's successful bid to acquire BEA Systems, SAP has unveiled the first wave of products developed through its own $6.78 billion acquisition of Business Objects last year. It has also revealed more details about its plans to integrate its product suite with the French business int...

Competing for customers has never been more challenging, intensely focused or costly for manufacturers globally. Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product line extensions to marginally increase a given product's market size and potential sales, manufacturers must get bac...

Salesforce.com has introduced a set of new tools with a pricing model designed to encourage adoption of its Force.com Platform as a Service product introduced last year. One of the new entries is Force.com Cloud Computing architecture, which can be purchased on a per-login basis. "The concept of clo...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specif...