Archive

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis. Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must d...

For some companies, CRM means managing each transaction and checking the customer's satisfaction at the end. This is exactly why a company's customer loyalty scores are always lower than the satisfaction score. CRM is a lot more than buying a lot of products and services from a software company. ...

A truly humbling experience is to give your first Webinar as an analyst. I remember it well; my voice projected the "deer in the headlights" image that we all try to hide but the world sees anyway. Giving a good Webinar is a natural talent for some, but for the rest of us it takes work and concent...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

I have a wallet that is much thicker than it needs to be because it is full of supermarket loyalty cards. Each store has its own loyalty card and I dutifully carry all of them as well as the membership card I pay for annually at one of the warehouse stores. I actually like the warehouse store best...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday a bundle of application modernization services designed to help large enterprises do some IT housekeeping and set a roadmap that will lead them to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Within about three months, consultants will have sifted through the legacy app...

Last week, Microsoft announced its embrace of the Web and software as a service (SaaS) but there might be less there than meets the eye. Rather than a bold strategy to move the company and the industry ahead, I see it as more of a hedging strategy to help the company hold on. Microsoft Founder and ...

American retailers are turning to radio frequency identification technology -- RFID tags -- to ensure that in-demand items are in stock this holiday season, hoping to bolster end-of-year revenues, experts say. Holiday revenue can account for 25 to 40 percent of a company's annual revenue, and retail...

When it comes to CEM I think we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I can fully buy into the idea and the importance of treating the customer well and being attentive to the signals a customer gives off by virtue of his or her existence and background. But most CEM "solutions" that ...

Hoping to appeal to smaller businesses and fend off competition from open-source rivals, Oracle plans to release a free version of its database software. The company has not made it official yet, but the expectation is that by week's end, Oracle will announce that Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle ...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action. China is emerging as the world's manufacturing center and a sourcing magn...

If you came to Boston last week for Siebel's User Week conference you might have been disappointed. With the impending purchase of the company by Oracle, it would have been easy to regard the event as some kind of "last hurrah" -- and what better place than Boston for the atmospherics to pull it of...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and...