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Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

Every generation has a few seminal moments, and while a company IPO does not compare to the wars and assassinations that have typically marked a generation's coming of age, Netscape's IPO and all of the downstream bubble activity it presaged have irrevocably changed the way we all live. Before the ...

According to a study published by CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking sales and marketing excellence, companies that excelled at sales knowledge management saw the number of sales reps meeting or exceeding their quotas increase by 25 percent. Based on this statistic, one ...

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 ...

The lack of trust in the accuracy, frequency and depth of financial reporting processes in companies has spawned a sizeable industry that has trust at its cornerstone. Sarbanes-Oxley's pain is the outsourcer's gain, and in this strengthening reciprocal relationship between the need for U.S. publicly...

We hear a lot of talk about there not being a new, new thing to propel the industry and that sure seems true. The era that ended with the dot.com bubble bursting was one in which selling was really fun. It was a sales person's dream. Organizations couldn't get enough technology for ERP, Y2K, CRM,...

Today, the CDI market has attracted several technology vendors from areas like ERP, CRM, data quality, and master data management. Unfortunately, while there is consensus that a CDI hub is critical for tying distributed customer data into unified views, there is rampant confusion on how best to imp...

In a town renowned for big bets and high rollers, Harrah's laid down the biggest bet of all on June 13th when it concluded its merger with Caesars Entertainment. Harrah's paid US$1.87 billion in cash and $3.27 billion in stock, also assuming $3.86 billion in Caesar's debt. With the merger, Harrah'...

According to the American Bankers Association, the average consumer has two accounts with any one bank. One is typically a checking account, and with the plethora of free checking options available today, that one hardly counts. It's not profitable. Relationship banking is the carrot, not the stick,...

Today, the first place your customers look for help is online. Gartner Group has estimated that capturing a new customer is 4 to 10 times more expensive than providing good service to an existing one. They additionally said over 68 percent of customers defect due to poor service. In a more recent st...

As one of the primary functional prongs in CRM, the marketing department should use coordinated customer data to advance the sophistication, even the science, of its practices. Eastman Kodak, Rochester, N.Y., drew customer awareness, perception, satisfaction and purchase information from decades of...

Is outsourcing still dragging down salaries of key IT talent in the U.S.? Not anymore, according to a new survey by Foote Partners, an IT consultancy based in New Canaan, Conn. According to the report, such adverse effects of outsourcing -- made an issue in last year's losing presidential campaign o...

Partnerships are increasingly under attack as less than credible in enterprise software, no more so than in CRM. Starting with classic logo and press release swaps between vendors desperate to fuel each other's sales pipelines, partnerships are met with increasing scrutiny in the world of enterpris...

If bad data is put into a data warehouse, companies risk what Tony Fisher, president and general manager at DataFlux, described as "code, load and explode." "If the data from a source system doesn't meet the expected qualities for that data, the loading process may fail, causing the company to stop ...

I have enjoyed reading Clayton Christensen's books on disruptive innovation and observing how many of the concepts articulated in his books have played out in the CRM market and beyond. With the theory in mind, it has been fascinating to watch as smart people have behaved in ways that are either pr...