Archive

I love it when I can find independent verification for an idea and that's what happened on Monday when Walker Information released its "2005 Walker Loyalty Report for Software and Hardware." In case you are not familiar with Walker, this Indianapolis-based company has been studying customer loyalty...

Today's organizations increasingly experience the creep from the general tracking of customer contacts and responses by CRM to the general tracking of marketing activities and their returns by the CFO. Marketers have to look at the bigger picture, at their contribution to the entire enterprise, rat...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they d...

When Rust-Oleum Consumer Brands Canada decided to deploy a business intelligence package, the company was only looking to get its monthly paper sales data in a weekly electronic format. A little more than a year later, they're using BI to gain a competitive advantage in such tangibles as shelf place...

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...