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Many companies question if the dollars spent with research and advisory firms are delivering unbiased, accurate guidance. This is particularly true in the CRM industry, where analysts influence short lists, sales cycles, and media coverage extensively. Analysts, in short, can make or break a start-u...

Time to go out on a limb, put everything on the table, and make some prognostications about what the big stories will be in and around CRM in 2005. This is all based on the best available research and written with the confidence of knowing that no one will remember any of it by next December. Here...

Many retailers already use automation in their supply chain and inventory management. Vendor-managed inventory (VMI), for example, has made its way into many retailers. It optimizes supply-chain performance by keeping the responsibility for restocking with the manufacturer, not the distributor. The ...

Hoping to expand its customer base while also enhancing the so-called front office services it already provides, Siebel Systems said it will buy e-billing service provider eDocs in a deal worth US$115 million. Siebel will take control of Natick, Massachusetts-based eDoc's 180 employees and gain acce...

Oracle's OpenWorld conference last week in San Francisco combined the company's traditional shows Oracle AppsWorld and OracleWorld in the company's largest conference ever. More than 25,000 customers, vendor partners, Oracle employees and analysts took part. Even Microsoft made its first appearance....

It's time for a reality check: When it comes to managing e-commerce strategies in your company, how do results line up with expectations? Too many companies hold on to incredibly inefficient Web sites chock full of order capture systems that lead nowhere except to someone's Outlook folders, or catal...

Now that e-commerce is no longer a novelty, most corporations recognize some basic realities about online sales: Building and maintaining a Web site is no walk in the park; not all browsers are equally interested in buying; and when it comes to sales, slick Web copy can't replace the human touch. T...

Earlier this fall an MBA student from MIT's Sloan School gave me a call. He wanted to invite me to be a panelist at the Seventh Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. The conference was run by students and is part of something called MIT Innovation Week. This is a big deal in the Boston venture capi...

We live in a data-rich world. Data is everywhere you look, and used in so many ways -- to build e-mails, generate lists, create target groups, form reports, even to construct the foundation of a valid strategy. Yet data remains an elusive and stubborn beast, and it can become a point of contention b...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has won again, this time after an acrimonious,18-month-long battle with PeopleSoft, whose board of directors bowed today and agreed to a $10.3 billion takeover offer. In October, Oracle made what it called its "best and final offer" of $24 a share. The company then raised th...

The CRM systems of many companies fail because they don't properly manage the expectations of prospects and customers. What's been missing is the ability to capture the moment of truth with every prospect or customer and then bring these insights into a broader mosaic of what the many segments of ...

The end of the year is always a good time for top ten lists and forecasts of things to come. It's a way for analysts and pundits to show how smart we are and that we "knew it all along" -- or at least to exhibit our 20/20 hindsight. Here are my observations of what was important to CRM this year. Sa...

Loyalty card programs operated by grocery and drug retailers have been focused on rewarding shoppers for isolated activities. Typically, retailers dole out extra points for buying Brand A today or discount the price of Brand B during a given week and not much more. But now these loyalty programs are...

In the last U.S. presidential election the candidates clashed on the issue of privatizing the Social Security system. I'll leave the political debate to the professional politicians, but I would like to address this matter from the standpoint of millions of U.S. workers. Many of them are already b...

Sales methodologies and sales force automation (SFA) are a combination that should be a natural fit. In practice, however, method support is poor in most current forms of SFA. Sales managers want their representatives to follow the company's defined methodology, but often salespeople veer off cour...