Archive

It's easy to lose sight of people in a CRM discussion, focusing instead on the great technology and what it lets us do under optimum circumstances. We should keep the customer in mind at all times, however, for without them what are we? Forgetting the customer is dangerous both for customers and ven...

Most customers aren't eager to look under the hood to examine the processes underlying their experiences, suggested Don Schuerman, CTO of Pegasystems. "The contemporary customer doesn't really care about CRM. They care about the experience they have, and in most cases they know little or nothing abo...

What's the direction of the software industry? I'm not indulging in idle curiosity -- things are changing, and today's events are signaling a significant shift. The rollout of SaaS and the emergence of relatively good platforms -- which will only get better -- suggest to me that the software industr...

Salesforce has inked an agreement to acquire BeyondCore, a data analytics firm that already has integrated its latest release with Salesforce, the companies said Monday. BeyondCore will become part of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, extending smart data discovery and advanced analytics capabilities ...

CRM innovations in recent years have had a significant impact on campaigns and nonprofit organizations, according to CFB Strategies President Trace Anderson. "Traditionally in the campaign world, it was an old-school mentality of just collecting checks," he said. "Even when I started working in poli...

If you want to succeed at engaging customers, or anyone else for that matter, it helps to have a model of what success looks like. This idea isn't new. Elite athletes train themselves to see a perfect race in their mind's eye, or to imagine the arc of a ball to its flawless conclusion. Scientists mo...

After surviving well over a year as a cord-cutter, I recently returned to the cable fold -- and after less than a month, I'm having major regrets. The problem isn't with the service or even with the pricing. The problem is with the lies. I wasn't entirely happy with my cord-cutting solution, but I w...

We've seen a rapid progression from conventional software bought through a license to cloud-based solutions that sell for a song -- and in theory could sell through barter at some point. I am not a big fan of zero marginal cost economics, in which prices drop to zip because buyers take into account ...

The deal is worth about $582 million, according to a Salesforce filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Quip provides a chat feature that's built into every document and spreadsheet. It lets users direct-message team members and comment directly on any piece of content.

Dealing with customers in context can equate with personalization, as many define it. Also, it can refer to enabling customers to jump out of a largely automated customer-facing process to deal with a company representative. Additionally, it can mean getting down in the weeds of some hyper-specific ...

Oracle has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NetSuite -- the company its former chief marketing officer, Zach Nelson, cofounded in 1998 -- for $9.3 billion. NetSuite offers various software packages as cloud-based services, including ERP, accounting, CRM and sales force automation. What...

It's important to recognize that "CRM is growing up," said Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera. "It's becoming more useful to the CRM user, who is predominantly the sales rep or whoever is managing the customer relationship. The sales performance management, or SPM, space is on a collision course with CR...

When gamification was just starting to catch on several years ago, I recall sitting next to the CMO of my then-company at a Gartner conference session. The presenter walked the audience through the concept of using ideas borrowed from gaming as a motivational tool, and about two-thirds of the way th...

LinkedIn this week announced three updates to Sales Navigator. One is deeper integration with Salesforce CRM data, allowing leads and accounts to be imported into Sales Navigator automatically. More than 20 LinkedIn customers already are using this feature. The second is direct integration of Sales ...

The platform land rush is definitely on. You can't swing a dead cat, as the saying goes, without finding an announcement about some new platform or some established vendor's attempt to enhance its existing platform. Some sorting out seems to be in order. What's not a platform these days? Well, if it...