Archive

CRM often is described as a discipline and a technology that will transform the entire business. Sales and marketing can get on the same page, support will have visibility into what sales and marketing are doing, and every interaction can be captured and used to create a complete and comprehensive v...

Lots of CRM vendors talk about personalization, but their idea of how to do it leaves much to be desired. They address personalization very late, using a just-in-time approach to accessing customer data to support a sales or service encounter in the moment. This certainly is important, and it achiev...

The most important trends in CRM right now are "the rise of the millennials, the rise of the promoter economy, and the rise of the conscious consumer," said Matt Price, Zendesk's SVP of emerging businesses. "The 'R' in CRM is relationship, and all of these things impact how we develop relationships ...

Salesforce on Monday announced it had completed its $2.8 billion acquisition of e-commerce cloud software platform Demandware. The deal "gives Salesforce the e-commerce piece to compete against Oracle, which already has e-commerce capabilities, as well as SAP," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president...

In a bid to augment its cloud services business with more flexibility on pricing and customization, Microsoft on Wednesday announced the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource, which will integrate its ERP and CRM solutions. The combined cloud offerings, which will become available...

This summer has started out to be anything but a somnolent day at the beach. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU is enough to disturb your slumber, and that's not the only thing on the plate. To be frank, it appears we are at one of those major historical transition points that might happen a...

As I see it, there are four basic capabilities, or attributes, needed to build better customer loyalty. I learned about them from two McKinsey researchers. Those attributes, according to David C. Edelman and Marc Singer -- and I agree -- are the following: automation, proactive personalization, cont...

Salesforce VP Lynne Zaledonis drives product marketing and sales enablement for Sales Cloud. In order to succeed in the age of the customer, companies need to understand that the new cloud, mobile and social world we find ourselves in "has produced trillions of pieces of customer data, and it's tota...

Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn for more than $26 billion has created quite a stir -- at least in my world. Ellen Levy reported that the deal can boast a number of superlatives if you look at it right: the largest sale of a consumer Internet company in history; the largest sale of an enterprise ...

If you talk to marketers for any amount of time about what they do, you are bound to hear the term "customer journey" at some point. The go-to exercise for marketers looking to up their lead generation games today is "journey mapping," the exercise by which you try to understand how a potential buye...

Oracle Vice President Des Cahill is the company's head CX evangelist. An expert in B2B software and marketing, Cahill has spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, helping companies develop, refine and tell their stories. One of the main CRM challenges businesses face today is adjusting to the era...

Salesforce held TrailheaDX last week -- its first event just for software developers. The company previously relied on special sessions at events such as Dreamforce to educate developers, but its declared intention to train up to 100 million of them in its Lightning development environment dictated ...

I start a lot of client engagements with a simple question: Who's the customer? It's amazing the answers that I get. Some people are really quite good. They know the customer's demographic and business or personal needs, and they focus on those things. Others don't even grasp the difference between ...

SugarCRM cofounder Clint Oram is one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar application. He currently serves as the company's CTO. The biggest CRM challenge right now is that "technology is changing the way customers work with companies," Oram said. "I want the company that I do busi...

In an era when technology is changing the ways people conduct every aspect of their lives, it's not a surprise that business leaders have come to depend on it as the lever that will elevate their sales and marketing performance to the next level. Productivity has increased in all aspects of busine...