Archive

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...

Software vendors and their business customers have tried many things to increase customer loyalty, but they have been disappointed more often than not. Rewards, delight, and daily deals were good ideas to help spur customer loyalty. Unfortunately, they weren't enough to move the loyalty needle in to...

After two years of declining customer satisfaction, the telecommunications sector has halted the slide, according to the ACSI Telecommunications Report 2016, released Wednesday. There was a 1.9 percent gain -- to 70.1 on a 100-point scale -- in satisfaction with pay TV services, Internet service pro...

Salesforce last week announced its selection of Amazon Web Services as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. The deal is worth $400 million. "For the first time, we'll be able to deliver our core services -- including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cl...

My friend and a partner at Wildcat Venture Partners, Bruce Cleveland, along with his associates, has come up with an idea that helps explain why some early-stage companies thrive and thus raise more capital, while others die on the vine. As a venture capitalist, he's always trying to figure this out...