Archive

Salesforce on Wednesday announced its next-generation marketing cloud at the Salesforce Connections digital marketing event held in New York this week. The new release has enhancements to Journey Builder that let companies work with the customer journey across sales, service, marketing, custom apps ...

If you read a lot, like me, you might notice almost daily there's a new study that contradicts some earlier research. Something causes cancer -- then it's good for you. You know the drill. What's going on here? Do we simply not know what our research is saying? Can nobody correctly interpret the dat...

Sales executives, managers and reps spend countless hours in forecast meetings, yet often find their actual closed revenue falls far from the mark they predicted. With the advanced CRM technology and sales forecasting tools available today, it's a wonder this trend continues. There are four common p...

Veeva Systems last week introduced several new CRM products for the pharmaceutical industry at its 2015 Customer Summit in Philadelphia. Veeva CRM Suggestions offers recommendations on the best action and right channel for the next customer interaction. It's designed to accelerate the transition to ...

Technology is giving companies an unprecedented view of their customers: demographic data; buying preferences; behaviors that signal the intent to buy; and analyses that enable them to develop expectations about how customers are likely to act during the buyer-seller relationship. Those abilities ar...

Every innovation spawns its own set of issues. What happens when you have a lot of a good thing, like cloud computing? You might get a "Franken-cloud," as some vendors are calling it. Basically, a Franken-cloud is what happens when you have multiple cloud-based systems that need to share data and ru...

Pega last week announced enhancements to Pegasystems Customer Service for Healthcare, an application that integrates customer service and care management through its Clinical Interaction Manager to provide a 360-degree view of all customer interactions. The application provides call center agents wi...

Despite vendors' assertions to the contrary, CRM is not all about technology. Technology helps it scale, but CRM is really a discipline. It's the discipline of creating relationships that benefit both the buyer and the seller. The product we call "CRM" is really great at organizing the data that mak...

Zuora two weeks ago announced its first acquisition, Frontleaf, and a new product, Z-Insights. This marks an important moment for both Zuora and what it has called the "subscription economy." The subscription economy has spawned a culture in which people have been conditioned to expect subscription-...

"Customer first" is the motto businesses live by -- or should -- but that doesn't seem to resonate with companies providing pay-TV or Internet-access services, based on ACSI data gathered in the first quarter of 2015. Customer satisfaction with information services -- including subscription TV, Inte...

In sales, we know customer retention is critical for success in the subscription economy. For many tech companies in the SaaS space, it takes three years to break even. In insurance, which has toiled in the subscription economy for more than a century, the average break-even time is an incredible se...

Salesforce on Thursday launched Wave for Big Data, a tool that will help marketers and salespeople leverage customer data in the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta have signed on to the Salesforce Analytics Cloud Partner ecosystem. Powered ...

There is no better company to look at to get a sense of the future of technology in business and society than Zuora. This might surprise many people, because companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce might come to mind more readily. To one degree or another, those companies feature their produ...

The mobile advertising race is on. Google has to scramble to stay ahead in the volatile mobile ads market, because it has been losing ground to Facebook, suggested Pace University marketing professor Larry Chiagouris. Google is "cannot afford to give away any market share," he noted. "Any drop will ...

Within a few years, 1 million B2B sales roles will be eliminated, according to a recent Forrester Research report. That's 20 percent of them gone, thanks to the evolution of technologies like self-service and customers' increasing desire to avoid the hassle of speaking to sales reps. Personally, I t...