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Gartner's Hype Cycle Report, which looks at new technologies as they make their way through the inevitable gauntlet of media hype, is now in its 20th year. The various stages are aptly named, and many tech observers are painfully familiar with the early ones. The hype cycle starts with innovation, r...

There was a lot to like at Salesforce ExactTarget's Connections 2014 user conference in Indianapolis last week. Now all that's needed is a shorter name. The words "marketing cloud" need to be fitted in there too, but I forget how. Perhaps it's ExactTarget's Midwest roots, but I can see a genuine con...

Snow flurries and the smell of pine needles. Eggnog and hot apple cider. Gingerbread men and latkes. Stockings and dreidels. Ornaments and menorahs. Trips to see family, and... visits to the customer service department? Oh yes, the holiday season is upon us, and it isn't complete without a customer ...

Sales people love leads. They want lots of them, and they want them now. The more leads, the more money -- because sales is a numbers game, right? Well, yes and no. Some believe in an equation that says X number of leads will produce Y number of closed deals. If you make X greater, Y will be greater...

CRM system users are a versatile bunch. Some 29 percent of participants in a recent survey accessed CRM through four devices: laptops, desktops, tablets and smartphones. Twenty percent said they used a combination of three of the aforementioned form factors, and about 81 percent said they used multi...

Sales forecasting never has been easy, and over time it has gotten a lot harder. This brings up a couple of points that every sales manager and CEO has to deal with: how to forecast deals and how to track them. Forecasting has gone through several generations of approaches that have been tied direct...

Just as businesses used to fool themselves into believing they controlled the customer conversation, many businesses today think they define the customer experience. They think that by assembling the right combination of processes, environment and people, they can develop an experience that will del...

Jive Software recently unveiled the latest series of upgrades to its Summer Cloud release of its two flagship products -- the Jive and JiveX communication and collaboration suites. There has been a slew of improvements to both suites, ranging from better UIs, mobile optimization and third-party inte...

The wearables market heated up last week with Apple's introduction of its Watch and payment processing service, and the implications for CRM are interesting. First off, the announcement shows how very young the wearables marketplace is and how far it has to go. Second, even though wearables are by...

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, along with updates to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. All will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. This release will focus on knitting together the sales and marketing functions. "We wor...

If you want to make an old-school salesperson flinch, just bring up the idea of data-driven selling in conversation. To sales pros, especially those who started in the game more than 10 years ago, the idea of data driving the sale is sacrilege. It minimizes the sales person's talent, and it suggests...

Europeans are relentlessly attacking Google: A German official called for its breakup, a French minister charged it was a threat to sovereignty, and a publisher compared it to a dragon, according to a report. Really? I would have thought the euro and the draconian austerity program needed to keep i...

Salesforce.com this week notified its customers that the Dyre malware, which typically targets customers of large financial institutions, might have been tweaked to target some Salesforce users as well. There was no evidence that any Salesforce customers had been impacted, the company said, but if a...

One of the CRM secrets to success is executive buy-in. That typically means the support of a high-level executive for the deployment and use of CRM technology. That executive often is an SVP of sales, or maybe a chief revenue officer or a CMO. The support of multiple executive roles is critical to i...

Salesforce.com's vision of the Internet of Customers is getting clearer, and it has a decidedly mobile orientation. The company on Monday announced the launched the Salesforce1 Fund -- a dedicated fund in its newly renamed investment unit, now called "Salesforce Ventures" -- that will pour $100 mill...