Archive

There is a business problem that comes up in the life of every company, and these days it seems that a lot of companies face it at once. It's the question of how to transition from one business model to another without clobbering your current revenue flow. Even if a company's executives really want ...

The White House last week added to the ongoing national discussion about online privacy and tracking with the release of a review counselor John Podesta conducted on Big Data and privacy issues. Among other things, privacy advocates hope the findings will spotlight the role of mobile in the gatherin...

PRODUCT PROFILE

OnSip Invites Customers to Push Its Buttons

Amazon's Mayday button has intrigued CRM industry users as well as consumers. Introduced about a year ago, Mayday is a button customers can press on their mobile devices to get service or tech help. Salesforce.com last month debuted its version of Mayday. Now other tech providers are introducing var...

EXPERT ADVICE

4 Ways to Embrace Crowdsourced Knowledge

Traditional knowledge management programs focus on distilling knowledge into systems of record, which end up being underutilized for a number of reasons, chief among them because they cannot contain the long tail of knowledge. Conversely, nowhere are successful KM programs as impactful as where they...

Although it's often mistakenly viewed as a technology, CRM is really a discipline -- and it's not a solo discipline, like a martial art or meditation. It's a team discipline, one in which every customer-facing employee can make a contribution. Whether those contributions are positive or negative dep...

INSIGHTS

Partner Selling

If there's one thing that vendors and channel partners agree on, it's selling. More or less. Everyone agrees that more selling is better, but the discussion can diverge greatly from there. Vendors and their partners are not immune to the virus that affects direct sales people. We often hear direct s...

PRODUCT PROFILE

New Salesforce Tool Lets Customers Send an SOS

Salesforce.com last week launched Salesforce1 Service Cloud SOS, a tool that allows companies to offer service via a mobile app. It consists of a button embedded in an app's interface, and as the name "SOS" suggests, it is meant for customers to press when they need help or assistance. Then, dependi...

Whenever the term "business intelligence" is bandied about, thoughts immediately turn to the customer. BI, it is thought, should allow you to learn things about the customer by correlation, inference and comparison. However, BI is a two-way street. In the course of using CRM -- which becomes the rep...

INSIGHTS

Marketing Automation’s Next Gig

If you aren't sold on marketing automation yet, there's another reason to consider it before you end up down two touchdowns with three minutes to play. We usually think of marketing in its traditional role of new customer outreach, which is good but no longer enough. As much as 80 percent of revenue...

inContact has released its first cloud contact center software update for the year. Version 14.1 contains a new two-way SMS channel, more refined automated call-routing, deeper integration with Salesforce.com and Oracle, and new APIs that give enterprise users the ability to customize their own appl...

Another retailer security breach, another national conversation about how these now regular occurrences need to stop. In the Michaels case, though, some of the talk touched on what by now should be remedial public relations. When you screw up and it affects your clients, apologize -- profusely and w...

They say you must walk before you can run. It follows that you should crawl before you walk. In CRM, however, there are a lot of businesses that talk at great length about wanting to run even though they haven't mastered crawling yet. They battle with the same old problems: adoption issues; technolo...

INSIGHTS

Marketo’s Show

Marketo put on an interesting show last week at Moscone West in San Francisco. Still basking in last year's IPO, the company attracted a large and diverse audience of marketers who wanted to learn about modern marketing automation, and it was a good opportunity to take stock of where marketing has b...

OPINION

Don’t Overlook the Mobile Searcher

The mobile browser is not dead, exactly, but if it were an animal it might be on the endangered species list. Mobile users are spending more time using mobile apps and less and less time surfing the Web from their mobile devices, based on recent statistics from Flurry. Apps took up 86 percent of the...

PRODUCT PROFILE

SugarCRM Refines Customer Analytics for Sales

When SugarCRM debuts version 7.2 in the coming weeks, users already will have had a taste of one of its main themes: tighter integration around productivity tools aimed at better understanding a customer base. That is because SugarCRM has previewed two such integrations over the past month -- one wi...


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