Archive

Salesforce.com is acquiring GoInstant, reportedly paying $70 million for the startup. The news generally fits the "another day, another Salesforce.com acquisition" story line. The CRM cloud vendor has been on an acquisition binge -- it bought at least six companies in 2011 alone. It is on track to m...

Financial site Adaptu serves people in all stages of life, from young people just establishing themselves, getting married and buying a home, to more mature investors planning for their children's educations or their own retirement dreams. "Some of these people are open to talking about their finan...

The List, a provider of lead generation software for media buyers and marketers, is adding CRM functionality to its line of services. This new feature set joins other new functions the company is building into its core product, such as integration with Moat.com, and a global media content database. ...

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great stories from my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "my experience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith in humanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're o...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specificall...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. There has been anecdotal evidence over the last five-plus years about social's efficacy as a business tool, and there ha...

Putting points on the board, "scoring" sales and posting results to beat the competition -- sales teams are the key offensive players at every organization. And not unlike star forwards on the basketball court, they require sufficient tools and training to be successful in this role. Unfortunately, ...

Marketing automation provider Act-On Software has added a unique feature to its product lineup that allows users to track, compare, and then take action on what is being said online and in social media about their company or executives. Act-On Insight lets users benchmark and track these mentions, a...

Avaya has added new products and enhanced existing ones in its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. The overarching goal of the changes was to allow users to reach out to customers via any channel the customers chose -- for example, mobile application, social media or phone. Such ac...

About a year ago, I heard a great story on NPR's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. While fans marvel at the enormous contracts paid to star players, there are thousands of younger players who toil away in the mi...

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's...

Microsoft has agreed to pay an eyebrow-raising $1.2 billion in cash for the startup Yammer, presumably in the expectation that it will gain a much needed boost in social media expertise. Yammer will remain a standalone service for its 5-million-plus customer base, and Microsoft will also pair it wit...

A year ago, Nimble CRM launched with a simple idea: If one application could bring together a contact's social media profile, online comments, company information and other relevant data, the sales and marketing process would be much easier. The hardest part -- bringing in social media conversations...

Several months ago Constant Contact became aware that much of its customer base was intrigued by the daily deal model. However, it also noticed that once those companies actually tried out the model, their enthusiasm for it diminished considerably. "Daily deals just don't work for a lot of companies...

One would almost think we have entered a stage of customer service nirvana: Two industry categories not ordinarily associated with high levels of customer service satisfaction -- airlines and fast food -- have garnered relatively good scores in a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report. The ...