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The blogosphere lit up last week after it was disclosed on Bloomberg that Salesforce was working with unnamed bankers on a possible merger. Naturally, everyone automatically thought that Salesforce was in play, and my colleagues and I went into overdrive speculating about who the suitor might be, what the striking price would be, and whether it was a good idea to do the deal. The first two questions dominated the discussion...

"We see this kind of rumor-mongering often with Salesforce, though this current [rumor] is the most persistent," noted Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research Group. Such an acquisition does not make sense, because Salesforce "is not doing something that others couldn'...

Bill Clinton won the presidency with the mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," and I think CRM could borrow heavily from that pithy bit of logic. When in doubt, if you can check your preconceptions at the door and actually perceive the information in front of you, there's no telling what you can figure out ...

I recently praised Salesforce for having the smarts to not get into enterprise resource planning several years ago. It was a good decision, I thought, because there was no upside for them to invade such a well-established market -- better for them to focus on a blue ocean strategy in which they went after new applications. ...

Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified accounting system designed to limit a business' "losses" due to marketing...

We've heard a lot lately about customer moments of truth (as in, Denis Pombriant's recent book). Charting and then understanding them from the perspective of the customer is not just a useful exercise -- it's a critical way to focus on areas where empathy is most important. W...

You can tell when the economy is doing well, because instead of worrying about how you're going to make the next mortgage payment, you worry about the next disruption in business. It looks like the big worry on the horizon now is the digital disruption, a nice piece of alliteration designed to make you question your worth ...

It came as a surprise when Keith Block, vice chairman of Salesforce, made an off-the-cuff remark about a Sage-Salesforce alliance at the Salesforce World Tour event held last week in Boston. Sage and Salesforce in February had announced they would work together, with Sage moving some of its undisclosed ERP applications to the Salesforce Cloud. However, the word didn't seem to spread, and it remained off my radar for nearly two months.

Solve for the Customer: Using Customer Science to Build Stronger Relationships and Improve Business ResultsBy Denis PombriantCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform March 5, 2015, 190 pp.$14.99 Paperback We all know customers have changed. They can voice their dissatisfaction with you, complete most of the buyer's journey without you, and even seek out support and service without you...

Oracle did some smart things at last week's Oracle Modern CX Conference and user meeting in Las Vegas. The company has been making strides in organizing its messaging and products around customer experience in the wake of its RightNow Technologies acquisition a few years ago. It's been taking on the CX mantra whole hog ...

However, Oracle has most of the world's big companies as customers, noted Denis Pombriant, principal of the Beagle Research Group. "These businesses don't want solutions that have an appearance of being bleeding edge -- they want stuff that works," he told CRM Buyer....

The surround strategy for legacy ERP is real. It's been going on for several years, and if I was a legacy ERP vendor I would be concerned. The strategy refers to the idea of leaving legacy ERP in place while implementing cloud ERP to handle specialized parts of a business, like a region with currency conversion issues, subscriptions, or something like that.

It takes prodigious amounts of cash to launch a company these days and that's especially true when trying to insert a new idea into the collective consciousness. Salesforce spent well over US$100 million to convince us that SaaS CRM was real, Zuora has raised nearly twice that amount defining the subscription economy, and cloud ERP is following suit...

Self-service is generally considered a good thing, especially in CRM, where there has been significant investment in empowering people to take on more responsibility for provisioning service or making purchases. But it's not all great and there is some interesting blowback that is causing vendors to reconsider how their offerings work ...

"People love to watch the small screen, and as time-challenged as we are, if the video can take the load off of having to read all of a proposal -- or, more likely, explain some gray areas -- then great," said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Others could emulate ...

I was having dinner the other night with friends, telling them about some of the ideas in my book, Solve for the Customer. My friend, we'll call him Brian though it's a pseudonym, was interested in my emphasis on process and my belief that customer science has evolved from a general emphasis on process in business, especially in the back office ...

Transaction systems have all the fun but systems of record do all of the work; at least it seems that way. Maybe you've never thought of it this way but unless both kinds of systems are working well -- and working together -- your results will suffer ...

Partner Relationship Management gives a lot of attention to the vendor and partner relationship, and it should. But it's worth remembering that as important as this relationship is, the one that really counts involves an end customer. So what does the end customer need from a channel partner that a PRM system can uniquely provide? ...

Configure, price, quote software was once a barely thought about branch of CRM, falling under the heading of sales enablement. But lately, it's been getting a lot of attention from a familiar source, Salesforce.com. ...

"It's not about CRM," said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, who interviewed the chief customer officer at "a very large multi-line insurance company" for his upcoming book, Solve for the Customer Companies first must understand customers and their momen...