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Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, talked a lot about CRM in his keynote at SuiteWorld, his company's user meeting recently held in San Jose. You might not think that's unusual, given that the company has a whole suite of cloud-based ERP-CRM-E-Commerce, but it represents a departure -- and I don't know if even Nelson is fully aware of it ...

Bringing a new product to market -- or even a new version of an existing product -- is not what it used to be. Back in the day your market was probably empty, a green field where you could find opportunity under a rock. Everybody needed what you had, and selling was relatively easy. ...

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. ...

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 sales people say their leads are no good and we hear marketing say that sales doesn't follow up. Sound familiar? Of course it does...

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. ...

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 been and where it is going ...

You should check out The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT. It's a thoughtful analysis of the technology progression handed to us by Moore's Law and its effect on every aspect of our lives. Their thesis is pretty simple but also powerful. ...

After many years, I think I can boil down CRM to this: Vendors prepare for transactions but customers expect process. Of course, this demands elaboration and neither of these ideas is stationary. The desire for better processes evolves as customers and markets do, and transactions become more sophisticated as vendors play catch-up with their markets. ...

Everyone in business claims to want to listen to the voice of the customer. It's a noncontroversial issue, but the approaches are all over the map. There is little consistency -- and truthfully, many vendors do a poor job of it. ...

Sales people have been demanding better leads for a long time, and marketing today is in a position to provide them. At the same time, marketers have discovered that the kind of data they collect is as important as its volume. ...

I was at a dinner at a working cattle ranch outside of Denver not long ago, but it was a ranch with a difference. Rather than raising cattle for the table, the business raised breeding stock and sent animals and other products, like embryos, all over the world. ...

"They've crafted some marginally useful discounts for their biggest customers and improved the functionality for setting up iOS devices after an upgrade," Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "Why not?" Pombriant continued. "Apple ...

Subscription companies face many of the same challenges that more conventional companies face, but the nature of these businesses puts an entirely different spin on the challenges. ...

A wave of change is now making its way through the front office with uneven results. CRM is moving from a data capture and retrieval solution to something that supports end-to-end processes -- and as with ERP, data analysis is helping to improve what once were purely manual processes ...

This story was originally published on Oct. 30, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

I have written often about the connection between CRM and economics, almost as if one explains the other. While I still believe it in part, my thinking has evolved and become more nuanced over the last 15 years to the point that today I want to discuss my evolution ...

This is, I hope, the last time I drag out the "year of" phrase attached to anything significant unless it's the year of MY Tesla, and that's highly unlikely ...

There are some good reasons to consider platform's primacy in our thinking. ...

Maria brings a welcome geek factor to the blog, writing often about wearables, emerging analytic trends and other tech topics that scratch a bit deeper below the surface than most CRM writers. There's also a sizable sprinkling of guest bloggers -- the ubiquitous folks from Forrester, notably, and Denis Pombriant on occasion -- that add third-party credibility to the blog. This is one that gets better with each year...

2. Beagle Research Group -- Denis Pombriant Denis Pombriant is almost the opposite of Paul. While Paul often gets personal in putting his CRM observations in context, Denis often pulls back to put CRM in the context of broader economic, social and global trends....