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The recent run-up of gas prices has lead to many U.S. companies rethinking their stance on telecommuting, and in the more global context, the increasing acceptance of outsourcing is creating virtual teams at an unprecedented rate. Given the euphoria over Software-as-a-Service applications, the question of how effective they are at enabling virtual team performance is being raised more and more...

When the sales team operates with urgency, the soul of a company is alive, thriving and growing. The sales department is the company's heartbeat and is absolutely necessary to create a sense of purpose and maintain a constant focus on delivering value to customers ...

Customer events have replaced trade shows as the big-spend item in many software vendors' and analyst and advisory firms' marketing budgets. Implicit in this shift of spending is the precision possible for targeting CEOs and CIOs with relevant content ...

Spending the last week traveling through Australia, visiting a manufacturer, giving presentations and talking with several other companies after my presentations has been fascinating. Before saying anything else, I have to compliment this nation and its people -- they are kind, humorous and have a ton of class ...

Google AdWords is the most commonly used lead generation tool in many small and medium businesses. Layer in small and medium vendors ofCRM's many varieties of applications, and the dependency on precise targeting for lead generation becomes even more important, due to the highly targeted messaging each uses ...

Louis Columbus, a CRM Buyer columnist, is a former senior analyst with AMR Research and the author of several books on maximizing analyst relationships, including Best Practices in Analyst Relations ...

They are everywhere -- value propositions that claim much and deliver little. The fact that so many value propositions these days are of the "boil the ocean" variety makes some thoughtful people wonder if their view of the world is overly simplistic or if they are missing something. Sure, a listing of all the features of a new software application presented as differentiators is educational. Yet it is often irrelevant to how companies actually buy software...

Now is the time for all good dads to come to the aid of their Girl Scout daughters and sell, sell, sell cookies. What is reminiscent of the sentence used by many typing teachers to teach that skill has become the battle cry throughout the suburbs of America. What has quickly replaced the length of one's SUV as a status symbol in suburbia is something so competitively pure and clear you can't help but admire it: boxes sold...

The growing adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) including SAP's NetWeaver platform and its related applications are having a significant impact on the politics of integration between manufacturers and distributors. The balance of power has already shifted in a few industries to the channel over the manufacturer, and nowhere is this more visible than in retail, with a case in point being Wal-Mart...

The fact that instant messaging, e-mail and chat are rising much faster as a combined approach to communicating supports the scenario of communication hubs redefining customer relationships in the next three to five years. Yahoo claims that 10 percent of all instant messaging sessions end with a telephone call. While small in total percentage, the growth rate is accelerating for this combined approach to communicating. There are many other research projects underway on this dynamic and its implications for changing how people and business relate to one another in the future...

While sitting through technically complex webinars and presentations this week, I felt like raising my hand and saying, "May I be excused? My brain is full." Seriously, the level of technology and adroitness of world-class demo jockeys is both impressive and intimidating. Compound this with bonding between engineers of different nationalities and platform allegiances, and you have the makings of a remix for "We Are the World" sung by programmers ignited by a common spark.

Pricing for licenses has stabilized -- except when an SaaS offering enters the mix, according to CRM industry expert Louis Columbus. "Prices and their erosion vary across each sector of the CRM market, yet the license pricing only takes a hit if a SaaS vendor is also in the deal," he told CRM Buyer. "Then, the licensing vendor has to drop way below their average."

I'm in the middle of doing a Web survey of SAP users to gauge their levels of satisfaction with theirenterprise resource planning vendor, and an interesting dynamic is starting to emerge ...

The mantra of selling solutions has taken enterprise software by storm and nowhere is this more prevalent than CRM. Honestly, it seems like the more challenging and difficult it is to sell into specific sectors of CRM, the more "solution-selling" is being invoked. This newfound religion is truly transforming some companies away from being purely product-centric to being problem-centered on their customers' broken business processes first. The most positive aspect of solution selling's prevalence among the best-of-breed CRM community is that it is starting to make a difference...

Starting around August of last year I started tracking down SAP users that were early adopters of the NetWeaver platform, and I found an interesting dynamic that led me to continue researching what was going on. What I found was that SAP was attracting entirely new customers based on the NetWeaver platform ...

Many sales forces seem to be stuck in a time warp. Selling with a transaction focus to customers who require a consultative or even enterprise approach is driving the cost of supporting these misaligned sales forces to the point of being unaffordable. Conversely, there are companies out there that have tried a consultative selling strategy when all that was needed was transaction support...

Throughout the last few months of 2005 there was a pronounced ramp-up in activity around Web Services to enable integration of marketing, sales and CRM databases so that more precise selling strategies could be created. ...

My garage looks like a weight loss contraption museum. There's virtually every piece of workout equipment sold on the shopping channels and then some. One child asked if we were going to donate the older ones to the Smithsonian as she'd just learned about that museum in school. With enough hardware out there to start a small gym, one can't help but reflect on the disconnect between intentions and actions...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally ...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. I didn't do any predictions at the close of 2004 which would have been 50 percent right if I was lucky, but my predictions for 2006 are coming next week ...