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About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation. On the other hand, there are those companies faced with real market saturation -- and their plummeting prices every day just underscore how impervious their markets are to price as their lone remaining differentiator...

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on me: BlackBerries are a baby boomer's PSP with business justification and reimbursable charges. Perfect!...

When it comes to measuring their customers' satisfaction, too many companies have settled into a comfortable rut of changing their approaches to get the results they want. It's like buying a treadmill with the mile counter sped up; if we all could perform at such accelerated levels, we'd all be Olympic-class sprinters and milers. Ironically the more critical renewal business is in a company, the greater the emphasis on inflating customer satisfaction metrics, and the greater the tendency to design research programs that deliver results expected. This doesn't happen overnight; it is a gradual slide into the bad habit of designing research to get the results you want...

There's a burning question on the minds of many marketing, sales and support execs these days and it is: "How do I reach the influencers that really matter to my business?" A common question that comes up often in marketing planning meetings, these execs are realizing that the influencers most visible today, while important, aren't necessarily the ones with the most weight...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketability of these applications in the open market, and second, the need to value intellectual property in their companies as manufacturing is moved offshore...

The torrent of facts, data, figures and insights that blogs deliver daily are random and chaotic, yet immensely valuable in the right context. For companies committed to getting to the truth of where they stand with their prospects, customers, suppliers and many other stakeholders, blogs are becoming the medium of choice ...

In good times marketing and sales get all the credit for increases in sales and profits, but in bad times, IT gets the brunt of the cost-cutting pressure. What have been missing are truer measures of return on investment (ROI) for companies adopting customer-facing strategies. What's really needed is a more focused approach to quantifying the contribution of marketing, while at the same time questioning some long-held beliefs about ROI...

The bottom line is that despite promising a 360 degree view of the customer, and all the benefits of that level of visibility into customer relationships, CRM systems continue to suffer from lack of the one essential element that would make all these applications come together: trust ...

During the last downturn nearly every enterprise software vendor stayed alive for a quarter or more due to their support and maintenance revenue streams. Today, support and maintenance comprises the majority of revenue for many CRM vendors, both public and private ...

The bottom line is that today the analytics used in many small manufacturing companies starts and ends with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are entire manufacturing operations run off Excel, fulfilling the roles of demand planner, manufacturing scheduling, and the continual maintenance of bills of materials, in addition to many other tasks ...

Prospects, customers and investors must have a lingering question in their minds with the announcement of a new CEO at Siebel: "Since George Shaheen was already on the board and capable of major influence, why haven't things changed already?" Putting a board member into the CEO slot seems like window dressing and let's be honest -- just perpetuates the inward-centric view this company has of itself...

Louis Columbus, a CRM Buyer columnist, is a former senior analyst with AMR Research. He recently completed the book Getting Results from Your Analyst Relations Strategies, which is available on Amazon.com ...

In the CRM arena, there are several myths surrounding best practices, and these myths get more pronounced the closer systems are to channels and customers. The situation gets worse as the pressure is increased to produce results from people you have no direct control over. Despite all the hype, best practices are far from being CRM's Viagra ...

Home-grown ERP systems are the Oscar Madisons of the IT world. Grizzled by years of service yet reluctant to change, these massive home-grown systems resist the efforts of CIOs to transform them. More often than not, the home-grown ERP system ends up changing the CIO. The complexity and lack of clarity makes some CIOs yearn for hosted applications to increase responsiveness...

Blogging is quickly becoming part of the online lexicon of marketing, sales and support organizations as companies look for better ways to connect with customers ...

There's a dangerous undercurrent tugging at even the best manufacturer and distribution channel relationships: the inability to set and manage expectations based on supply chain visibility ...

The allure of automating the most common tasks involving channel partners, manufacturers and distributors is so sexy that this corner of the CRM market erupted with growth during the dot-com bubble. Today it's collapsing faster than a souffle pulled from the oven too fast ...

Many manufacturers rely on special pricing requests, or exceptions to standard pricing, for a large part of their indirect channel revenue. Even for direct accounts, many manufacturers have given their sales managers and regional directors control over price limits to increase responsiveness. But these strategies don't pay off for either manufacturers or software vendors. That's because the systems that support special pricing are broken...

What makes channel, sales and service partnerships messy? Contracts, lots of them, for office leases, for equipment, even to prove the partnerships' existence to local, state and national governments ...

Too many companies seem to believe that the right technology is the key to e-commerce success ...