CRM

I was having dinner the other night with friends, telling them about some of the ideas in my book, Solve for the Customer. One of my friends 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...

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. Record systems can tell you what happened, but b...

One of the pitches sales reps selling CRM make the mistake of dropping into conversations is that it's easy to use. "Users can practically train themselves, it's so intuitive! Just start clicking! And did we tell you -- we just introduced a new UI to improve the UX!" It's a line of discussion that r...

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 ...

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. Last month, Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce's corporate investment group, swung into action. It led a Series B round of fun...

One of the most disconcerting phrases I hear these days whenever someone proposes a new business process is, "our system won't let us do that." So, at least in some cases, legacy systems are preventing businesses from evolving. If only there was a way to evolve while keeping the legacy systems in pl...

You might remember Garry Kasparov, the last chess grand master to beat a computer. That was about 20 years ago when he went up against Deep Blue, the IBM megaframe that is the direct ancestor of Jeopardy-winning Watson. A rematch between Deep Blue and Kasparov a year later did not go so well for the...

For all the breakthroughs in technology and process, and for the vast amounts of money invested in making sales and marketing both more productive and better aligned, we still face a staggering adoption problem. Sales and marketing pros answered a lot of questions in a recent survey. One of them was...

Roughly a year after it acquired Parature, Microsoft last month unveiled the Spring '15 release of Parature from Microsoft. The new application, the first major release since the acquisition, adds to Parature's self-service and knowledge management functionality. The feature set focuses on increasin...

Part of my new year routine has been ordering new business cards. In this electronic age, they are the only things I actually print, and I'm a writer! Well, actually, in a few weeks I'll publish a book, Solve for the Customer, in paperback, and the two are related. I made a discovery while writing t...

Engage.cx just closed its first investment round -- $2.9 million in Series A financing. The round of participating investors is noteworthy, but for the CRM industry the real intrigue lays in Engage.cx's premise -- or rather, promise: how to present a unified cohesive customer service operation, no...

No, this is not an article about fracking -- drilling for gas and oil in shale. This is about "drilling down" into big data. We've been using the term for a long time and it provides a useful metaphor for data analysis. However, we've conditioned ourselves to think of drilling down only to a superfi...

The second half of the Top 20 Bloggers list is the half that holds the most surprises and fresh faces. This year, it also has the most variety -- from non-English speakers to blogs targeted at small businesses -- as well as plenty of marketing-oriented content. There also are some re-entries to the ...

The field of CRM bloggers is like the start of a marathon: There may be thousands of entrants, but there are only a few elite runners. Identifying them from the rest of the pack is not always easy -- especially as their enthusiasm for blogging waxes and wanes, or as they move into other formats, lik...

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds and business and finance columnist for The New Yorker, published an article in the magazine's Nov. 10, 2014, issue entitled, "Better All The Time." The piece connects the importance of culture-wide continuous incremental improvement using data and ana...