CRM

After writing a positive review of Roy's Hawaiian Grill on Yelp, Matt Siltala received a "thank you" from the company. It's that kind of active involvement with Yelp that Avalaunch Media President Siltala recommends to his clients. "I love Roy's Hawaiian Grill because it's done that for me," Siltala...

Salesforce.com has debuted a new feature for its Salesforce Desk.com Support Center: video support for knowledge-based self-service offerings. Desk.com Video Support Center allows users to embed video content from any of the major video platforms in their online customer service offerings. There is ...

Take a look at almost any sales software on the market, and you'll find the vendor's claim that the product accelerates the sales process. It's a given. For years, we've been trying to achieve this acceleration, and we've been succeeding. The only problem with this approach is that it can't go on fo...

Qstream, which has developed a gamification-based app to help sales reps learn complex sales-related content, has broadened and deepened its functionality so the platform can be used in a number of new scenarios. It has expanded the types of situations in which a company can use its Qstream license,...

Tellwise, a two-and-a-half year old startup, has introduced a new collaboration platform for sales reps to target prospects. Called "Smart Messages," the multichannel platform comes equipped with such tools as intelligent notifications, behavioral analytics and mobile functionality. Smart Messages i...

So far, Satya Nadella's moves as head of Microsoft echo the teachings of Jim Collins' 2001 best seller, Good to Great. It's a book about how and why some companies wallow in mediocrity and others operate at several levels of magnitude higher than their peers -- think Apple for one and Salesforce for...

Attentive.ly recently released its application on the Eloqua platform, digging a deeper foothold for itself in the CRM enterprise space. Attentive.ly provides social marketing automation functionality in the form of a plug-and-play toolset that works with a CRM overlay. Using its tools, companies ...

SAP and its long-standing partner Esri have developed a native product integration that debuted this week at the at the Esri User Conference currently under way in San Diego. The companies have been collaborating on projects since 1999, due to the significant overlap in their respective customer bas...

It's general practice to have multiple sales forecasts, and that typically means low and upside potential as well as what's committed -- but the idea of teasing those threads apart only at forecasting time might be old school and no longer applicable. Long before you compile a forecast, you have a g...

Salesforce.com will shell out $350 million in common stock for RelateIQ in a deal expected to close by October. It will provide another $40 million dollars in stock for its cash balance. RelateIQ will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, according to an SEC filing. Many of Salesforce's pa...

As much as we may wax on about engaging, enchanting and delighting our customers, most of them are not expecting such an experience. In most cases, their purchase is prelude to something else pleasurable, in the case of B2C -- or profitable, in the case of B2B. They want to get what they need and go...

Blackbaud recently upgraded its cloud-based eTapestry fundraising application with tools addressing what seems to be a perennial problem in CRM -- dirty data. The ultimate goal of the upgrades for the application, which is designed for nonprofits, is to improve the quality of donor information. The ...

It always happens this way. A market erupts or transitions to something new or it goes the way of the dodo and you miss the key turning point. Looking back, though, you can spot the telltale signs of disruption. People like me, who try to forecast these great events, have the reliability of a dartbo...

Zendesk has rolled out a new analytics and data visualization tool that sits on top of its flagship customer service platform. Called "Zendesk Insights," it is available to the company's Plus and Enterprise users. "One thing we have been hearing from our customers is that they want more access to th...

"Perfection is the enemy of completion" is a bastardization of a translation of the first line of a poem by Voltaire. That makes the saying itself sort of an example of what Voltaire was talking about -- but it doesn't make it any less true. In the processes we use to run our businesses and deal wit...