Strategy

The holiday season is upon us; even those uninitiated in the ways and means of retail can see it in the Halloween decorations and candy that are now so plentiful on store shelves. For the initiated -- that is, anyone who expects to make a buck off of the holiday shoppers this year -- not only is the...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

It's easy to be blinded by the obvious. It happens in business all the time. Something is right in front of you, but you attribute its effect to a different cause. I see this most typically when observing a paradigm shift -- the reason for the shift is not always the obvious causative agent. For exa...

Prognosticators love to look at Salesforce.com and imagine an impossibly tall edifice about to fall in the next stiff breeze. Maybe it could. I am not a finance guy, so what do I know? For now, though, the party continues -- and the party within the party is the one full of the doubters. What do th...

Do you remember walking by telephone poles at downtown intersections 10 or 20 years ago and seeing them covered in fliers, placards and notices? If it was a really popular intersection, there were probably several layers of paper pinned, tacked, taped and stapled on top of each other. If the telepho...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence...

Before they contact a prospect, smart salespeople check the CRM system to see what the customer record says. That's what CRM is there for, from a sales perspective: to give sales the background information it needs to have the best chance at closing a sale. However, the picture of the prospect paint...

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. Customer retention isn't flashy, and it doesn't earn extra pats on the back from executives or big promotions -- which...

CBS viewers who get their broadcast TV service via Time Warner may have felt a little bit like the characters in summertime drama Under the Dome in the last 24 hours or so. Specifically, as part of a battle over retransmission fees, the cable giant on Monday briefly pulled CBS from its lineup in sev...

Sage Summit, held in Washington, D.C., this week, was a more upbeat event than it has been over the last two years. During that interval, the company has had the thankless task of telling its customers and partners that it was making big changes and that things would be better. The news was not alwa...

Like everyone else with a pulse, Paul Rand, president and CEO of Zocalo Group, has noted the phenomenal growth of mobile advertising. Statistic after statistic confirms such observations, including the latest from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which earlier this week reported that mobile adver...

Last year, I polled a group of respected CRM resellers to create a list spotlighting "forgotten features" -- tools and settings in CRM that many users overlook, even when they could bring great value to their businesses. Perhaps the most interesting forgotten feature was internal reporting. Most com...

If ever there was a case for conducting online customer surveys, Adam Lasky, global social media coordinator at Spreadshirt, has lived it. "A week after a customer makes a purchase on the Spreadshirt platform, we follow up with a customer review survey," Lasky said. That's how the company learned th...

The issue of mobile privacy has been simmering for years, and it's long been apparent that there will be some movement at the government level sooner or later. This week, sooner would probably be the better guess -- especially if the European Commission is included. In the last few days, more allega...

It's no secret that online reviews play a key role in consumers' purchase decisions, but that's increasingly true for local brands as well, according to a report published Tuesday by BrightLocal. More and more, consumers are using the Internet to find local businesses, according to the company's Loc...