Strategy

Some things in life are fleeting -- the lifespan on the mayfly, the appearance of a rainbow, the pure white of the first snow of winter. Some things in your CRM system are fleeting too -- namely, the quality of your data. Did you know that every year, somewhere between 25 percent and 40 percent of ...

This past May mobile app developers dodged a bullet when a California state court sided with Delta Airlines in a dispute over its mobile app. California's attorney general had sued Delta, alleging that the company violated the state's mobile privacy law, which requires a company to clearly state tha...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. Then there's the idea of social CRM -- on a basic level, the inclusion of social media-generated data in the customer record -- which can help shift the way a business interacts w...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many....

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of work...

The case for mobile CRM is an easy one to make. Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and the way most people work requires 24-7 accessibility. Also, not being tethered to a desktop to access customer records is a plus -- if not an outright necessity in some cases. For sales reps or anyone who interacts w...

Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses that market to them and those they patronize. As a result, when I say I wri...

You wouldn't think it was easy to bungle a mobile marketing campaign -- but it definitely is doable. Six in 10 decision makers planned to increase their companies' mobile marketing budgets in 2013, Forrester said earlier this year, reporting on a survey conducted for Acquent. However, 42 percent of ...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is the way you realize the value fr...

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me. I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "...

Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged. They range from running afoul of still-developing regulations to security concerns, to consumers misinterpreting content. Keeping a marketing messag...

As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that ap...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of sal...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a l...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...