Strategy

My childhood birthdays and Christmases had a few eternally repeated phrases associated with them: "Happy Birthday," "Merry Christmas," and "He'll grow into it." The latter one was always perplexing to me. The volume of oversized clothing I received as a kid from aunts, grandparents and family frien...

Last week, after dropping off my Prius at the dealership for routine service -- as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007 -- I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home. "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. I recognized him -- he'd drive...

The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is tru...

I'm ensconced at the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando this week for IBM's concurrent Lotusphere/IBM Connect shows, and all the announcements here paint the picture of a company and a partner ecosystem that is going all-in on collaboration. Big Blue's fuddy-duddy reputation is ...

Do customers suffer from a split personality? I say this not because of encounters with clearly rattled fellow shoppers during the holiday season. I say it because of the numbers that consistently come out when customers are surveyed -- and the other numbers that seem to be in the forefront of most ...

Social media is often held up as the wind sock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing. When Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people had become willing to shift the channels and methods they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new,...

The mainframe application forms the core of the system where the bulk of the order processing takes place. The traditional mainframe UI in, say, SCOBOL (Screen COBOL) is being augmented/replaced through the front-ending applications built in VB, ASP, .Net, etc. The front-end screens fetch the custo...

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote famously in his essay "Self-Reliance" that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." These days, many people drop the "foolish" out of the statement and thus completely pervert the saying's meaning, creating a justification to bash the idea of consistency. C...

Each dollar spent on CRM yields $5.60 in benefits, according to a recent report. Though the findings are interesting, the methodology is questionable. The 70 participating companies were customers of a firm that had been profiled in case studies, meaning that they were not necessarily typical CRM u...

When the so-called experts dispense advice about CRM implementations, whether they're first-timers or replacements of old systems, they always include a caveat about the future. You need to solve today's problems with the new system, but you also need a way to "future-proof" your investment so that ...

As a CRM journalist, I always enjoy talking to integrators (or resellers, or VARS, or partners, or whatever term they choose to describe themselves). It's always an interesting contrast to speaking with vendors. The discussion you have with a vendor is like taking an anatomy course; the discussion y...

What's the ultimate goal of CRM? As much as I and others of my ilk might talk about the positive interactions, good feelings and peer-to-peer relationships that result when CRM is done well, they're just happy means to an end. The end is, and always will be, inflating the bottom line. While a lot of...

Let's be honest: Marketing has always been considered a little "soft" in the business world. That may be why CMOs have one of the shortest average tenures -- about two years -- of any corporate board member. Marketing's reputation comes from reporting on metrics like "impressions" and "brand awaren...

My friend Hank retired from the Coast Guard after a 20-year career, and now he's pursuing a second career of service as the executive director for the Alameda Food Bank, another truly worthy career path. During a recent party, we got to talking about work -- me about CRM, him about the food bank. As...

CRM is a business tool. Lke any business tool, its objective is tied to money -- either making more of it through increased sales, or saving it through greater efficiency. Perhaps because CRM is rooted in sales force automation and hard sales, the customer's path through CRM has mirrored the custome...