Strategy

One of the great conundrums about CRM is the disconnect between its stated intention and what it's usually really used for. Theoretically, CRM is supposed to help businesses build better and longer-lasting relationships with customers. In actuality, it's usually used to simply manage customer data a...

Relationships are the lifeblood of any business. As a small business achieves the success of a growing network, the question often turns to how to choose the best system for managing the information captured across multiple devices, digital files and scribbled notes. A contact management systems or ...

Social CRM has been contemplated and debated, defined and refined, cussed and discussed. These many years of excited conversation about what SCRM could do for businesses and what businesses need to do to make it a reality have created more questions than answers for many companies. That's created an...

I worked on an exercise in messaging for a CRM vendor this week, and it was both entertaining and frustrating at times. It was entertaining to hear smart people offer clever takes on what they do (and, perhaps more colorfully, what their competition does), but it was frustrating to realize that the ...

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk, and technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it. But one thing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said early on really stuck in my head. He...

There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce. For some reason, I don't understand why Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year, which is fortunate for two reasons: Hurricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the East Coast ov...

As is so sadly the case with many environment-oriented subjects, Green IT was consigned to the back burner at a lot of businesses when the economy began grinding its gears several years ago. The same thing happened to a lesser extent to some potentially game-changing CRM strategies, most notably mob...

Sales has had a rough couple of years. Although customers have been harder to find, the pressure on sales pros to produce has become ever greater. In some U.S. firms, the lowest-performing 40 percent of the sales force is replaced annually. In other businesses, departures or layoffs of sales staff a...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

"Half of the marketing money you spend is wasted -- trouble is you don't know which half," said William Lever of Lever Bros. in 1885. With due respect to Mr. Lever, we know a significant portion of the wasted half is made up of opportunities qualified in an initial lead qualification initiative -- b...

By now, most people understand the power and the value of adding a social component to your CRM strategy. Perhaps you're not yet ready to go to full social CRM, but you no doubt recognize that there is a lot of value in engaging with customers in the ways they want to engage. As social media become ...

Whether you're a user or whether you purposely ducked the invitations to join, you've probably discovered that Google+ is all but inescapable as a topic of conversation. Responses run the gamut from rejection to an all-in embrace of Google's new social media platform; users are trying to figure ou...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Although businesses no longer control the conversation with their customers, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way. It's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer expe...

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communi...