Strategy

On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies, but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times. As a social learning...

Around the time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and signed into law, I was a reporter covering that area of technology. Specifically, I was writing about service, measurement, data management and the software that made all that possible for telecommunications companies. Little did I re...

One of the more revealing things I heard from Marc Benioff at Cloudforce 2011 in New York last week was his idea about how his company will continue to build out its product line. Marc's never been super secretive about his general direction, though product specifics have always been closely kept.

One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps you understand how to keep them coming back. Still, there's a long way f...

In the Aberdeen benchmark report "Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling," the research among 528 end-user sales organizations revealed that the most frequently used delivery models for sales intelligence were limited to remarkably traditional, if not predictable, applications: email, sea...

As I've written before, social CRM best practices don't exist -- but only because in order to be most effective, each business needs to tailor its social CRM approach to its specific customers. However, that doesn't mean you're doomed to a long evaluation process and a tough spell of trial-and-error...

One of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer relationships, to be sure, but in reality it's a link in a chain of decisions and ...

Sage took a major step in clarifying its position in the market when it hosted an analyst day in Boston last week. The company has been around for a long time and has been one of the higher revenue generators for many years thanks to an assortment of products that span the front and back offices of...

The emergence of the social customer is forcing businesses to think differently about how they reach the people to whom they sell, and much has been written about ways for businesses to cope with this. However, as is all too common in CRM discussions, the customer is often forgotten as we default to...

Microsoft did some smart things last week when it announced its Dynamics CRM Online service. Most of the headlines will focus on the teaser rate or introductory pricing of only US$34 per seat-month for 12 months. Until June, users of Oracle CRM On-Demand and Salesforce who switch will have an adde...

To remain successful against the backdrop of complex market dynamics and increased competition, it has become critical for organizations to offer more evolved products and services that are not only cost-effective, but also extendable, scalable and focused on improved customer experience. Cloud com...

Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had a coming out party. Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty -- that's 8-oh, my goodness -- tablet PCs to the world. Now, by itself, that's significant, especially for CRM, and ...

This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He'd done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated. After that, however, he started finding new problems -- which he then found solut...

We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so eve...

In April and May 2010, Aberdeen surveyed 422 executives from a variety of different industries, and the results were clear: Rapid forecasters -- companies that collect and prepare reliable sales forecasts in less than half an hour -- significantly outperform slow forecasters in terms of their curren...