Marketing

About the easiest way for companies to dip their toes into the social media waters is the blog. There are few technical burdens to setting them up, the time needed to create posts can flex with the workloads of the assigned writers, and they can become a conduit for customer conversations through th...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

On July 5, Pitney Bowes announced it had received acceptances for over 90 percent of the existing issued ordinary shares of Portrait Software, a leading provider of solutions that focus on enhancing customer relationship management systems and enabling clients to achieve improved customer retention ...

The U.S. government's $642-million program to encourage the use of electronic health records through federally created Regional Extension Centers will involve a two-tiered effort featuring customer relationship management technology. The REC program is one of several federal initiatives promoting el...

The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I've discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend. Most of us don't th...

Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when th...

CRM and marketing systems are all geared toward getting people to buy. After all, the whole point of investing in these tools is to increase top-line revenue. At least, that's the argument we make to our bosses when we seek to implement them. Those tools are getting better all the time, and one area...

The revolutionary changes in the buying process mean that the sales process seems to be shrinking while the marketing cycle is growing. How do we then stay engaged and determine when the time is right to strike? We need to get involved early -- when the buying process begins -- by providing educat...

As a marketer, you need a control panel to make decisions. The world is moving faster and faster every day, enabling literally billions of interactions about your company and products around the globe. What you need is real-time intelligence. The term "real-time" used to only apply to Wall Street an...

The last two years have been rough for many sales and marketing departments: Head counts have been cut, goals have increased, and the emergence of technology has boosted expectations. Those are recent issues, but the issue that persists is that sales and marketing are still too often working at cros...

As businesses worldwide increasingly focus on e-commerce as a vehicle for driving new revenue streams, most e-commerce sites still struggle to leverage the growing wealth of customer data to which they have access. This failure to integrate customer relationship management activities with online vis...

Do you want to close more sales? Do you want to sell more to existing customers? Do you want to get closer to your users online so you can know what they are thinking? A virtual agent could be an effective way for you to do all of the above. What is a virtual agent? Technically, a virtual agent ...

It had to happen sooner or later; the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is, yippee! With trends like social media -- or almost any trend -- we tend to over-imbue the idea or offering with our own expe...

Marketing data does yet not evolve the way individuals evolve. The inability for marketers to quickly adapt to rapid changes in how their customers behave is undermining the effectiveness of their communications. How, then, can what is learned about an individual be leveraged into a better experienc...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substanc...