Expert Advice

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are ...

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernst made my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss). Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range of crimes against language, ranging from tortur...

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball spring training, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oa...

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with...

Last-click attribution assigns the entire value of a conversion to the last campaign the consumer clicked prior to converting. Naturally, last-click attribution favors campaigns that influence the lower-end of the funnel. In contrast, first-click attribution favors campaigns that influence earlier i...

Is your small business guilty as sin? Many small businesses are committing sales transgressions that hinder success and threaten to condemn them to eternal mediocrity in the market. The root of all these sins lies in a failure to adhere to the "commandment of commitment." To stay on the right path, ...

More companies than ever are seeking to understand project accounting costs as they realize that knowledge of this data impacts their bottom line and exposes areas where costs can be cut and profits can be made. By understanding project accounting costs, companies can discover financial problems wit...

To grow a business, you need leads. So how do you fill the funnel, especially if you're a small business that no one has heard of yet? Ten years ago, the formula was pretty simple. It was all about driving traffic to your website, getting people to fill out a form, and then following up with them us...

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. But the ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almost impossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon. That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which often resul...

The billing function conjures up many images, few of them positive. Essential to success of your business, yet often a burden for most organizations independent of size or market, billing is seen as a necessary evil to collect cash and enable organizations to stay alive. Over the past few years, how...

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with sever...

There's a great chase scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, having been identified as a future murderer, is making his escape through a futuristic mall. He's trying to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, the advertising billboards start crying out to him, vying for his attention and blowing his c...

A company's reputation is based on the customer's experience. Fixing or preventing problems is half of the service equation; communicating with customers is the other half. Customer service is as important, if not more important than the immediate resolution of the problem. An integral part of the c...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...

Putting points on the board, "scoring" sales and posting results to beat the competition -- sales teams are the key offensive players at every organization. And not unlike star forwards on the basketball court, they require sufficient tools and training to be successful in this role. Unfortunately, ...