Expert Advice

If a customer walked into one of your brick-and-mortar stores -- assuming, for this exercise, that you have brick-and-mortar stores -- and asked if you had any Sleepytime Pajamas, how would you want your sales associate to respond? Whether you only carried Sweet Dreams Pajamas, you'd just sold out o...

In a past life, I was a bosun's mate in the U.S. Navy. A bosun's mate's job is best described as "sailor stuff" -- running small boats, tying up and casting off in port, steering the ship, maintaining things, and lots and lots of painting. Bosun's mates also stood lookout watches, monitoring the env...

The trend toward an "always on, always connected" lifestyle driven by the use of social networks and mobile technology has, if nothing else, groomed consumers to become demanding in their expectations of the online experience. Unfortunately, the e-commerce experience has changed little since early d...

I remember being an impatient kid when something I really wanted was on its way. The first time I was aware of my parents mail-ordering something for me -- I think it was a baseball jersey I especially coveted -- I can recall bombarding them with a chorus of the phrase, "when is it going to get here...

There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly. That's the certainty that we'll make mistakes. Everyone makes them; if it hasn't happened to your business, you haven't b...

There's been a lot of talk recently about how BPM is gaining traction across a wide variety of industry verticals. BPM's surge is part of the larger trend of agile development; organizations are weary of growing top-heavy and employing a number of individuals to perform tedious, manual processes tha...

I just wrote a note to a friend of mine thanking him for his participation at a conference I recently helped organize. It was a thank you note, and he's a CRM industry influencer; I won't divulge names, because it's not important to my point, nor do I want to seen like too much of a suck-up. In any ...

Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 custo...

Every day, I meet retailers who are eager to learn how they can add a co-creation, customization, or personalization feature (collectively "Customization" with a capital 'C') to their existing offerings. They often start the conversation off with an overview of their current products and quickly mov...

"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth. Logically, we know that's not true. Yo...

At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. Most of the application...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specificall...

Can you tell me exactly where your employees are and what they are doing? Do you know what the top 10 most profitable projects were for your company last year? Can you make a bid on a project that has little or no margin of error? If you can't answer these questions, then you should know that someon...

When I go to CRM conferences -- and I go to many -- one of the things I relish is the opportunity to speak to leaders about thinking surrounding social CRM. That group is not limited to the pundits and authors most closely associated with SCRM; it also includes users at these events who have reached...

The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their jux...