Expert Advice

Marketing automation is not science. It is a badly coined term that describes the automation of push marketing. The name is often associated with a class of cloud software that helps marketing become more efficient and effective. Marketing automation is simply software waiting for someone to app...

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 ...

There is a lot of hype around marketing automation, and it's for good reason. An effective marketing automation strategy and implementation can help drive more qualified leads, and therefore increase revenues and decrease sales cycle times. But many organizations fall into the trap of believing all ...

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...

The Durbin Amendment is well-known throughout the financial services community thanks to extensive media analysis over the past year. Originally scheduled to take effect last month, the Durbin Amendment, an addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will now take effe...

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 ...

The project management office has provided well-documented value to many organizations. However, for some businesses, the benefits never materialize. Take a look at PMOs over the years, and you will see that many have restructured, dissolved, or constantly had to justify their existence during both ...

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...

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or...

During the past few years, customer service organizations have faced increasing amounts of pressure to deliver better service over a broader range of channels including the Web, email and phone. Customers expect to get service at any time of the day or night and assume that customer service teams wi...

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...

The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and it...

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...

For more than 15 years -- since the dawn of the Internet, really -- display advertising has held promise, but it has often underperformed with boring, static banner ads whose value diminished greatly as consumers became trained to ignore them. Today, innovative technologies are pumping new life into...

By this point in the evolution of e-commerce, most e-tailers know the benefits of live engagement. Website visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase when they have the support of a sales representative. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, interacting with a knowledgeable person in real...