Expert Advice

"Half of the marketing money you spend is wasted -- trouble is you don't know which half," said William Lever of Lever Bros. in 1885. With due respect to Mr. Lever, we know a significant portion of the wasted half is made up of opportunities qualified in an initial lead qualification initiative -- b...

What would you do if 100 people visited your website tomorrow and each wanted a different variety of your company's solution? Would you take that information and develop 100 new and unique brochures? No, that would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Now imagine that you can track where website visitors ...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Although businesses no longer control the conversation with their customers, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way. It's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer expe...

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communi...

If you knew you could apply a number of best-in-class lead generation processes proven to close five times more deals than average processes, would you do it? Seems like a no brainer, doesn't it? But in reality, many companies continue to implement lead generation processes that can be considered av...

Customer experience can make or break a company. The pressure to manage costs has never been greater, but it's a fatal mistake to view customer service channels as a cost center. The solution? An at-home workforce that delivers excellent results: 10 percent higher customer satisfaction; 30 percent m...

It's often said that CRM is always a work in progress. Never mind the fact that I'm the one who's often saying it -- it's true, if you're doing it right. You should always be looking for areas where you can coach your people, adjust your processes, and fine-tune your technology. However, thinking ab...

For more than a decade, B2B firms have used the Internet to publicize their product catalogs. As a result of the rise in consumer sales on the Web and the rapid maturation and adoption of Internet technologies like RIAs and Web 2.0, B2B firms are now rethinking their e-business strategies. At the sa...

Do you know how much money you will lose if your e-commerce site fails for just one hour? What if your site slows down? The more tags and pixels you have on your site, the more likely you are to find out. Tags, or pixels, are pieces of code that are put on your website every time you implement a new...

It has been a wild ride for retailers these past few years. But when we look back, we won't be talking about the economy, the drive for lean inventory, or deep discounting. Rather, we will recognize the fundamental change that occurred was in the shopping process itself. Shoppers are often interac...

It's long been discussed that marketing and sales need to "get along." But the reality is that marketing and sales actually need to work smoothly together along a defined lead management process. The lack of this cooperation costs companies more than wasted leads. It increases sales costs and reduce...

In long-distance navigation -- like in a boat or an airplane -- if you're going to make an error, it's better to make it later than to make it early on. A half-degree mistake can multiply itself into hundreds of miles over the course of a long voyage, but the same error made toward the end of the tr...

The past year has seen business process management (BPM) achieve tremendous growth in the enterprise, but there continues to be a good deal of misunderstanding about BPM itself. At its core, BPM is about automating and streamlining manual processes. These processes may represent a diverse range of t...

"What's my motivation?" Sounds like a corny question an overwrought actor might pose to a director on the boards or in front of a camera. But we all have motivations -- and it's smart to understand your own and those of your vendor when it comes to CRM. No one wakes up one morning and decides, "What...