Spotlight Features

It is part of the American Experience to be always searching for self-improvement, and I think that contributes to our obsession with New Year's resolutions. I have made a few of my own over the years and 2007 will be no exception. In the last few days I have witnessed this urge to plan and improv...

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people wil...

As most people know now, the practice of pretexting was publicly highlighted earlier this year when it was revealed that HP had hired private detectives to spy on reporters whose reporting appeared to be based on leaks from members of its Board. The PIs has used pretexting ruses to gain access to th...

Like many industry analysts and alumni, I find analytical concepts sexy. Add in creating strategies for serving customers more efficiently while being profitable at it, and the conditions are perfect for the creation of an Accidental Analyst. The analytical side of CRM experienced explosive growth ...

It's hard to believe that it's time to make predictions for the year ahead -- it feels like I just finished that job, but here we are again. I dug up my 2006 predictions and was amazed at how close some of them were. The lesson I derive here is that I must not have been trying hard enough. The fun...

Selling products and services through multiple channels offers a number of "touch points" where information can be gathered from customers or potential customers. Most people in marketing clearly understand the importance of using this information to personalize communications with customers and per...

Service centers get a lot more calls with complaints and criticisms than they get showers of praise. All telecom companies experience churn rates way above those of many other industries -- it isn't unheard of for 30 percent of an average telecom company's customers to switch providers in the course...

Technological development is fueling the transformation of economies and production processes around the world. Just-in-time manufacturing -- an industry-shaking innovation when Japanese manufacturers applied the methodology on a wholesale basis back in the early 1980s -- is now a best practice acro...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo, the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year. This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as t...

If you asked each member of your sales team what problem your company solves, what value you provide, and how you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, would their answers be clear, consistent and compelling? Most likely, you would receive a range of inconsistent responses. Today's salespe...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...

I have always advocated that CRM is a growing field, and that it grows at the margins whenever some innovative company introduces a new application type. As such, the definition really speaks more about all of the front office than CRM alone. Nevertheless, over the last few years we've seen a lot ...

Sales executives have long embraced the vision of leveraging incentive compensation to drive performance within their sales teams. In this vision commissions are the reward, the proverbial carrot used to motivate reps to achieve and exceed specific revenue and performance metrics. However, the gap b...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures gam...