Spotlight Features

You have to take your hat off to Salesforce.com, I think. Last week's earnings call was a thing of beauty. It was the kind of thing that I bet every entrepreneur must dream of doing someday -- reporting to the investors on a great quarter for their newly public company. It wasn't so long ago that...

When the Internet burst upon the scene in the early 1990s, the concept of software as a service seemed an idea whose time had come. It got hyped along with everything else about the Internet and reached a massive peak of inflated expectations in early 2000, as venture capitalists funded dozens of ne...

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear d...

Outsourcing and the establishment of captive customer service operations offshore depend on labor markets to supply qualified talent at affordable rates. Without appropriate personnel, nothing is possible. The globalization of information technology and IT-enabled services is leading to the global...

So your small business is experiencing better-than-expected growth, and you're ready to take the next step and expand globally? Think about when you go shopping -- more often than not, you may notice phrases like "Made in Mexico," "Made in Sri Lanka" or "Made in Italy." Perhaps they're on your cloth...

You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World, the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco re...

A lot of people will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for Salesforce.com's annual user meeting, Dreamforce. I think I have been to every one of these events and this year marks a turning point. Previous meetings have been held in local hotels and other venues around the cit...

In considering whether or how to reorganize customer service and back-office functions offshore, the option to open a captive subsidiary service center may not receive full consideration in comparison to outsourcing options. Here we look at the case for Western companies to establish their own dedi...

As a rule, manufacturers have been blissfully unconcerned with some of the finer points of CRM functionality and processes -- but not because they have been indifferent to their customers' needs. Rather, the low adoption rates of CRM technology in this sector have been more reflective of manufacture...

I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certain...

As a rule, manufacturers have been blissfully unconcerned with some of the finer points of CRM functionality and process. This is not to say they are indifferent to their customers' needs. Rather, the low adoption rates of CRM technology in this sector have been more reflective of manufacturers' bus...

Someone recently asked me who I thought was ahead in the on-demand market. That's a hard one. As far as I am concerned, there are no right answers to a question like that, and though seemingly innocuous, it raises more questions than I can answer. For starters, I don't even think it is a single ma...

Earlier this month, Sage Software announced it had acquired one of its longtime partners, Corum, a Canada-based provider of CRM technology. It was a significant deal for the company, said Dave Batt, senior vice president and general manager of Global CRM, as the acquired technology matches one of th...

It's the catch-all department in many companies where top sales funnel activities like lead and demand generation are found, or lower sales funnel strategies including pre-sales support, pricing exceptions and team selling are found. It's team selling on enterprise-class ERP applications. It's als...

As the online space expands and becomes ever more complex, Web marketers are finding that they have to cherry-pick among the many possible technology marketing channels available to be exploited. Online marketing has evolved from links to banners to search engines. While search engines are by far th...