Spotlight Features

Indian call centers are being purchased by U.S. and Canadian companies seeking to quickly gain access to call center services offshore, particularly outbound services. Although media attention focuses more on the sale of U.S. assets to Asian and Middle Eastern firms, this trend in the other directi...

Spending the last week traveling through Australia, visiting a manufacturer, giving presentations and talking with several other companies after my presentations has been fascinating. What's so refreshing about Australian manufacturers' approach to using enterprise software for selling, serving and...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service, market. In no particular order the company announced its version 11.0 release, informed the world that this release is fully AJAX infused, introduced a scripti...

The relationship between CRM vendor and its channel ecosystem has slowly been changing over the last two years, driven by a number of industry trends. Once seen almost as a commodity, a vendor's ecosystem -- its resellers, independent software vendors, systems integrators with certifications for the...

It's opening day in many Major League Baseball stadiums today, and in addition to wondering who's throwing out the first pitch, how much the beer will cost, and whether that rookie shortstop can hit the curveball, competitive and committed fans of this great sport are grappling with another burning ...

Google AdWords is the most commonly used lead generation tool in many small and medium businesses. Layer in small and medium vendors of CRM's many varieties of applications, and the dependency on precise targeting for lead generation becomes even more important, due to the highly targeted messaging...

I don't do endorsements -- that's for ball players. For me to endorse a product would be the end of my credibility. All I look for is what works and, if it does, I'll point it out. If something doesn't live up to the hype, I follow my mother's advice and say nothing. That's why I was surprised wh...

Customers experience a major difference in doing business with companies with strategies in place for synchronizing demand. Many studies are available of the top-performing companies that have achieved high levels of performance in this area.

I was doing research for a white paper not long ago and it gave me reason to speak with people who operate call centers. The call center operators I spoke with had one thing in common; they used on-demand call center services. If you are not familiar with on-demand call center services, it's much ...

They are everywhere -- value propositions that claim much and deliver little. The fact that so many value propositions these days are of the "boil the ocean" variety makes some thoughtful people wonder if their view of the world is overly simplistic or if they are missing something. Sure, a list...

In a world where customer acquisition costs are soaring and customer retention -- particularly retaining profitable ones -- is getting harder for every enterprise, "knowing your customer" is not just a slogan but a business mandate. However, in order to truly know its customers, an enterprise need...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest...

Now is the time for all good dads to come to the aid of their Girl Scout daughters and sell, sell, sell cookies. What is reminiscent of the sentence used by many typing teachers to teach that skill has become the battle cry throughout the suburbs of America. What has quickly replaced the length of...

I take between three and seven briefings each week from software companies. Some of these companies are known quantities that I like to keep up with, while others are new to me or possibly new to the world. Most times, companies are looking for an objective opinion on a plan, a message or an idea ...

The market has declared CRM dead any number of times over the years. The most recent pronouncement came when iconic Siebel was purchased by Oracle. If the market maker couldn't stay afloat, then what hope did other vendors have? To be sure, there is something to that doleful reasoning: Few expect th...