Spotlight Features

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It's going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent thems...

I think 2005 was a bit of a false spring for many software companies. Although many enterprises moved to take advantage of new revenue opportunities, those actions did not filter down to emerging companies with the ideas and technologies the big guys need to achieve their vision. In fact, articles...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. A seismic shift is happening in CRM today. Foremost of these is the shift from transactions to trust -- and if your pipeline has been ...

Ever notice how these year end reviews and a pundit's previous forward-looking prognostications rarely synch up? Of course not! Analysts and pundits are great at predicting the future, but lousy at coming back a year later to review how they did. Well, I'm different. I don't care if I was wrong ...

A silent stealth war is going on between best-of-breed vendors for position in the Google AdWords column of searches on keyword searches, and a strategy on the part of larger best-of-breed vendors of completing dominating their smaller best-of-breed counterparts in AdWord spending alone. This war fo...

It really should not surprise me, though it does, that the media companies have such lousy Web sites. Here's what surprises me: It's a secret hidden in plain sight that the newspaper business is in trouble, yet papers seem to be supremely ineffective at doing something about the situation. Sellin...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within ...

It's time to start thinking about what comes after CRM. I am not trying to be alarmist or to set a dire tone, I just think there's a good amount of evidence that CRM has taken us as far as it's going to and we need to think about something beyond it. That's not to say that CRM is dead -- far from i...

For some companies, CRM means managing each transaction and checking the customer's satisfaction at the end. This is exactly why a company's customer loyalty scores are always lower than the satisfaction score. CRM is a lot more than buying a lot of products and services from a software company. ...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

I have a wallet that is much thicker than it needs to be because it is full of supermarket loyalty cards. Each store has its own loyalty card and I dutifully carry all of them as well as the membership card I pay for annually at one of the warehouse stores. I actually like the warehouse store best...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

Last week, Microsoft announced its embrace of the Web and software as a service (SaaS) but there might be less there than meets the eye. Rather than a bold strategy to move the company and the industry ahead, I see it as more of a hedging strategy to help the company hold on. Microsoft Founder and ...

When it comes to CEM I think we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I can fully buy into the idea and the importance of treating the customer well and being attentive to the signals a customer gives off by virtue of his or her existence and background. But most CEM "solutions" that ...