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Bob Stutz is a great guy. I have interacted with him occasionally over the years in his various senior postings throughout the CRM industry and always found him to be kind, generous and thoughtful. Last week he announced he was leaving his position as head of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which he...

In manufacturing, margins are everything. If you're like most manufacturers, your business operates on such tight margins that even a small change in the price list can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. So what happens if your sales team inadvertently uses an old price list and the cost o...

Now would be a good time to put Zoho on your radar if for some reason it isn't there already. The Austin-based company just announced Catalyst, a developer environment that helps programmers and others to speed development of apps and microservices with capabilities inherited from Zoho's apps portfo...

As technology advances and consumers' expectations and digital sophistication rise exponentially, marketers no longer can focus on delivering static messages, regardless of how "targeted" or "multichannel" they may be. It's no longer enough simply to greet a customer by name.

I wanted to like Kara Swisher's recent piece about Facebook's attempt to wrestle with its demons, but I can't. It feels too much like self-delusion. To cut to the chase, Facebook announced it was forming an oversight board with responsibilities for policing its domain and reducing or even eliminatin...

I have been writing about Salesforce for 20 years. That's incredible for me because aside from marriage, there's nothing in my life I've done so consistently for so long. Perhaps like a marriage, the thing that's been attractive about Salesforce is its constantly changing nature. The company went th...

After a 50 percent rise in the stock price of The RealReal, the marketplace for consigned luxury items, following its June 28 public offering, there's been a search to define what is so lucrative about this company, or e-commerce in general. The RealReal certainly has exhibited wisdom in various asp...

I'll admit it, it was love at first sight when I purchased my first MacBook. It was my iPhone that prompted my decision to give up years of PC efficiencies and dive head-first into learning a new operating system, but familiarity had kept me complacent for too long. Still, I remember the excitement ...

When buying clothes, many consumers still prefer to head to a bricks-and-mortar store, browse the racks, and try things on. There's something about clothing, after all, that's inherently tactile and personal. Gradually, however, the way people buy clothes has been changing. Digital technologies are ...

Online tech support scams have been on the rise for the past decade, as hackers found new ways to trick consumers into providing remote access to their computers in order to steal information. This tried-and-true scam currently relies on sophisticated social engineering, fueled by detailed user info...

We're starting to rely more on AI to interpret massive amounts of consumer and third-party data in real time, and to make it relevant. As a result, businesses can create personalized and tailored interactions for their customers at every step of the buying journey.

When word came out that Motorola was rereleasing its hit Razr smartphone, I was excited. Now that it has been delayed until the end of the year, the sizzle seems to be lessening a bit. Razr was hot more than a decade ago, but then it quickly faded away when the iPhone and Android stole the show. Mot...

National Customer Service Week is the first full week of October -- a designation we've celebrated every year since 1992. The week highlights the importance of customer service and the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis. Customer service is a big deal in e-commerce, as many cust...

If you've ever played chess, you know that each move you make has to be the best move. At one level, this is painfully obvious -- after all, who would choose to make a terrible move instead of a better one? -- but it's illustrative of an important concept. Specifically, the core reason it's true is...