Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

This story was originally published on June 2, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The idea of taking CRM into the field has been around for a decade -- long enough to lull many people into ignoring it in favor of newer, flashier and more social ideas.

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk -- the ability to add individual customers to Chatter, the use of HTML5 to create native-like mobile CRM applications, a scheme to allow customers to store some sensitive data in an on-premises location rather than within Salesforce's data centers, and more. And technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it...

As is so sadly the case with many environment-oriented subjects, Green IT was consigned to the back burner at a lot of businesses when the economy began grinding its gears several years ago. The same thing happened to a lesser extent to some potentially game-changing CRM strategies, most notably mobile CRM. We have a natural tendency to pull in wh...

Sales has had a rough couple of years. Although customers have been harder to find, the pressure on sales pros to produce has become ever greater. In some U.S. firms, the lowest-performing 40 percent of the sales force is replaced annually. In other businesses, departures or layoffs of sales staff aren't followed by new hires; instead, the quotas ...

At the CRM Evolution show in New York on Tuesday, Brian Vellmure, the principal and founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffic...

By now, most people understand the power and the value of adding a social component to your customer relationship management strategy. Perhaps you're not yet ready to go to full social CRM, but you no doubt recognize that there is a lot of value in engaging with customers in the ways they want to engage. As social media become ever more omnipresent, you'll have no choice but to engage with customers through those channels...

Whether you're a user or whether you purposely ducked the invitations to join, you've probably discovered that Google+ is all but inescapable as a topic of conversation. Responses run the gamut from rejection to an all-in embrace of Google's new social media platform; users are trying to figure out the best ways to use it, pundits are trying to fi...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for good reason. It's a similar thing for social CRM. Wh...

A business that's succeeding at CRM (and that means the discipline of CRM, not the technology) will have come to some realizations. First off, even though the business no longer controls the conversation with the customer, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way.

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communities. The metaphor is almost perfectly realized f...

It's often said that CRM is always a work in progress. Never mind the fact that I'm the one who's often saying it -- it's true, if you're doing it right. You should always be looking for areas where you can coach your people, adjust your processes, and fine-tune your technology However, thinking about such a monumental set of factors can be extreme...

I have a friend who's a musician, author and former radio personality, and he likes Facebook. A lot. My newsfeed is clogged with his posts -- news from his life, comments about music and movies, photos of his travels, videos of songs, links to other people's articles. I don't think there's any possible way he could actually view or read all the th...

The idea of taking CRM into the field has been around for a decade -- long enough to lull many people into ignoring it in favor of newer, flashier and more social ideas. But this isn't the time to take your eye off mobile CRM. The technology is about to emerge as a force that will boost adoption, increase the abilities of field personnel, and do s...

This story was originally published on March 3, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps...

I've written several CRM Buyer Guides in the last four years, and the buying process I recommend hasn't really changed much. Unlike people who leap into the technology right at the outset, I always advocate a period of self-assessment for the company -- in other words, a thorough internal examination of how a business works and what the employees in the business do...

In long-distance navigation -- like in a boat or an airplane -- if you're going to make an error, it's better to make it later than to make it early on. A half-degree mistake can multiply itself into hundreds of miles over the course of a long voyage, but the same error made toward the end of the trip needs just a slight jog to set things right Tha...

"What's my motivation?" Sounds like a corny question an overwrought actor might pose to a director on the boards or in front of a camera. But we all have motivations -- and it's smart to understand your own and those of your vendor when it comes to CRM No one wakes up one morning and decides, "What my business really needs is a CRM solution." It's ...

My wife is a recruiter working in high technology. Recruiters are like every other profession: There are some bad ones, a bunch in the middle who are competent, and some who are truly excellent. I may be biased, but I think she falls into the latter category Here's why I think she's so good: She thinks of the managers she's hiring for as her custo...

I'll admit it -- I have a secret life. In addition to being a CRM reporter, I'm also a small businessman. A tiny businessman, in fact; my goofy, niche company grosses about US$5,000 a year. We make detail parts for scale model airplanes -- and while you can't get much more niche than that, you also can't find a better place to discover some CRM secrets that make a big difference...

Applications delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) are great. They allow businesses to scale their operations, reduce up-front costs, relieve themselves of tasks like backups and software updates, and speed up deployment of applications They're simple to implement (in most cases). But, oddly, I think the ease with which cloud-based CRM can be d...