Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy often results in two realities: the one reflected...

Adoption is truly the CRM killer. If your employees won't use your CRM system, your investment is an utter waste However, the way many organizations look at adoption doesn't help matters. All too many adoption failures are attributed to the users -- those darned stubborn employees who can't be bothered to deal with change, even when it's for their ...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, social marketing, social service and a whole host of other social takes on key business functions...

CRM is not a technology; it's a discipline that encompasses people, processes and technology. How many times have you heard that truism? How many times have you heard it from a CRM vendor? Many times, I'd imagine -- but internalizing that concept is not as simple as it seems. Practicing a truly complete CRM approach is a company-wide endeavor. Impl...

One of the great things about CRM is that it allows you to discover who your best customers are -- and not just who the best ones are on a regular basis, but who are best over time. Knowing this allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts more precisely and ensure the loyalty of these customers over the long haul It also allows you to figu...

When CRM first came into being -- before it was even an acronym -- it was intended as a way to streamline and organize some very basic and essential processes and data. Those underlying features are still there today, and we take them for granted Once things like contact information, sales histories and call logging were arranged so that they made ...

The old cliche is that CRM is supposed to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. I debate that -- I think it gives, at best, a couple of overlapping 270-degree views, and 30 degrees will always be hidden. However, that's all geometric digression. My real point is this: Having a 360-degree view of your customers isn't worth a hill of beans u...

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important people, as they see it -- than they ever could in the past.

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." CRM failures are very similar -- the ones that work do so for the same reasons, but those that go awry manifest a collection of diverse symptoms, so that the term "CRM failure" is but a catch-all CRM fails for a lot of reasons -- all of them avoidable, an...

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." If you haven't heard that one multiple times, you aren't really in business. It's a truism -- and part of being a truism is that it's true, for the most part. When a new business strategy emerges, it can temporarily topple truisms -- but soon, they're back and as applicable as ever. That disruptive p...

Service is becoming perhaps the most important leg of CRM. It's not just me saying it -- it's many others, including Paul Greenberg, who literally wrote the book on CRM. With the economy in the state it's in, that makes sense; keeping the customers you already have has never been more important. However, service has some internal cultural hurdles to clear before it gets the respect it deserves. Luckily, technology and the customer landscape are both shifting in ways that will allow more companies to realize the value of service and give it the priority it has long deserved...

There's an adage in the CRM industry that every successful CRM implementation is customized in some way. That may not be as much of an absolute as it once was, with SaaS allowing smaller businesses to handle the basics of sales and marketing with what's already in their CRM solutions. But, in order to gain a true competitive advantage from CRM, your business needs to find ways to use it differently than your competitors do...

Had a meteor hit the Dulles Westin outside of Washington, D.C., two weeks ago, it would have set social CRM back 10 years. That meteor, in addition to melting a lot of snow, would have vaporized in a trice the vast majority of the world's serious thinkers on the topic of social CRM, gathered there for the BPT Partners' Social CRM Strategies for Business Seminar...

Although service is gaining in importance as the economy is forcing customer retention to the fore, sales has long been the dominant leg of the CRM stool. Many CRM efforts were spearheaded by sales, and in many organizations, the SFA functions of CRM software remain the only features that actually get used That said, sales pros continue to voice pr...

Businesses all over the world have made enormous investments in service -- both in people and in technology. The amount of thought dedicated to service is enormous, and the time spent trying to make service divisions more efficient is countless Guess what? Most of this money, time and effort has been wasted....

CRM systems are on a steep evolutionary slope, but marketing automation is evolving even more rapidly, spurred by a rash of innovative thinking and the SaaS delivery model. With the technology offering so much potential, integrating a crackerjack CRM system and an effective marketing automation solution seems like a surefire way to boost sales numbers...

As anyone familiar with CRM knows, adoption is the key to whether you live or die by your CRM solution. You can make detailed plans, do arduous research, negotiate great deals, execute a deployment plan flawlessly -- and then see it all go for naught when your users fail to use the system. The reasons users shy away from using CRM are many and var...

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differentiator. Worse yet was the service aspect of these...

Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. How do you stay in front? If you come from a traditional software background, your default answer is likely to be "new features." The addition of new features and function...

Those of us immersed in CRM take it for granted that people understand what the acronym stands for and what it really means -- the technology, people and processes that go into building stronger relationships with customers, or customer relationship management. Quite naturally, the people who sell, support and comment on CRM understand all of that. But do the intended users?...