Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

If you're in business, you're going to face a customer relationship issue that's your fault. It happens. We're human -- and though we may strive for perfection, the best we can do is get close to that goal When your business errs, the first people who are likely to hear it are your customer service reps -- or in certain situations, your sales reps,...

"Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them." Mitch Lieberman, managing partner at DRI and an all-around bright thinker, first said this around 2009. He wasn't trying to smash anyone's illusions about the value of CRM. He was trying to reset business' thinking back to reality abo...

The Top 20 CRM Blogs of 2013, Part 1: Greenberg Through Rampen It's no easy feat keeping a good CRM blog going, but I've been keeping track since 2007 of those that succeed....

When you write regularly about CRM, you realize what a challenge it can be to keep a blog going. The same themes come up again and again, and the technology does not radically change from release to release. So being a great CRM blogger requires something else -- the ability to understand the always-fascinating human behaviors that CRM is supposed to document, analyze and influence...

This story was originally published on Oct. 18, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series One of the phrases CRM vendors love to toss around these days is this saw: "CRM makes every employee a salesperson." I'm sure the VP of sales loves this vision, in which he suddenly is served by a quadrupled or quintupled number ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 29, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction...

Companies that sell direct have it easy. They have control over hiring their salespeople, control over marketing messages, and control over service and support. There's only one entity to blame if the buyer's unhappy, and that's the seller. When you mix in an indirect channel, however, things get a little more difficult. Now a third party has an i...

Technology and social media give businesses new ways to interact with customers, to build stronger and longer-lasting relationships, and to create two-way conversations that lead to better products and happier people at both ends of the conversation They also allow dumb businesses to expose their incompetence faster and to a wider audience than eve...

The buyer-seller relationship we most often think of is one in which all the responsibility is loaded on the seller. The seller convinces the customer to buy from it, then provides support and further marketing to keep the customer loyal Not every selling relationship works this way, however. When both ends of the sale have a responsibility, things...

There's always a lot to digest after Salesforce.com's annual bacchanalia, Dreamforce, which drew 135,000 registrants this year. Some of it is about Salesforce's announcements, but a lot more of it is about the implications of those announcements, the people who attend, and what goes on around the show. Here are a few things that stood out to me.

There's one thing in the post-industrial world that's never affected by economic slowdowns, changes in customer preferences, or technological advances. In fact, production of this commodity seems to pick up when there are disruptions, and each year an increasing quantity is produced, regardless of market forces I'm talking about jargon. It used to ...

CRM technology often gets blamed for the failure of customer initiatives -- and sometimes it's deserved. In many cases, though, the technology works exactly as advertised -- as far as technology can work. Still, CRM is a discipline, not a technology -- the technology merely helps business scale up the discipline. For that reason, the people and th...

CRM technology is all about collecting data -- which means it should go hand-in-hand with the trend toward increased use of analytics. Often, though, what is analyzed is not what's important. In CRM, many of the most useful and most compelling data are hiding in plain sight, but businesses are looking elsewhere, toward measurements of sales and ma...

One of the phrases CRM vendors love to toss around these days is this saw: "CRM makes every employee a salesperson." I'm sure the VP of sales loves this vision, in which he suddenly is served by a quadrupled or quintupled number of salespeople, many of whom he doesn't have to manage and to whom he doesn't have to pay commission The idea is a canard...

If you talk to any sales consultant -- or marketing consultant, for that matter -- you'll probably get an earful of comments laden with the jargon of "sales-marketing misalignment." To the layperson -- or business person who refrains from paying for expensive consultants -- all this means is the ongoing conflict between sales and marketing, the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with your customers better; it will make relationships among people in your company who connect with customers better...

This story was originally published on June 14, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Building a customer relationship -- the kind that lasts a long time -- is a not an easy thing. There are lots of occasions where things can go awry, touch points where signals can get crossed and communications that can unwitti...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence of events that can end very badly The same is tr...

Before they call or have a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, smart salespeople check the CRM system to see what the customer record says about that person or that business. That's what CRM is there for, from a sales perspective: to give sales the background information it needs to have the best chance at closing a sale. However, the picture of...

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. Customer retention isn't flashy, and it doesn't earn extra pats on the back from executives or big promotions -- which is a shame, because it's usually more profitable...