Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

Last year, I polled a group of respected CRM resellers to create a list spotlighting "forgotten features" -- tools and settings in CRM that many users overlook, even when they could bring great value to their businesses Some of them were defensive in nature -- for example, many implementations never set the security settings in CRM, making it possi...

Some things in life are fleeting -- the lifespan on the mayfly, the appearance of a rainbow, the pure white of the first snow of winter. Some things in your CRM system are fleeting too -- namely, the quality of your data. Did you know that every year, somewhere between 25 percent and 40 percent of your customer data ages out, goes out of date, or ...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. Then there's the idea of social CRM -- on a basic level, the inclusion of social media-generated data in the customer record -- which can help shift the way a business interacts with customers to a more intimate and effective le...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many. We don't like to envision ourselves as vulnerabl...

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs from their CRM application. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of workflows that introduce social media data or specific sales and marketing behaviors unique to the business...

Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses that market to them and those they patronize As a result, when I say I write about CRM, I'm often asked to explain what it is...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it so you can use it. That raises a question: How are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is good. It's the way you realize the value from ...

If you're a dedicated skeptic like I am, you probably know the way a psychic's cold read works. Start by asking a broad question that fits almost anyone -- like, "Have you lost someone you love?" Allow the mark to fill in the blanks, and then ask further leading questions based on information fed to you until the mark thinks you're actually communicating with a dead relative...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of salespeople. The sales manager held up a former employ...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRMfailure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percentof implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were notcoming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample wasimpossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction businesses had withthat generation of CRM...

The devil is in the details, the saying goes. When it comes to B2B selling, the dollars are also in the details That's something I learned many years ago while writing about the reseller channel. Back in 2000, the Internet caused significant disruptions of traditional reseller relationships, because many large technology vendors expected online sal...

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales organization in my company Which is just swell. The p...

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernstmade my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss).Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range ofcrimes against language, ranging from tortured grammar to made-up words to animpenetrable lexicon...

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball springtraining, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, aboutMoneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oakland Athletics GeneralManager Billy Beane used data --...

By now, common sense, the business media and practical experience have taught the lessons of multi-channel engagement for service. Businesses have come to realize that they need to provide service in whatever way their customers wish to receive it, whether it's through the phone, via chat or text, over email or through social media This is a reflec...

This story was originally published on Oct. 4, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy is that it requires left brain and right brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional"...

The social media era doesn't mean that more people can communicate than in the past. It means that more customers can communicate faster than ever before -- and customers always communicate more and faster when they're angry You'd think that this message would have been internalized by the nice people over at Facebook, which owns Instagram. Sadly, ...

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers'relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returningcustomers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? Thus, it makes sense to foster loyalty in these customers. The first phase ofthis comes in the form of your empl...

They don't call it the Christmas rush for nothing. December weekends see masses of customers crowding stores to buy gifts, and at peak times the salespeople can appear overwhelmed. Their objective is to check out as many customers as quickly as possible -- ring 'em up, bag their stuff and move to the next customer. It's a numbers game -- the faster you can move the customers out, the happier everyone is in the end...

As a callow youth, I enlisted in the Navy and found myself at sea aboard the USS Gray as a bosun's mate. That meant standing a lot of watch on the bridge, and being on the bridge meant knowing how to report positions of other things based on a 360-degree arc. The idea was to have a 360-degree view of what was out there -- primarily so we didn't ru...