Articles by Louis Columbus

Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them Take that urgency you may have felt about wanting to catch up as quickly as possible, multiply it by the number of companies that use distribution channels, and you get a s...

With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there's a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I've seen a few financial services and insurance companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and reach out to their customers -- only to turn these strategies into yet another communication channel where they do all the talking and none of the listening...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social networking is making channel management more about wa...

There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the CRM industry....

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers I got to thinking about this after watching the movie"Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finch, who is supposed to be the key influencer of publi...

If you want to see who's winning at retaining and attaining higher-than-ever customer loyalty, look no further than what is really happening inside sales reps, call center reps, their managers, and for that matter, their CEO What is it? It's nothing on the outside -- while a new CRM system on a hosted platform helps, and the analytics application ...

There's no other series of business processes that are going through more of a transformation today and impacting customer relationships more than order management These series of processes have gone through multiple owners, first starting with IT, who adopted them as a quick way to achieve ERP (enterprise resource planning) system consolidation go...

While much has been written on how vendors can get the most out of their analyst relations strategies -- both in blogs and in my book -- little has been written about how technology buyers can maximize their use of advisory firms. Jim Zimmerman, in his blog, AnalystPerspectives, presents this issue in a well-written post It got me thinking about th...

Whenever I think of New Year's resolutions, one of Mark Twain's best quotes comes to mind: "A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time." Resolving to change is really what customer relationships and serving customers is all about. How many times has any company implementing CRM, or for that matter, ...

The coming year is going to reorder entire industries due to customer churn. With this reordering will be an entirely new set of selling dynamics, as existing ones prove marginally successful into 2007 The old "bundle three" rule for higher customer retention will prove no longer as effective as it once was. Pricing and promotional strategies wil...

Like many industry analysts and alumni, I find analytical concepts sexy. Add in creating strategies for serving customers more efficiently while being profitable at it, and the conditions are perfect for the creation of an Accidental Analyst The analytical side of CRM experienced explosive growth in 2006 because there are so many of us out there.

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of There's something missing in this year's forecasts, though, and the inflated performanc...

It's the catch-all department in many companies where top sales funnel activities like lead and demand generation are found, or lower sales funnel strategies including pre-sales support, pricing exceptions and team selling are found. It's team selling on enterprise-class ERP applications. It's also another word for a telemarketing staff. Defined by its functions more than its measures of performance, business development is, in many companies, the glue that connects customers and prospects with sales...

The best performing companies when it comes to customer-facing strategies actively attack the seven deadly sins of CRM with a vengeance. These observations come from their quantified success, and for certain publicly held companies, a rise in their Price/Earnings Ratio, stock price and valuation. From a limited sample, that correlation exists I'l...

The service revolution inCRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators look speedy It's time to abandon the entire "my featur...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's time? Probably not, and that relates to one of the re...

With the CRM vendor landscape going through so many changes today, it's an excellent time to check up and see what your vendor's viability is, what their future prospects look like, and especially for the best-of-breed vendors, what their exit strategy is, if they have one I have compiled some quick tips for completing a viability assessment and di...

For many manufacturers, indirect channels provide the majority of their revenue yet carry only a small percentage of their most profitable products. Instead, indirect channel partners opt to move literally tons of low-margin items, competing in the marketplace on price and availability alone. The electronic components industry is a case in point. When buyers have little opportunity to customize services or products, pricing and availability are all that matter...

Earlier this year I spent a couple weeks in Australia visiting subsidiaries. I was amazed to see how the seemingly smallest of processes Australian companies use to communicate internally have major implications globally. It's been tempting to create a maturity model that shows the wide gulf in organizations' maturity at transferring knowledge globally...

By definition Search Engine Marketing refers to both paid search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The former is based on a pay-per-click advertising model as companies bid on specific search terms or in the case of Google, AdWords, to get a more visible placement within search engine results. SEO refers to a series of Web site design processes by which companies tailor the content, keywords and messaging on a Web site to improve its rankings in search engines. SEO by nature requires a commitment on the part of companies to continually compete for top rankings in their chosen search areas. SEO is never a one-and-done proposition, but a continual re-fueling of sites with fresh content to keep its rankings up in search engines...