Articles by Louis Columbus

In watching the continual battling of best-of-breed vendors for top position on CRM-related searches on Google, I decided to sign up for an AdWords account and see how this works. First, I am not a search engine optimization expert, not an AdWords expert, but having tracked many small companies I saw popping up in AdWords seemingly battling their competitors for space along the right side of Google search screens, I was curious...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within larger ERP companies of senior managers and directors considering making a run at their own companies...

A truly humbling experience is to give your first Webinar as an analyst. I remember it well; my voice projected the "deer in the headlights" image that we all try to hide but the world sees anyway. Giving a good Webinar is a natural talent for some, but for the rest of us it takes work and concentration I just had to write about this subject to s...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a marketing department that has a passion to execute and deliver results...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipelines The definition of a strong pipeline varies by ...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action Why This One Counts...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and having a platform to constantly bring value to them...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacturers. Web-based product introductions are the strategy of choice for many manufacturers trying to control the two most critical variables in the marketing mix: products and price...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have Many companies can easily list off these expectations of their customers in a rapid-fire litany yet have no idea how these expectations are prioritized and, wo...

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the innovation, therefore, entirely new markets get created as a result. What follows is market dominance, and just look at 3M, IBM, Microsoft and other global leaders, my students pointed out. Throw in the Apple iPod and case closed...

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's CRM business and the Boston Red Sox are just too strong to ignore. Add in the fact the Red Sox are the World Champions, in part due to acquiring talent, but more by making the team dynamic work, and the allegory is complete. With Oracle's big news this week, the rivalry between Oracle and SAP in CRM now compares to one of sport's all-time best rivalries, the New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox...

It's time to start giving your customers a seat at the development table. Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs are delivering results today, which is exemplified in the best practices of some the leaders in this concept Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberat...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they don't have blogs of their own. It's the tendency to ...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. They bring the voice of the customer into any company Con...

The lack of trust in the accuracy, frequency and depth of financial reporting processes in companies has spawned a sizeable industry that has trust at its cornerstone. Sarbanes-Oxley's pain is the outsourcer's gain, and in this strengthening reciprocal relationship between the need for U.S. publicly held corporations to comply with SOX on the one hand versus fixing antiquated and broken processes that drain profits on the other, many companies are coming down in the middle, doing them both at the same time and outsourcing it...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubles every two years. These chipmakers have continual...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation. On the other hand, there are those companies faced with real market saturation -- and their plummeting prices every day just underscore how impervious their markets are to price as their lone remaining differentiator...

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on me: BlackBerries are a baby boomer's PSP with business justification and reimbursable charges. Perfect!...

When it comes to measuring their customers' satisfaction, too many companies have settled into a comfortable rut of changing their approaches to get the results they want. It's like buying a treadmill with the mile counter sped up; if we all could perform at such accelerated levels, we'd all be Olympic-class sprinters and milers. Ironically the more critical renewal business is in a company, the greater the emphasis on inflating customer satisfaction metrics, and the greater the tendency to design research programs that deliver results expected. This doesn't happen overnight; it is a gradual slide into the bad habit of designing research to get the results you want...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketability of these applications in the open market, and second, the need to value intellectual property in their companies as manufacturing is moved offshore...