Trends

As many as 80 percent of U.S. residents support frictionless payment methods and technologies, suggests a survey of 1,000 consumers Viewpost published this week. Among its other findings: Nearly 51 percent of survey participants were paid electronically through direct deposit; Eighty-three percen...

Membership in loyalty programs grew at 15 percent this year to total 3.8 billion, according to the recently published 2017 Colloquy Loyalty Census Report.

Eighty percent of participants in a recent Capgemini consumer survey said they would pay more for a better customer experience, and 9 percent were willing to pay up to 50 percent more. Researchers polled 3,300 customers of 125 companies in the utilities, consumer products, retail, retail banking, an...

So much is happening as we approach the end of Q2 -- our industry's busiest quarter by some measures. I'm flying around seeing things but not always able to comment from a middle seat on a red-eye. So this piece is an attempt to catch up and set some markers for the traditionally slower summer. I've...

FinancialForce held its first big time user conference in Las Vegas last week, headlined by new CEO Tod Nielsen. The company seems to be telling us that it is adjusting course in an effort to create a new category aligned with enterprise resource planning, but very much for this century. The key con...

A good motto for modern marketing would be, "When in doubt, check the data." Perhaps an even better one would be, "When not in doubt, check the data to see if you should be." There's never been a time when we've had such an ability to compile, collate, analyze and understand marketing data. As busin...

"There are groups within companies that don't want to interact with a full-blown CRM application," said John Oechsle, president and CEO of Swiftpage. "They want it running in the background, but they want to access it based on the functions they want it to perform. These small purpose-built apps are...

More than 80 percent of high-growth sales organizations use five or more sales technologies, suggests a recent online survey of 400 companies. Velocify and the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals partnered on the research and released their findings on Tuesday. The average number of s...

For several years now, Salesforce has built distinct product lines that all work off the same platform and can integrate in interesting ways. There are product lines for the enterprise, small and mid-sized businesses, business-to-business firms and business-to-consumer operations -- and probably som...

While sitting in the audience at Zuora's recent Subscribed event, I couldn't help contemplate the meaning and progress of what was once a set of words that didn't roll off the tongue. I am talking about the "subscription economy" -- and it's really something. The data coming in from a variety of sou...

Ask salespeople and they'll tell you: They don't have enough time in the day to sell. That's not because the laws of physics cause salespeople to move through time faster than the rest of us -- it's because salespeople are pulled in many directions over the course of a day, cutting into their sellin...

A lot happens in a decade. Bill Gates once said that we overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10. 2017 is a particularly good time to stop paddling and look back at what's been going on in the last decade. While we will all have our favorite memories, there's o...

I don't know why more subscription vendors don't do this. Subscription companies collect mountains of data from their customers, and analyzing the aggregations can deliver profound insights virtually for free. Yet too often, subscribers are reluctant to let their data be stripped of identifying char...

E-commerce brings together several themes that relate to our current fascination with artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots, mobile technology and the like. It's actually more than that, because it represents an underserved part of CRM. Until fairly recently, there were few tools that reta...