Trends

Salesforce VP Lynne Zaledonis drives product marketing and sales enablement for Sales Cloud. In order to succeed in the age of the customer, companies need to understand that the new cloud, mobile and social world we find ourselves in "has produced trillions of pieces of customer data, and it's tota...

Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn for more than $26 billion has created quite a stir -- at least in my world. Ellen Levy reported that the deal can boast a number of superlatives if you look at it right: the largest sale of a consumer Internet company in history; the largest sale of an enterprise ...

Here are a few things to think about as you build a set of journey possibilities that will lead to a successful buying decision.

Oracle Vice President Des Cahill is the company's head CX evangelist. An expert in B2B software and marketing, Cahill has spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, helping companies develop, refine and tell their stories. One of the main CRM challenges businesses face today is adjusting to the era...

Salesforce held TrailheaDX last week -- its first event just for software developers. The company previously relied on special sessions at events such as Dreamforce to educate developers, but its declared intention to train up to 100 million of them in its Lightning development environment dictated ...

I start a lot of client engagements with a simple question: Who's the customer? It's amazing the answers that I get. Some people are really quite good. They know the customer's demographic and business or personal needs, and they focus on those things. Others don't even grasp the difference between ...

SugarCRM cofounder Clint Oram is one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar application. He currently serves as the company's CTO. The biggest CRM challenge right now is that "technology is changing the way customers work with companies," Oram said. "I want the company that I do busi...

In an era when technology is changing the ways people conduct every aspect of their lives, it's not a surprise that business leaders have come to depend on it as the lever that will elevate their sales and marketing performance to the next level. Productivity has increased in all aspects of busine...

Software vendors and their business customers have tried many things to increase customer loyalty, but they have been disappointed more often than not. Rewards, delight, and daily deals were good ideas to help spur customer loyalty. Unfortunately, they weren't enough to move the loyalty needle in to...

After two years of declining customer satisfaction, the telecommunications sector has halted the slide, according to the ACSI Telecommunications Report 2016, released Wednesday. There was a 1.9 percent gain -- to 70.1 on a 100-point scale -- in satisfaction with pay TV services, Internet service pro...

My friend and a partner at Wildcat Venture Partners, Bruce Cleveland, along with his associates, has come up with an idea that helps explain why some early-stage companies thrive and thus raise more capital, while others die on the vine. As a venture capitalist, he's always trying to figure this out...

If you love studying technology trends and imagining what they will do for your business, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you have a vision of how things will be, while many of those you need to partner with to achieve that vision still are trying to master the reality of today. Congratulat...

It has been 40 years since Bill Gates wrote his open letter to the software industry complaining that computer hobbyists were stealing his BASIC program. That was so long ago that Wikipedia has a picture of the source code for "Micro-Soft" BASIC on paper tape. A lot of things have changed since then...