Trends

Gone in half the blink of an eye. Online customers, that is. Visitors are less likely to return to a site that is even 250 milliseconds slower than a competing site, according to Harry Shum, a Microsoft executive who led research and development efforts for the Bing search engine. That's an incremen...

Bringing a new product to market -- or even a new version of an existing product -- is not what it used to be. Back in the day your market was probably empty, a green field where you could find opportunity under a rock. Everybody needed what you had, and selling was relatively easy. Things don't sta...

Walmart customers who use the banking services provided inside the chain's stores are among the highest payers of fees -- especially overdraft fees -- in the U.S., an analysis of federal filings concluded. The five banks with the most Walmart branches reportedly ranked among the top 10 U.S. banks in...

Selling direct is a breeze -- kind of. You control everything -- you choose the salesperson, you provide the training, you establish the payment structure, and you decide on the marketing message used to reach customers, among other things. When you sell through the channel, howevr, things get compl...

There is a business problem that comes up in the life of every company, and these days it seems that a lot of companies face it at once. It's the question of how to transition from one business model to another without clobbering your current revenue flow. Even if a company's executives really want ...

Traditional knowledge management programs focus on distilling knowledge into systems of record, which end up being underutilized for a number of reasons, chief among them because they cannot contain the long tail of knowledge. Conversely, nowhere are successful KM programs as impactful as where they...

Although it's often mistakenly viewed as a technology, CRM is really a discipline -- and it's not a solo discipline, like a martial art or meditation. It's a team discipline, one in which every customer-facing employee can make a contribution. Whether those contributions are positive or negative dep...

Whenever the term "business intelligence" is bandied about, thoughts immediately turn to the customer. BI, it is thought, should allow you to learn things about the customer by correlation, inference and comparison. However, BI is a two-way street. In the course of using CRM -- which becomes the rep...

They say you must walk before you can run. It follows that you should crawl before you walk. In CRM, however, there are a lot of businesses that talk at great length about wanting to run even though they haven't mastered crawling yet. They battle with the same old problems: adoption issues; technolo...

Marketo put on an interesting show last week at Moscone West in San Francisco. Still basking in last year's IPO, the company attracted a large and diverse audience of marketers who wanted to learn about modern marketing automation, and it was a good opportunity to take stock of where marketing has b...

The mobile browser is not dead, exactly, but if it were an animal it might be on the endangered species list. Mobile users are spending more time using mobile apps and less and less time surfing the Web from their mobile devices, based on recent statistics from Flurry. Apps took up 86 percent of the...

After years of surprising the industry with its middling adoption, it appears that location-based mobile advertising is poised to come into its own. U.S. mobile local advertising revenues will reach $4.5 billion in 2014, up from $2.9 billion in 2013, according to BIA/Kelsey. Mobile local ad revenues...

You should check out The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT. It's a thoughtful analysis of the technology progression handed to us by Moore's Law and its effect on every aspect of our lives. Their thesis is pretty simple but also powerful. Early in the computer age, we...

The era of inbound marketing is upon us, but a great many businesses are fearful of it. Having worked as a magazine editor and a content marketer, I find the conversations very familiar: People who haven't written or who hate to write find many reasons not to, including some that make very little se...

After many years, I think I can boil down CRM to this: Vendors prepare for transactions but customers expect process. Of course, this demands elaboration and neither of these ideas is stationary. The desire for better processes evolves as customers and markets do, and transactions become more sophis...