Trends

The personality inventory known as the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" is premised on the idea that different people process information in different ways. Some people are verbal processors. Others are visual processors. Some people respond more strongly to images -- others to text. The most effective...

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of work...

The case for mobile CRM is an easy one to make. Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and the way most people work requires 24-7 accessibility. Also, not being tethered to a desktop to access customer records is a plus -- if not an outright necessity in some cases. For sales reps or anyone who interacts w...

Bloomberg has been embroiled in scandal since news broke last week that its reporters were using the company's corporate terminals to monitor its customers' activities. The story began to unravel when news surfaced that Goldman Sachs had confronted Bloomberg over the possibility that reporters were ...

There are two questions that emerging companies in the CRM space hear when they face the analysts: When are you going public? Why don't you build out a full CRM capability? The first question is easily and deftly handled by most executives, and it must be. An IPO has its own cadence, and the Securit...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is the way you realize the value fr...

It hit me last week while attending Oracle's Analyst World briefing. We met in a conference center on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores to learn about the company's latest developments in hardware and software, and to be briefed on its future road map. How extensive was it? Let's just say that my...

If you're a dedicated skeptic like I am, you probably know the way a psychic's cold read works. Start by asking a broad question that fits almost anyone -- like, "Have you lost someone you love?" Allow the mark to fill in the blanks, and then ask further leading questions based on information fed to...

Hoopla has debuted Game Center, a new sales performance module that uses contests to incentivise CRM software users. It typically works this way: A sales organization identifies a certain behavior or goal, such as prompting sales staff to make more cold calls or follow up with prospects. The module ...

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me. I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "...

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. By inc...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of sal...

Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their ...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a l...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...