Trends

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with...

Last-click attribution assigns the entire value of a conversion to the last campaign the consumer clicked prior to converting. Naturally, last-click attribution favors campaigns that influence the lower-end of the funnel. In contrast, first-click attribution favors campaigns that influence earlier i...

It is not hard at all to find an example of a mobile B2C CRM app -- all one has to do is fire up the nearest smartphone. But B2B mobile CRM? That is a qualified yes -- assuming one is willing to limit one's thinking to salesforce automation as a B2B discipline. To be sure, there is a case to be made...

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly, to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about what journalists are looking for from the companies they cover. Usually, these are straightforward discussions -- journalists want access and th...

Showrooming enabled by the proliferation of smartphones has become the bane of brick-and-mortar retailers. Basically, consumers waltz into a local Best Buy or similar big box store, find the product they are thinking of buying and check it out. So far, so good, from the retailer's perspective -- onl...

Is your small business guilty as sin? Many small businesses are committing sales transgressions that hinder success and threaten to condemn them to eternal mediocrity in the market. The root of all these sins lies in a failure to adhere to the "commandment of commitment." To stay on the right path, ...

CRM is a mature software category with a decades-plus history of development and evolution. Still, one important problem remains unsolved: A lot of employees, especially sales staff, just can't be bothered with it. Corporate "solutions" have ranged from bribing to arm-twisting to appeals to corporat...

More companies than ever are seeking to understand project accounting costs as they realize that knowledge of this data impacts their bottom line and exposes areas where costs can be cut and profits can be made. By understanding project accounting costs, companies can discover financial problems wit...

Discover Bank is refunding approximately $200 million to more than 3.5 million customers under a joint enforcement action by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Discover will also pay a $14 million civil money penalty, with half going to the U.S. Treasury ...

To grow a business, you need leads. So how do you fill the funnel, especially if you're a small business that no one has heard of yet? Ten years ago, the formula was pretty simple. It was all about driving traffic to your website, getting people to fill out a form, and then following up with them us...

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells -- this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal the epicenter of the CRM industry for a week. That give Salesfor...

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference ready to kick off next week, there is little doubt the company has several new products ready to debut. Just in case, though, CEO Marc Benioff made sure the CRM world would be primed for the news. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch founder M...

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. But the ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almost impossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon. That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which often resul...

The billing function conjures up many images, few of them positive. Essential to success of your business, yet often a burden for most organizations independent of size or market, billing is seen as a necessary evil to collect cash and enable organizations to stay alive. Over the past few years, how...

Increasingly, CRM vendors -- and their customers -- are recognizing the value of applying mobile technologies to the self-service piece of a CRM operations. In response, more and more vendors are rolling out new applications for companies that wish to target this emerging, but rapidly growing, deman...