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At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss?...

The ire exhibited by consumers in the wake of Bank of America's recent announcement that it would impose a $5 monthly fee for using debit cards for retail purchases does not seem to have been a momentary flash -- at least, not based on findings in a survey by The Research Intelligence Group. Thirty ...

As a CRM journalist, I always enjoy talking to integrators (or resellers, or VARS, or partners, or whatever term they choose to describe themselves). It's always an interesting contrast to speaking with vendors. The discussion you have with a vendor is like taking an anatomy course; the discussion y...

I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing with it effectively. They've been content to watch and wait, hoping that ...

As customers become more digital, social and mobile, SMBs have significant opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through a differentiated customer experience, just like their enterprise competitors. However, those who are unwilling to invest in solutions that embrace the needs of ...

What's the ultimate goal of CRM? As much as I and others of my ilk might talk about the positive interactions, good feelings and peer-to-peer relationships that result when CRM is done well, they're just happy means to an end. The end is, and always will be, inflating the bottom line. While a lot of...

Let's be honest: Marketing has always been considered a little "soft" in the business world. That may be why CMOs have one of the shortest average tenures -- about two years -- of any corporate board member. Marketing's reputation comes from reporting on metrics like "impressions" and "brand awaren...

What struck me most last week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- beyond Oracle OpenWorld -- came out of meetings I had with CEOs of software companies situated south of Oracle on Route 101. The companies are all SaaS-based, and I promised not to spill the beans, so there will be no names -- yet...

Half of U.S. companies plan to invest more on IT resources in 2012 than in 2011, according to new research. In fact, 10 percent of the companies surveyed were planning an increase of 10 percent or greater; only one out of 10 planned to decrease spending next year. "Our survey shows that companies vi...

Yesware has gone to market with a new cloud-based email productivity application that is based on the simplest of concepts: Salespeople hate to waste time inputting data into their CRM systems. However, companies need that data salespeople hate to bother with. Ergo, a system that automatically input...

My friend Hank retired from the Coast Guard after a 20-year career, and now he's pursuing a second career of service as the executive director for the Alameda Food Bank, another truly worthy career path. During a recent party, we got to talking about work -- me about CRM, him about the food bank. As...

The long-simmering feud between Oracle and Salesforce.com leaped off the back burner into the open Tuesday, when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that Oracle head honcho Larry Ellison had canceled the keynote address that Benioff was scheduled to make Wednesday at OpenWorld, Oracle's annual confe...

Oracle is a big company, and that point gets driven home when you start to go in-depth on their products. At a show like OpenWorld, which is dedicated more or less to touching on every aspect of the business, you can quickly get out of your depth. Since the opening keynote on Sunday, the talk has b...

Thousands of people may visit your website every day, but only a fraction of them make it into your CRM system. What about those visitors who don't get captured by CRM? How do you count and relate to the vast universe of prospects you know nothing about, but who obviously have some reason to be in...

Bank of America may have hoped it could quietly slip a $5 fee past its customers. If so, it was woefully wrong. This week, the bank announced it would charge debit card customers a $5 monthly fee when they use their cards to purchase goods. The bank pointed to new financial regulations as a reason.