Trends

To many, the term "sales executive" conjures up images of five-star dinners and long afternoons on the golf course. But, as I'm sure any sales executive would tell you, the job entails more than simply schmoozing with clients and courting prospects. In reality, sales executives face enormous pressur...

CRM is a business tool. Lke any business tool, its objective is tied to money -- either making more of it through increased sales, or saving it through greater efficiency. Perhaps because CRM is rooted in sales force automation and hard sales, the customer's path through CRM has mirrored the custome...

Last week's doings at HP exposed a lot that few of us ever think about. The basic story is that board member Meg Whitman replaced recently minted CEO Leo Apotheker. The company's stock price has been floundering for a long time, and many people on and off the board had little confidence in the job...

Marketing automation is not science. It is a badly coined term that describes the automation of push marketing. The name is often associated with a class of cloud software that helps marketing become more efficient and effective. Marketing automation is simply software waiting for someone to app...

One of the great conundrums about CRM is the disconnect between its stated intention and what it's usually really used for. Theoretically, CRM is supposed to help businesses build better and longer-lasting relationships with customers. In actuality, it's usually used to simply manage customer data a...

Relationships are the lifeblood of any business. As a small business achieves the success of a growing network, the question often turns to how to choose the best system for managing the information captured across multiple devices, digital files and scribbled notes. A contact management systems or ...

There is a lot of hype around marketing automation, and it's for good reason. An effective marketing automation strategy and implementation can help drive more qualified leads, and therefore increase revenues and decrease sales cycle times. But many organizations fall into the trap of believing all ...

Social CRM has been contemplated and debated, defined and refined, cussed and discussed. These many years of excited conversation about what SCRM could do for businesses and what businesses need to do to make it a reality have created more questions than answers for many companies. That's created an...

The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That's not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last 10 years that rival this year's Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference, that was also ...

The Durbin Amendment is well-known throughout the financial services community thanks to extensive media analysis over the past year. Originally scheduled to take effect last month, the Durbin Amendment, an addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will now take effe...

I worked on an exercise in messaging for a CRM vendor this week, and it was both entertaining and frustrating at times. It was entertaining to hear smart people offer clever takes on what they do (and, perhaps more colorfully, what their competition does), but it was frustrating to realize that the ...

Of the nearly 6 million people who consider home their primary place of work, 2.8 million -- slightly more than 2 percent of the population -- are employed by someone else, not "self-employed," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When accounting for those working at least one day from home, the Te...

It's worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce -- the products announced -- as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist, and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters. Many people might look at the news coming out of Sa...

The project management office has provided well-documented value to many organizations. However, for some businesses, the benefits never materialize. Take a look at PMOs over the years, and you will see that many have restructured, dissolved, or constantly had to justify their existence during both ...

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk, and technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it. But one thing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said early on really stuck in my head. He...