Sales

There are dozens of webinars, seminars, research reports, whitepapers, and blog postings on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Despite the endless flow of resources and suggestions, sales and marketing alignment continues to elude many organizations. Misalignment is often a byproduct of a...

Although Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu doesn't describe his company as the Wal-Mart of the software world, he would likely find the comparison apt. Some vendors stand out from their peers because they were the first to commercialize a particular application; some because they were the most successful in ev...

When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn't -- as one might assume in this economy -- mean it in a bad way. In January, the company acquired Centive, its primary competitor. In Februa...

Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down. Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Deman...

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowi...

SugarCRM has released Sugar 5.2, which packages some existing Web 2.0 features with new technologies. The company is also introducing Cloud Services -- a framework for developers to build links to third-party data sources such as LinkedIn or JigSaw. SugarCRM is no stranger to Web 2.0. It has made th...

Salesforce.com has announced its latest platform-to-platform integration -- this time with Google. Force.com for Google App Engine is a new set of tools and services that allows developers to build Web applications on App Engine that leverage the enterprise data that resides in Salesforce.com. "We b...

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features -- as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions. The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for...

Salesforce.com continues to push its cloud computing functionality into the enterprise, with the introduction of a new tool that allows users to harness the applications available on Force.com and apply them to corporate Web sites. Force.com Sites allows customers to run their Web sites in Salesforc...

Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them. Take that urgency you may have felt about wanting to catch up as quickly as possible, multiply it by the number of compan...

Last week NetSuite held a user group meeting in Boston for OpenAir, a company that they had bought earlier this year. OpenAir, if you don't know, provides an application for managing professional services engagements. When integrated with NetSuite's front and back office applications, the combinati...

All companies have similar problems, with one of the biggest being the ongoing challenge of growing their revenues. In today's declining economy, companies are seeking new ideas, new solutions, and proven advice to fight off competition and stay above water. The most successful organizations are not...

There is a near-universal desire among firms to link all aspects of their supply chain -- including the customer front end -- on one platform. However, there are relatively few applications on the market today that address that demand. ModusLink hopes to fill that void with its newly launched e-busi...

Two-year-old Demandbase has planted its own stake in the rapidly emerging next-gen lead generation and lead conversion space with the introduction this week of Demandbase. A Software as a Service platform, Demandbase Central consists of sales and marketing applications as well as a search, scoring a...

Some of your employees have a blog -- approved, of course -- as do some of your customers. In addition, your employees have been posting videos from the latest trade show on your Web site, as well as on some of your partner Web sites. Your latest project is the funneling of customer comments from yo...