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Bizo, an online marketing provider that focuses specifically on the business segment, has introduced two new apps that refine its marketing reach. Bizo Company Targeting and Bizo CRM Retargeting are tightly integrated with Salesforce.com, although it is not necessary to be a Salesforce.com client to...

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...

As you read this, Dreamforce 2012 is underway and Marc Benioff is giving his keynote presentation. I've been in San Francisco since Monday and have watched the city -- especially near the Moscone Center -- swell like a pumpkin on a vine in late summer. If Salesforce's 70,000 registered attendees do...

Without a doubt, mobile CRM has become a must-have deployment in the B2C world. Expect that trend to move into the B2B community for similar reasons: The devices are becoming ever more equipped to serve multiple needs, and their uses can soothe a lot of pain points. B2B, more so than B2C, is highly ...

Aprimo has released its second app for Salesforce.com's AppExchange, called "Aprimo Service to Sales." It is an inbound marketing app with real-time interactive features. The first Aprimo app destined for the AppExchange was released in 2010. The newer app, however, is written on a different code b...

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...

I made a decision this week that pleased me and will drive some of my thinking about the CRM business well into next year. I opened up a contest called the WizKids Award. That might not seem like much and it might seem self-serving for me to write about it but maybe there's more. WizKids is an infor...

Want to extend your company's CRM presence in the mobile world easily and effortlessly? Vendors are lining up to help -- at least with the first part of that sentence. Sales, service and marketing are all categories in which vendors are actively rolling out products aimed at the mobile space. Whethe...

Sage North America has rolled out Sage Act 2013, a new iteration of its flagship application that has been enhanced with mobile, social and email marketing capabilities, as well as new smart task automation functionality. The focus is on contemporary trends of interest to SMBs, said Brandon Balsley,...

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...

Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed. In that vein, what could be seen as the first golden age o...

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...

There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses. While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than 15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority of them are in small businesses. That's a big opportunity for CRM ...