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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...

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...

On an otherwise slow news week, I spotted a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia. The article was on Business Insider, and I found it interesting. The headline told the story, as good headlines often do. "What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP Do...

The big number always seems to be there. The big number is the amount of money the U.S. federal government invests in information technology. In constant dollars, that number has hovered slightly above or slightly below $80 billion per year since 2007, according to TechAmerica. That funding level is...

Results Software has rolled out the latest iteration of its longstanding CRM business suite product. In this version, it builds on its recent three-way integration with QuickBooks, Outlook and SmartVault. That integration with three applications widely used by small- and medium-sized companies is wh...

When the so-called experts dispense advice about CRM implementations, whether they're first-timers or replacements of old systems, they always include a caveat about the future. You need to solve today's problems with the new system, but you also need a way to "future-proof" your investment so that ...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." For the record, I am an ERP dilatant -- I know about it but don't follow it with the same passion that I follow CRM. And as far as SAP is concerned, I have ra...

You have probably transacted business with Paciolan at some point in your life, even if you don't recognize the name. Perhaps you did it just by purchasing event tickets. Paciolan is a 30-year-old, private-label vendor that powers ticket sales for college athletic games, professional sports and perf...

Marketers are embracing the need for customer intelligence to provide actionable insight to optimize revenue. But how do you get started? Treating what you have today as actionable insight enables marketers to think about using their existing data as customer intelligence, learn from it, and then in...

If you've been in this business any length of time, you've become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what's...

The CRM Idols have been announced. The goal of the contest was to identify the best corporate video developed by an up-and-coming CRM company. In the Americas, the winning firm is Get Satisfaction. In the EMEA region, it is BPMonline. The companies were chosen by popular vote of subject matter exper...

SAP has updated SAP Business One, rolling out its 8.82 iteration for both the on-premises and hosted versions. A point release, the upgrade cannot be said to be a major leap forward in terms of functionality, but it does offer solid enhancements to the application's bread-and-butter feature set, as ...

I like the saying, "Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude toward us." It's a nice quote, although it was uttered by John N. Mitchell, a convicted prevaricator who participated in the Watergate conspiracy and ended up in an Alabama prison as a result. Paraphrase it for business and it m...

A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog j...

Bank of America has decided to back off from a controversial fee that it announced in September: a $5 ding every month for consumers who use their debit cards to make a retail purchase. The plan had endured sustained consumer outrage since it was publicly revealed. Bank of America, which did not ret...