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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.

StayinFront has been offering users mobile functionality for 10 years. However, its apps were not optimized for the latest generation of mobile devices, Ken Arbadji, vice president of North American sales, is quick to acknowledge -- such as the iPhone, iPad and Google Android devices. So, earlier th...

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...

Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Tele...

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...