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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...

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

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 ...

Responsys has beefed up its email marketing, social media, mobile and channel marketing Interact suite with a retargeting application for display ads. Generally speaking, ad retargeting refers to the ad strategy of showing ads to consumers who may have visited a website, lingered over a product or t...

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...

At the biggest Salesforce.com event to date, Dreamforce '11, vendors had ample opportunities to strut their stuff. In fact, more than 46,000 people -- many of them very socially engaged -- registered this year. "In less than a decade, Dreamforce has become the largest conference in the enterprise so...

The majority of salesforce automation software that is on the market and designed for small and medium-sized businesses has never fully felt quite right to users -- or for that matter, to JustEnough CEO Malcolm Buxton. "Many of those packages were designed from the larger corporate point of view, ev...

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 ...

The idea of taking CRM into the field has been around for a decade -- long enough to lull many people into ignoring it in favor of newer, flashier and more social ideas. But this isn't the time to take your eye off mobile CRM. The technology is about to emerge as a force that will boost adoption, in...