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Assistly, a SaaS customer service company, started out with the goal of helping its user base incorporate communications from all channels into the customer service hub. That means messages sent via social media, including tweets and Facebook posts, and even replies to routine transactional emails s...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

Maybe I'll take some heat for this, but I am trying to live by Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' ideas, especially concerning transparency. Let me digress already. Tapscott and Williams wrote a very good book called Wikinomics and followed it up with a better one, Macrowikinomics. As the titles...

For more than 15 years -- since the dawn of the Internet, really -- display advertising has held promise, but it has often underperformed with boring, static banner ads whose value diminished greatly as consumers became trained to ignore them. Today, innovative technologies are pumping new life into...

InsideView will be announcing several upgrades to its SaaS social sales and intelligence application in the coming weeks. Some of the changes, including social profile features, have already gone live. The company has been turning them on over the past month, as soon as they were developed, said Ral...

By this point in the evolution of e-commerce, most e-tailers know the benefits of live engagement. Website visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase when they have the support of a sales representative. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, interacting with a knowledgeable person in real...

As companies head out into the brave new post-recession world, the top two goals for marketers are organic revenue growth and margin growth. To help achieve these objectives, marketing budgets grew by an average of 4 percent for 2011. The crucial question, then, is this: How do CMOs invest that mar...

Xactly has updated its Express product, a sales compensation management application designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Xactly Express 2.2 comes with more ways for sales reps to customize their dashboards and more features for administrators to manage the information flow to the reps. Si...

By now, most people understand the power and the value of adding a social component to your CRM strategy. Perhaps you're not yet ready to go to full social CRM, but you no doubt recognize that there is a lot of value in engaging with customers in the ways they want to engage. As social media become ...

Someone recently commented on my post about curation. In part, the comment read, "Do you mean that it is the end result of the analytics phase, where relevant information on a specific topic is collected and acted upon?" The answer is yes and no, and I thought it would make a worthy topic to occupy...

On Sunday, July 10, Time Magazine posted a book review of sorts by Rana Foroohar. "Driven Off the Road by M.B.A.s" is really a riff on Bob Lutz's new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. Lutz should know something about his topic since he spent a 47-year c...

Oracle has released version 19 of its Oracle CRM On Demand application, providing upgrades that range from small, incremental changes to significant innovations. These include new cloud extensibility and mobile options; more access for sales reps via a new connected smartphone application that allow...

Whether you're a user or whether you purposely ducked the invitations to join, you've probably discovered that Google+ is all but inescapable as a topic of conversation. Responses run the gamut from rejection to an all-in embrace of Google's new social media platform; users are trying to figure ou...

We tend to think of social media as a property of CRM, and it is, but the story hardly stops there. Social media is changing the world beyond CRM too, and that's what makes it valuable. If being social were strictly about commerce, it might not be worth writing about. This week's Economist has a ...

What would you do if 100 people visited your website tomorrow and each wanted a different variety of your company's solution? Would you take that information and develop 100 new and unique brochures? No, that would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Now imagine that you can track where website visitors ...