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SAP has stepped up its analytics offerings with the launch of a family of industry-specific BusinessObjects applications, many of which were co-designed with users. SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott introduced the analytic offerings at DEMO Fall 2010 on Tuesday, joined by a slew of early adopter customers w...

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course...

FACT: 80 percent of leads generated by marketing are never contacted by a sales person. What a frightening statistic, and what an enormous waste of time, money and resources. "The problem is not that marketing departments are delivering such high numbers of leads that follow-up is impossible. And ...

Sage SalesLogix's OnTheGo is the first iteration of a new CRM application it developed with business partner Net@Work using a new cloud-based mobile platform. It is a new mobile paradigm for the company, said Dave Wallace, Sage SalesLogix director of product management. "The point is that the data i...

It had to happen sooner or later; the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is, yippee! With trends like social media -- or almost any trend -- we tend to over-imbue the idea or offering with our own expe...

If you're in the CRM industry, you may have a slightly skewed view of the world when it comes to CRM penetration. Many of my peers, when they hear about a company that still uses a home-brew system to manage sales, marketing and service, are aghast. With hundreds of applications out there and thousa...

Salesforce.com has announced it is making its social tool Chatter available for mobile devices within the next several months. Chatter is a real-time social collaboration application and platform for the enterprise, allowing employees to create profiles, and send feeds and status updates about proje...

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy ...

About the easiest way for companies to dip their toes into the social media waters is the blog. There are few technical burdens to setting them up, the time needed to create posts can flex with the workloads of the assigned writers, and they can become a conduit for customer conversations through th...

I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among ot...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

Salesforce.com is a top provider of CRM software in large part because its application is intuitive and easy to use and deploy. It is interesting, therefore, that many Salesforce.com users are opting for Salesforce.com Mobile because it is even easier and more intuitive to use than the desktop versi...

Social CRM has earned widespread appreciation as a real business tool. It's no longer an idea or a theory or a hunch. However, it's still a new idea, and many are approaching it with trepidation because its impact on the bottom line is not yet well understood. I don't believe there's a single set of...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

No self-respecting professional wants to be known as a paper pusher or bureaucrat, but it can be a hard label for them to avoid when they're managing projects. Projects create paper, or more specifically, they create documents. Whether those documents are paper or electronic, they can take on a life...