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As companies continue their search for the elusive "360-degree view" of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networks and other content providers about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales an...

CRM is a complex thing. It involves understanding your customers and your own business -- two difficult things to fully grasp under any circumstances -- and then using technology to convert that understanding into a positive impact on your business. Customers, and to a lesser extent your business, a...

The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I've discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend. Most of us don't th...

Its 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and Fred from the ABC call center is logging onto the company's metrics portal to find out his first call resolution and average handle time. He also has access to a complete set of other metrics that provide a composite view of his performance over the previous week...

The use of analytics in contact centers enables management to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, ...

Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don't do. You don't use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing t...

Last time, we explored how we can make IT more sustainable by improving data center energy use. Managing energy use is the most well-understood form of sustainability we have, but it is largely an internal form of sustainability practice. If we intend to make our businesses sustainable -- i.e., ab...

Seven months after Avaya closed its acquisition of Nortel and simultaneously released a road map for integrating the two product lines, Avaya has delivered on that plan. It is releasing a cornucopia of new and enhanced products that largely follow the promises Avaya made in January. "Most users on b...

Businesses will probably always have customers who want to place their orders by fax. When there are manual tasks involved in processing those orders, they can present a serious problem because companies may fall short in meeting expectations of the customers who place them. There is a fundamental c...

With the advent of technologies enabling buyers with increasing insight into the sellers' products and competitors, the traditional strategies of bringing qualified prospects to a closed deal require a new set of contemporary skills among sales staff. In September of 2009 research for "Sales Trainin...

If you've ever implemented a CRM application or trained to use one, you've undoubtedly noticed that there are an awful lot of features that you never touch. Some just aren't useful for your circumstances or for your particular vertical industry segment; some are overkill; some are just attempts by y...

The most popular concept of sustainability revolves around energy use, and while I have no issues with energy as an issue, I think in business the idea goes further -- all the way to products and customers. I will leave the last couple of ideas for another time and concentrate on energy today. Act...

Microsoft is set to release both the online and in-house versions of its new CRM package this fall. Along with the beta release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the company will be opening an app store for third-party developers called "Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace." That's according to a company a...

In an economy where automobiles are essential, information about car performance and cost is readily available. With a few computer keystrokes a prospective buyer shopping the "previously owned" car market can trace the history of a vehicle through multiple owners and across state lines. Now there i...

Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when th...