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You could be forgiven if you thought Salesforce.com was done with announcements if you attended the soiree in New York last week, but if you thought that you'd also be wrong. Kendal Collins, CMO of Salesforce, told me that there will be another announcement on April 27 in San Francisco, and accordi...

While telecom operators provide a means for improved interpersonal communications, the operators themselves still have a long way to go to make communications with their customers more personal.

Salesforce.com has launched ChatterExchange, an app marketplace for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform it introduced earlier this year. It is built on "Cloud 2" -- the company's name for the next generation of cloud computing: social, collaborative, and capable of delivering real-time ac...

The old cliche is that CRM is supposed to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. I debate that -- I think it gives, at best, a couple of overlapping 270-degree views, and 30 degrees will always be hidden. However, that's all geometric digression. My real point is this: Having a 360-degree vie...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the un...

A good CRM system can prove invaluable to a small business trying to achieve its business goals. Once that growth starts to occur, though, a small business needs to consider how the CRM tool will scale to meet the new demand. A small business is ready to think about scaling up if its processes are b...

While telecom operators willingly spend hundreds of millions to upgrade facilities, it is not at all clear that these investments, with long-term paybacks, are the right ones to meet customer demand. In contrast, investment in a CRM tool such as predictive analytics is very modest but generates payb...

As the population ages, financial institutions and other service providers will have to learn to adapt their marketing approaches to appeal to a sector that has high disposable income and substantial spending power. In some cases, they will also have physical limitations that will impede online acti...

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half. Many things came...

Once a small business successfully implements a new CRM solution, the next challenge will be maintaining it. Cloud computing promises to make the implementation process less painful, and it should also lessen the burden of system maintenance for the small enterprise. Traditional CRM tools typically ...

Some companies have a "PMO of one," which means that instead of setting up a sophisticated project management office, they assign one person the task of establishing and enforcing common project management processes. This person often has to deal with a broad spectrum of project work being performe...

Marketing Asset Management is an emerging category of Digital Asset Management technology that has been developed exclusively for the marketing function. With a host of digital asset technology available, many generic DAM products lack workflow capabilities, dynamic collateral development, and the ...

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." CRM failures are very similar -- the ones that work do so for the same reasons, but those that go awry manifest a collection of diverse symptoms. CRM fails for a lot of reasons -- many of them traceable to...

I've recently been looking at a couple of applications that don't readily fit into the idea of conventional CRM but which are nonetheless valuable front-office tools that can make CRM a better purchase. They strike me as important additions to the front-office suite for sustainability reasons, too....