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Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,...

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. There are still 6,600 main...

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least. Contact center managers have a never-ending desire to streamline operations to keep spending in check. If they're not focusing...

The chastening effect of the recession has many financial services firms taking a cautious view of future CRM investments. One reason is that these firms are husbanding their resources. Another is a growing awareness that investments in CRM by the financial sector have not been all that successful.

Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employe...

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages. The Black Swan is about uncertainty in the...

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.

In both the best and worst of economic times, worker productivity is a major management goal. Making sure that employees efficiently carry out their tasks is critical to the success of both government and business enterprises. First, of course, the workers have to show up. Keeping track of employee ...

Small businesses frequently rely on a haphazard assortment of tools to manage their CRM processes, such as email, contact managers and spreadsheets. However, such methods are usually not sustainable or scalable. "Their customer data ends up fragmented across 10 different applications and physical lo...

In research conducted among over 200 companies in 2008 for a reported titled "B2B TeleServices and Appointment-Setting: Less Risk, Less Reward?," Aberdeen Group found that end-user sales organizations relying primarily on external appointment-setting vendors for lead generation realized dramatically...

Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park. The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good ide...

Sales force automation -- nimble, lightweight and usually mobile -- seems to have little in common with its staid parent, enterprise resource planning. Until you consider this: After years of widespread adoption, SFA has also become mature. Yet the space is not remaining static. There have been chan...

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them. There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it, and I don't want to leave anythin...

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points a...