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SugarCon 2013: New Direction, Old Message April 10, 2013 
Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America. It seems to have worked, because even though New York is one of the most cosmopolitan of cities, I heard a lot of European languages in the corridors, and I met many people from countries across the Pacific.
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What's Driving Marketing's Renaissance? April 08, 2013 
Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a lot of emphasis on marketing.
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Salesforce Cranks Up Chatter for Social Intelligence April 05, 2013 
Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resources and identify experts, based on topics of interest.
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5 Things That Kill CRM ROI Dead April 05, 2013 
Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample was impossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction.
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Colosa Builds Better BPM Into SugarCRM April 04, 2013 
SugarCRM and Colosa are getting set to debut a new Sugar module based on a visual tool that lets users design business process workflows inside SugarCRM. They'll be able to control the way tasks get routed; track how long it takes to complete; and control which screens get displayed and their order. The module, ProcessMaker SugarCRM Edition, contains a full BMPN 2.0 designer and engine.
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Race Against the Machine April 03, 2013 
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, is short and to the point.
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Don't Rebuild Those Silos! March 28, 2013 
It's hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space.
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Convergence Tales March 27, 2013 
For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. The last step has been getting new enterprise products into the hands of users.
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Coremotives Has the Whole World in Its Plans March 25, 2013 
CoreMotives is a marketing automation platform that operates completely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Acquired by Silverpop about a year ago, CoreMotives remains a separate offering from its parent's flagship Engage platform, which features its own Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. CoreMotives has been tweaking its feature set and steadily globalizing its product line since the acquisition.
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Salesforce.com's New Mobile Chatter Expands the Conversation March 22, 2013 
Salesforce.com has rolled out the latest iteration of its Chatter app designed specifically for the mobile environment. "With this version, we are taking [it] to a new level, allowing users to really drill down into accounts and take many different types of actions while in the field," said Michael Peachy, senior director of solutions marketing at Salesforce.
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The Perils of Making Up Your Social Media Policy as You Go March 21, 2013 
Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, your mistakes are amplified and intensified by customers.
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Microsoft Dynamics Gets Major Overhaul March 19, 2013 
Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application.
With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "The key theme for the event is uniting business and IT," he said.
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KXEN's Predictive Offers Helps Agents Get Inside Customers' Heads March 18, 2013 
KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with the best recommendations for the customers they're speaking with in real time.
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Subscriptions, Social and CRM March 13, 2013 
"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.
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FirstRain Showers Sales Reps With Real-Time Intelligence March 12, 2013 
FirstRain has debuted FirstRain for Touch, an enterprise customer intelligence application built for the Salesforce Touch Platform. "What we did was create a component version of our application that was then easily dropped into the Salesforce.com Touch platform using their SDK," said Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain.
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Avaya's New CEM Platform Makes Everyone a Customer Agent March 11, 2013 
Avaya unveiled the latest iteration of its customer experience management platform last week, introducing new analytics functionality and a multichannel focus on communication. The new platform's big-picture mission is to foster holistic customer service -- an experience that will become a differentiator for that business, said Laura Bassett, director of product marketing for Avaya CEM and emerging applications.
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Enterprises to Show CRM the Money March 08, 2013 
CRM will be a top spending focus for enterprises this year and next, according to a Gartner report. What's more, CRM will be THE top spending focus -- edging past the behemoth category of enterprise resource planning -- based on a newly released survey of IT investment priorities for 2013 and 2014. Following CRM are ERP and office and personal productivity tools.
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Unlike Buzzwords, Relationships Will Always Be in Vogue March 07, 2013 
The jargon of an industry is a good indicator of where the mindset of that industry is at any particular moment. Think of terms like "the cloud," which are set upon by marketers and subverted to their ends until the meaning has been wrung from them. For many in IT, the cloud is a place that solves many of their routine problems, sight unseen.
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Let's Hear It for The Ecosystems! March 06, 2013 
Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? I mean it. The ecosystem -- and maybe not even social -- is the story of the last five years. While many of us have been talking up social, the ecosystems have been adding immeasurably to the customer experience.
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Demandbase Tech Targeting Trims B2B Marketing Waste March 04, 2013 
Demandbase has incorporated a new filter in its Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising platform. The filter, called "Technology Targeting," lets users target and personalize display ads based on the technology they use. In other words, users can now include the specific criteria of 'technologies used' as part of their campaign targeting requirements with the Demandbase platform.
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