Strategy

The Dollars Are in the Details - and the Details Should Be in CRM
March 01, 2013

The devil is in the details, the saying goes. When it comes to B2B selling, the dollars are also in the details. That's something I learned many years ago while writing about the reseller channel. Back in 2000, the Internet caused significant disruptions of traditional reseller relationships, because many large technology vendors expected online sales to eliminate the need for resellers.

Secrets for Speeding CRM Time to Value
February 21, 2013

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership and the concept of return on investment. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value." The T2V test is simple.

Sage Made a Wise Decision
February 20, 2013

I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market.

Building Social Into the Customer Service and Support Infrastructure
February 19, 2013

Surprisingly, many customer service organizations have yet to put their toes in the water when it comes to social media engagement. In fact, fewer than half of them actively respond to consumer complaints via Twitter and other social media channels. For companies that do actively engage in social media for customer support purposes, the average response time is an estimated 24 hours.

Big Data for Marketing
February 13, 2013

The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. Sales and service evolved organically, making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available.

Context: Customer Data's Secret Sauce
January 31, 2013

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales organization in my company.

Is Your Storytelling Smothering Your Customer Relationships?
January 24, 2013

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernst made my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss). Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range of crimes against language, ranging from tortured grammar to made-up words to an impenetrable lexicon of jargon.

Reading the Signals: 5 CRM Lessons From Moneyball
January 17, 2013

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball spring training, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used data to build a competitive team.

Loyal Customers Are Not to Be Trifled With
December 13, 2012

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers' relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returning customers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? Thus, it makes sense to foster loyalty in these customers.

The Social, Mobile Challenge to Customer Service Consistency
October 19, 2012

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with it. I mean, who would hear about it, right?

Quit Trying to Control Your Customers
October 11, 2012

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly, to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about what journalists are looking for from the companies they cover. Usually, these are straightforward discussions -- journalists want access and they want honesty. They want to hear a good story.

Dreamforce: The Aftermath
September 26, 2012

t's over, Dreamforce that is, and I have gotten some needed sleep on the flight back to Boston. As I contemplate Dreamforce 2012 and its meaning, I have three observations. First, it was what I expected it to be. If you refer back to my post just before the show opened my expectations were more than met. You might wonder about the timing of that post but I was under NDA and unable to say much until then.

Dreamforce 2012: Revolution Is Out
September 20, 2012

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells -- this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal the epicenter of the CRM industry for a week. That give Salesforce a chance to make a serious splash.

CE: Our Next Great Customer-Focused Buzzword
September 07, 2012

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. But the ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almost impossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon. That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which often results in confusion over what they actually mean.

4 CRM Lessons to Apply as You Move to Social CRM
August 30, 2012

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era.

Sage Charts Its Course
August 22, 2012

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names, in many cases renaming them.

Mobile CRM: Cost Center or Profit Maker? Part 1
August 21, 2012

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Hasen is, and can so plainly see how easy it would be for Comcast to lighten some of its customers' suffering.

Injecting That Personal Touch Into SMB Communications
August 18, 2012

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with several benefits, like reducing cost of travel and enabling long-distance meetings.

Fixing Customer Complaints in a World Gone Social
August 16, 2012

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in all things, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fully embrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days. After all, if you work in service, you have customers coming at you through a wider variety of channels than ever before.

Chick-fil-A: Stop Trying to Control the Conversation
August 09, 2012

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run by people. And choosing wisely when elevating people to leadership positions is critical.