Thursday - May 1, 2008
While demand generation professionals consistently turn to a wide variety of direct marketing software and e-mail marketing tools in search of sales leads, current research by Aberdeen points to a significant spend associated with a more human element: outsourced B2B teleservices, provided by a large array of vendors offering different models of phone-based support by outside agencies. In fact, organizations spend 33 percent of their overall lead generation budget on such services, and 44 percent of Best-in-Class end-users do so, according to data collected by Aberdeen.
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Wednesday - April 23, 2008
It's official. With the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is now formally a player -- a big one -- in the online CRM space. The general availability release seems almost anticlimactic, given that so many of its features and functions are the same as those in Dynamics CRM 4.0.
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Tuesday - April 22, 2008
The big CRM news of the week was Salesforce.com's tie-up with Google to embed its CRM application in the search engine provider's productivity suite. Plenty in the industry were wowed by the development -- not all, though. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu can be counted among the latter.
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Monday - April 14, 2008
Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google Adwords.
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Thursday - March 27, 2008
As an executive at Callidus Software, Chris Cabrera was frustrated at the mid-market deals he often had to leave at the wayside. There were firms that basically could not afford Callidus' on-premise incentive compensation software, nor the integration and implementation costs that would accompany such an investment. So like many executives have done, he left his employer to form his own company.
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Wednesday - March 19, 2008
Microsoft Convergence is a very large show. Last week in Orlando, Fla., there were in excess of 9,500 people, most from outside of the United States, and by that measure alone it was a successful event. Convergence is one of Microsoft's chances to meet face to face with its partners and customers for the usual mix of training, new product announcements and the like.
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Tuesday - March 11, 2008
There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the CRM industry. It's clear that Google and Salesforce.com are moving quickly in the direction of integration at the XML level.
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Monday - February 25, 2008
Empowering sales forces with tools to work remotely has evolved dramatically since the first wave of smartphones hit the streets. Sales reps have grown adept at basic applications such as e-mail and Web browsing, but often still wait for an end-of-day laptop session to access their CRM system. Still, Best-in-Class organizations generally yield an adoption rate of over 60 percent for mobile CRM.
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Tuesday - February 19, 2008
RightNow has enhanced its retail industry-specific app with chat and feedback functionality -- changes that give users more outreach options to customers using self-service channels. "With this app, retailers can incorporate feedback into chat," said Susan Meriwether, VP of product marketing, "to make sure [the customer walks] away from an interaction happy with the service dispensed by the rep."
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Monday - February 18, 2008
Generate unleashed its latest on-demand business intelligence application, turning the new Version 3 into a virtual Sherlock Holmes of enterprise data. The latest enhancements include the g2 Toolbar that incorporates Generate gClick technology so users can scan any browser-driven page to extract contextual sales intelligence in seconds without having to log into Generate's g2 application.
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Thursday - January 31, 2008
Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that last-ditch save-the-sale intervention online.
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