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The need for greater spending control in a tough economy, plus bulging inventories of best-of-breed apps, suggests that 2023 might be challenging for smaller CRM vendors.

Last week my good friends Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg opened up their online show, CRM Playaz, to an executive roundtable discussion with some of the movers and shakers in our CRM world. Unfailingly, each speaker espoused the centrality of the customer and visibility through 360 degrees of custom...

Salesforce has a genius way of putting people at ease and opening their minds before any of the company's representatives say a word about product. People who study neuropsychology point to the importance of ensuring that the audience's prefrontal cortexes are wide open and ready to transact ideas.

A little over 10 years ago, we were toasting social media as the great innovation that would enable CRM to traverse the mythical last mile between vendors and customers. Every analyst had something positive to say about social and its future role in CRM. I wrote a paper in 2004 forecasting that soci...

The Top 10 blogs on our top 20 list are written by people well known to CRM professionals. There's a reason for that: In order to understand and appreciate the discipline of CRM, you must be a person who values other people, and part of valuing people is being able to communicate with them. As a res...

Where does the discipline of CRM begin? We have a good idea where the software fits, but where does its impact end? With a sale? With a customer saying good things about your company to other customers? With a repeat purchase? And does CRM contribute to these events alone, or is there a web of other...

I have never been a big fan of the term "360-degree view of the customer," mostly because you never can have a complete view of your customers. It's simply impossible. Things happen that you don't capture in the data, as CRM guru Paul Greenberg has pointed out. They get divorced, their dog dies, the...

SAP has unveiled a new attempt to consolidate a group of about a dozen front office apps into a fully integrated CRM suite -- next year. How do you say "lipstick on a pig" in a non-derogatory way? Look, CRM is over 20 years old now. In the early days, the vendors scrambled to integrate their apps in...

Where does the discipline of CRM begin? We have a good idea where the software fits, but where does its impact end? With a sale? With a customer saying good things about your company to other customers? With a repeat purchase? And does CRM contribute to these events alone, or is there a web of other...

It gives some measure of the importance we give to AI that I went to two conferences last week and sat through two panel sessions on the subject. At CRM Evolution, I was part of the discussion in a breakfast session. At the Oracle CX show, executives involved in the adaptive intelligent applications...

There's something to be said for consistency. Baseball Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn hit over .300 19 years in a row. The swallows have returned to Mission San Juan Capistrano every year since 1812. Richard Belzer played Detective John Munch in nine different television series over 23 years. Doing things...

Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn for more than $26 billion has created quite a stir -- at least in my world. Ellen Levy reported that the deal can boast a number of superlatives if you look at it right: the largest sale of a consumer Internet company in history; the largest sale of an enterprise ...

Almost a decade ago, the first edition of this list was tough to compile. There simply weren't that many CRM blogs that were consistent (we set the annual minimum number of posts at a mere eight), vendor-agnostic and -- most important of all -- high quality. That number has increased over the years,...

Salesforce last week said it would invest $100 million in emerging sales force partners in Europe. The company previously announced a similar program for the Americas, and it hopes to discover valuable new companies and business solutions. Paul Greenberg and the team at CRM Idol have been doing the ...

The field of CRM bloggers is like the start of a marathon: There may be thousands of entrants, but there are only a few elite runners. Identifying them from the rest of the pack is not always easy -- especially as their enthusiasm for blogging waxes and wanes, or as they move into other formats, lik...

When you write regularly about CRM, you realize what a challenge it can be to keep a blog going. The same themes come up again and again, and the technology does not radically change from release to release. So being a great CRM blogger requires something else -- the ability to understand the always...

I'd like to say it's going to be a good year in CRM, and I firmly believe it, though I can't offer a single, all-encompassing reason for my optimism. There are plenty of small things that begin to add up, however -- in an earlier time, the metaphor might have been "straws in the wind." So what are t...

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny ti...

NetSuite bloomed this week, in part because of a very well-produced user meeting, SuiteWorld, held in San Jose. However, it also bloomed because there can no longer be any doubt that the market for ERP technology is turning to the cloud. What was once unthinkable -- that ERP could or would ever be d...

Has the emergence of social technology been faster than the rollout of other advanced technologies like CRM and ERP? If it has, why? I have recently been reading a dense technical book from 1990 with the improbable title -- for CRM -- "The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures -- Dynamics of Evolution an...