Salesforce held its Dreamforce NYC on schedule in early December, which you might have missed because of other news like Omicron and the looming chaos of the holidays. What was so interesting was how un-CRM-like it was.

It's okay to give ourselves kudos for CRM's resiliency over the course of the pandemic. We did a heck of a job keeping most of the balls in the air. Oracle, Salesforce, and many other CRM vendors continued innovating for the pandemic, but they also began innovating systems for what happens afterward...

Sales managers and their managers have had to make peace with the reality that they might not be able to get reps to use technology. But methodology alone or with technology is a more-or-less lost cause. Fortunately, the technology has improved consistently over the last two decades. Even more fortu...

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

There are three levels of abstraction that we can study to derive benefit, and this is abundantly clear in CRM. First there's the object, a material product or service that is the thing we trade money for. Then there's the experience, see where I'm going? Lastly there's the concept.

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that in some ways defies description. For the CRM rank and file there were plenty of announcements and enhancements -- and for others some tantalizing views of what may be coming in future releases.

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company. Truth be told, the transition has been ongoing...

If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at...

A sales process is a set of protocols that an organization uses to conduct selling. One's process needs not be complex, many organizations settle on processes that have around seven steps. But a sales process that everyone in the organization adheres to is fundamental to that organization's success....

It isn't just the pandemic that's shifting society; other macro events add an important dimension and all of it influences the direction of CRM for the foreseeable future. But a key question looms: Are we still too close to these events to be able to make sensible predictions about how and where we...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...

First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at least those of us in the knowledge economy -- but there's a...

There may be two Salesforce seasons in a year -- the one we're finishing and one that happens just before Dreamforce. Roughly speaking, these seasons happen when the company disgorges a raft of new technologies both to update existing products and to bring forth new ones. This season covers a lot of...

It seems the digital disruption is being disrupted. If the original disruption was about leveraging company data to better understand customers and to meet them where they are, the new disruption depends on all that plus supporting worker efforts wherever their lifestyles take them.

A lot of time and treasure has already been spent on "going digital" with no clear understanding of what that should mean. But going digital should, at least in part, mean taking full responsibility for turning a business' mountain of customer data into usable information that advances the company m...

IT has not been simply about data processing for a long time. Recent data breaches show the increasing importance of things like encryption, automated database management, and taking security measures to safeguard vital data. All of that is necessary overhead that must be supported by CPU cycles. Th...

Various CRM vendors have been issuing interesting survey results from the pandemic that purport to show the "new normal" in full flower. Salesforce did so recently, and now Oracle is getting into the act. While the data generated from these and many other surveys is interesting, and drives much disc...

The big questions about reopening the global economy and what new moves portend are coming in for analysis. It's not yet clear what the new normal is -- and there are more than a few straws in the wind that suggest that fixing one problem might cause another. This entire discussion before us isn't r...

I've been writing about the importance of platform as a tool and as a strategy for a while -- and not only with regard to Salesforce. I'd say most CRM vendors have a platform story; others like Oracle and Zoho come up as examples all the time. The difference with Salesforce is that it's looking bey...