Oracle's acquisition of health IT company Cerner could turn out to be pure genius. But right now, I see a Gumpian box of chocolates, and what I notice acutely are the missing jobs and resources in CX.

Some businesses are returning to the office and others continue working from anywhere or adopting hybrid strategies. All can benefit from the advantages of intelligent systems, and all of this is pointing to a paradigm shift once again led by CRM.

Software systems come and go. When is it time to re-evaluate your commitments in CRM and how do you know for sure? This simple quiz is based on my own market research for clients which I share with you to stimulate your thinking.

Sales and service are tightly related for the simple reason that they center on the newness of a category or product type and thus neophyte customers. When a product or its category are new it takes great effort to explain how something works and demonstrate the benefits.

Some of the technology that drives modern selling is really helpful, but too much seems aimed at scratching the itch of lead generation with no thought to what one does to process a lead.

Zoho Marketing Plus is an attempt to bring things back into focus so that SMBs can do the same things in marketing that larger companies do with more labor. You might call this the second democratization of information.

Research the Rand Corporation did for Salesforce paints a startling picture of how our industry -- actually our world -- is significantly underprepared for its digital future.

Recently McKinsey & Company did a deep dive on supply-chain planning -- which you might think is a long way from CRM -- but you might be surprised. The shocking finding to me, and the connection with CRM, is the statistic that 73 percent of respondents said that spreadsheets are their primary supply...

The customer version of sustainability requires that we capture scads of data about customers -- and today that means in an ethical and non-snooping way so that we'll have something to feed the monster we call AI.

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though. We did a study recently in which we asked over 500 experienced sellers about everything from lead quality to support in the form of resources and even their m...

The ongoing tech real estate boom shows vendors planting their flags in smaller cities where home prices are more affordable, and commuting is less a gladiatorial sport. Studies suggest that much of the higher salaries people command in big cities gets eaten up in housing costs, so moving to smaller...

Back in the day, never mind which one, software development was both easier and harder than it is now. The code you wrote was compiled and it ran. If you were a good programmer, you might have left comments in the code so that later developers could understand how the system was intended to work if ...

Today, we all need to be on platform-based CRM, and we need to become ninjas at platform-based application development and deployment. This especially goes for the newest tools on the platforms which include an array of analytics, machine learning, and voice assistants.

CRM has become big enough to generate a significant shadow. When an idea like putting customers in the center of our universe takes hold, we see ripple effects everywhere in the culture. Nobody wants to be in favor of something else. But other times, CRM gets blowback from new trends. Such is the ca...

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...

For those born after the mini-computer era (co-terminus with the original Star Trek), dilithium is the fuel used to power a warp core propulsion system needed for interstellar travel. Dilithium is both naturally occurring and rare, and when it melts, from overuse of the warp core, the starship is ba...

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 ...