Articles by Denis

Subscription companies face many of the same challenges that more conventional companies face, but the nature of these businesses puts an entirely different spin on the challenges. All companies have to acquire new customers, make products and price them attractively without leaving money on the table. Also, once a product is purchased, a company ...

A wave of change is now making its way through the front office with uneven results. CRM is moving from a data capture and retrieval solution to something that supports end-to-end processes -- and as with ERP, data analysis is helping to improve what once were purely manual processes The trick is in producing knowledge from data. Alone, data is us...

This story was originally published on Oct. 30, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. I go to a lot of conferences. Usually they're a combination of customer user group meetings and analyst days, and we all hear more or less detail about product futures, new functions and features, and policy rollouts....

I have written often about the connection between CRM and economics, almost as if one explains the other. While I still believe it in part, my thinking has evolved and become more nuanced over the last 15 years to the point that today I want to discuss my evolution Social science is for me the obvious metaphor for CRM, but which social science? Fo...

This is, I hope, the last time I drag out the "year of" phrase attached to anything significant unless it's the year of MY Tesla, and that's highly unlikely Curiously, subscriptions and platforms have grown up together, even though neither is yet a necessary or sufficient requisite of the other. ZipCar and its ilk don't have formal platforms and t...

There are some good reasons to consider platform's primacy in our thinking. Most vendors have some version of a platform that includes a hardware or infrastructure layer, middleware and applications. Most vendors have been at it for a while, so product sets are reasonably well configured and are in working order -- no slideware here....

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 they? First, the economy is looking better -- but t...

Once a year I write a post that tries to predict some of the big happenings of the year ahead. The success of these efforts relies on clear thinking and objectivity -- trying to figure out what will come to pass rather than what I want to see happen. It's hard, but thankfully no one ever checks up on me a year later First, let's take a look at th...

It is a quirk of the data-information-knowledge continuum that data perceived by one person might be seen as information by another. The same goes for information and knowledge -- the frame of reference is important. You might even say it's all relative, and I don't think you'd be wrong This conundrum is all brought into sharper relief by yet ano...

We are nearing year-end, and that means it's time for my annual year in review. This is not an attempt at a quantitative inventory -- just my assessment of things that happened that will matter in the long run. From my spot, it looks like marketing took a big step toward greater relevance in 2013, the importance of being a partner in an ecosyste...

The new customer era that we're all a part of accepts that the direct contact between a vendor and customer or potential customer is being augmented by non-human intermediaries like websites, software robots that triage customer issues, e-commerce systems, social media, and who knows what else. The good news in all of this indirectness is that cu...

OK, we survived Dreamforce and that has enabled us to limp home exhausted by all the information we accumulated and the parties we attended just in time for the holidays. I have a lot of thoughts about the show. If I try to share most of them, the result will be a stream-of-conscious rant that will make little sense, so some discipline is in order...

The story of this year's Dreamforce might best be told through the partner community and AppExchange, and that makes it a story about the platform. Appropriately enough, Salesforce teed up the platform topic in Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff's Tuesday keynote and the press conference immediately following it, where he announced Salesforce1 Salesforc...

I had an interesting conversation last week with Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, about a new report his company sponsored, "The State of Salesforce." This is the second year that Bluewolf has compiled this report. Researchers from MIT's Sloan School interviewed hundreds of Salesforce customers to learn about their attitudes, opinions and future...

I heard during my travels last week that Oracle had bought or at least announced its intention to buy configuration, price, and quote software company Big Machines. Just a few days earlier, it had bought content marketing startup Compendium This can't be good news -- and not for the reasons you think. I heard Big Machines only commanded US$400 mill...

I go to a lot of conferences. Usually they're a combination of customer user group meetings and analyst days, and we all hear more or less detail about product futures, new functions and features, and policy rollouts If you know how to look at these events, you can see a certain scene repeated: A customer meets an employee face to face for the firs...

There's a lot going on right now that bodes well for next year. It's amazing to even say this in October, but the evidence I've seen points to a busy new year. Companies are spending money on marketing and sales like they have not in the last several years. Venture capitalists are putting their capital to work, and some emerging companies are telling me they've taken money because it was offered and the valuations were good -- but not because they actually needed the cash...

A little while ago I wrote about New Coke and the time in the 1980s when Coca-Cola tried to change its formula (without much prompting from customers). As you may recall, especially if you were alive and drinking the stuff at the time, the customers didn't much like it They were miffed about the new taste, but probably more so over the way the com...

I took a trip in the Wayback machine last week when I attended DataWeek at the invitation of Dun & Bradstreet. As you might recall, D&B is a data company that collects copious amounts of information about individuals and firms and then sells it for use in filling out profiles for business purposes -- an oversimplification, but it will suffice. That data helps companies evaluate business risks -- to determine, for example, when to extend credit to an unknown entity. Companies happily subscribe to the service to help with decision-making...

The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld's third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I'd been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle's CRM strategy that resulted in the acquisitions of RightNow Technologies, ATG, Endeca, and other brands that the company spent billions on and consolidated into its CX operations...