Articles by Denis

Some of the challenges that app companies face, especially cloud front- and back-office companies, include data location and security. A cloud business linked directly to end customers might not see this, but service providers like financial institutions and telcos, integrators, and independent software vendors (ISVs) experience this regularly. They are both the customers of and vendors to others of cloud services...

CloudWorld, Oracle's rebranded user conference, kicks off this week in Las Vegas. The venue change during Covid also changed the vibe of the conference that once dominated San Francisco, but it's for the best For years, accommodating everything Oracle had to say and do required shutting down streets and covering them with outdoor conference venues ...

Salesforce is reinventing itself. Again From the time of its inception, the company has marched to its own drummer, often alone, only to be pursued by so-called fast followers. The thinking was that fast following was almost as good as being the leader, but the slides at Dreamforce told a different story....

If you are reading this, you know Salesforce at least superficially. If you know the company just a little bit better, you know it is over twenty years old and practically singlehandedly invented cloud computing Other companies that get a shout out for being early to the cloud include Amazon, but they built and maintained their instance of cloud fo...

Oracle's recent acquisition of Cerner for north of $28 billion plus layoffs in the CX business tells a story. How you read that story might tell you a good deal about the future of the CRM/CX world -- and you don't want to get this wrong So, the buzz is that the company needed to find a billion bucks to kick into the Cerner purchase and the place t...

It's hard to see how Oracle's recent layoffs, especially those in the CX business would not benefit the larger CRM vendor space. There is nothing definitive here other than less spending and less labor chasing the same number of deals. Other vendors like Salesforce will naturally move to fill any vacuum created by the news The word news is importan...

Over the winter, in the (hopefully) waning days of the pandemic, we at Beagle Research did a study of selling. Oracle sponsored the study and it included responses from more than 500 sales professionals and their managers The responses gave us good insights into selling in the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. For example, quota attainment drop...

Software systems come and go Back in the day, they were tightly tied to the hardware and operating system in your data center, even to the point that each system had to be compiled for specific OS versions and the language it was written in....

My last piece took modern selling to task because experience tells me there's too much emphasis on lead generation and not nearly enough on doing things that result in closing deals The issue isn't CRM but rather how many of us work. For many, our short attention spans keep us from following through focusing more on lead development than on closin...

This reminds me of that old joke about the guy who couldn't make ice because he lost the recipe. Selling is something we humans have done since the species climbed down from the trees and onto the savannah I think of selling as fundamentally human because it involves assessing value and determining a fair trade of unlike things like bushels of whea...

The CRM vendor community seems to be trying to welcome us back to normalcy by priming the selling pump with new marketing tools. It makes sense. Marketing is the beginning of the pipeline that brings in revenue, so why not? One vendor with plenty to say is Zoho.  The company just announced Zoho Marketing Plus -- a suite of tools and integrations f...

My analyst life has an interesting ebb and flow, as do most professional lives, I believe. My most productive times are when I work head-down on a project, drilling into sometimes arcane aspects of the market. From that comes unique information that I share with clients first, then more generally later. Other times, I'm swimming in the general pool of CRM, explaining my research and learning from others...

For some reason, McKinsey & Company publishes a newsletter-report on weekends that I dutifully read when I should be watching sports or otherwise recreating. Call it a busman's holiday. They call it "The Week in Charts" with the nerdy subtitle, "All the Week's Data That's Fit to Visualize." I love it Recently they did a deep dive on supply-chain pl...

A long time ago, before CRM and very early in my sales career, someone pointed out that customers are at the bottom of the food chain. It was not a profound idea; we just kind of chuckled and moved on, but obviously, it has stuck with me Today, perhaps more than ever, we often think about customers, supply chains, and sustainability. So, it seems t...

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 recently conducted a study in which we asked over 500 experienced sellers about everything from lead quality to support in the form of resources and even their management. We were interested in understandin...

We're at an inflection point that affects almost all of us. Should we return to the office en mass? Continue working at home? Further develop a hybrid approach to working from anywhere? In a recent article, even Salesforce had changed its position on working away from the office and is now leaning towards calling people back. In fact, Salesforce ha...

When you consider a sphere, it's well understood in math and physics that surface area increases by the square of the radius while the volume increases by the cube. In other words, what's inside expands faster than what you see on the surface by a considerable amount That's a useful metaphor for what many businesses are bumping up against as they d...

Last time we examined a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that looked into the Great Retirement Clearly, from that report, I can see that there are two major job exits underway: the first, accelerated retirement among the 65 to 74 age cohort; and the other, the Great Resignation, in which people are leaving jobs in search of somethi...

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 case with the ongoing Great Resignation in which mill...

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 But there it was -- trying to get back to some kind of normal, even if by absorbing efforts at mitigating the pandemic into its product line. What is so interesting was how un-CRM-lik...