Articles by Denis

I was at a Salesforce analyst briefing the other day. Most of it was under NDA but I had an insight that many of you may have already had and I want to share it 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 -- though they have one of the more pronounced strategies ...

Newsletters have become popular over the last few years; and especially over the past year during you-know-what when face-to-face meetings were taboo. Many companies are trying to figure out how to best leverage them, and new software platforms make it increasingly easy to produce one or more For instance, HubSpot, a CRM company based in the Boston...

I saw a report the other day about the future of commerce that made me smile It was unambiguously positive of the future of digital commerce and did its best to nail the brick-and-mortar coffin. The change had already occurred, it's time to mop up, the report implied.

As we slowly climb out of the Covid anis horribilis, advocates of the new normal (whatever that is) may wish to temper their prognostications about working from home or working from anywhere While those are good ideas, and the new crop of CRM apps that support such hybrid work lives are genuinely cool, they might only demonstrate the deep functiona...

Capturing return on investment on new software has never been more important than right now -- and never has it been harder to identify In the old days you could identify weak spots in your business and purchase software systems designed to eliminate or at least to significantly reduce those liabilities....

People frequently ask me what's next in CRM. I have a lot of knowledge because I attend a lot of vendor briefings, so it's a fair question, but my understanding is highly imperfect because what's next is a moving target. I'm better at declaring what might happen in five years than what will happen this year The next thing in CRM is often thought to...

Zoho might have had it as close to right as possible a couple of years ago when they named their flagship product Zoho One and called it the operating system for business Over more than 20 years, we've watched as CRM evolved from a collection of disparate front office apps to a suite, and then to a platform for building, maintaining, and most impor...

The minor trend I began noticing over the last week or so is budding optimism about the future. COVID-19 cases and deaths are in decline, financial indicators are decent and trending up, and forecasters are predicting a booming economy. The Federal Reserve anticipates a 4.5 percent growth rate, while Goldman Sachs says it sees growth at more like 6.8 percent...

Last week Salesforce made it official, coming back to the office will be a fluid thing -- and why not? The company has arguably done more in the last year to build systems such as Salesforce Anywhere and Work.com that enable workers -- at least a kind of knowledge worker -- to work from anywhere In the last few weeks, we've also seen the debut of a...

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th-century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise, and it became just another big company Then came the chal...

One of the many disappointments we've seen in handling the COVID-19 crisis has been how cloud software companies have been almost shut out of participating in providing solutions. In some ways it's to be expected because databases and wet chemistry aren't a natural fit, but still Early in the crisis vendors like Salesforce and Zoho began offering t...

Marketing and loyalty have a lot in common, and not just what you think Loyalty programs have traditionally been both the target of marketing campaigns and a form of marketing in themselves. But the comparison I see goes deeper. Both marketing and loyalty had delayed starts in the CRM world, and both exhibited traits of confusion among those charge...

Since the 1970s there's been a steady decline in the number of free-standing relational database companies until only Oracle remains. Familiar names like Sybase, Ingres, Informix, MySQL, SQL Server and others are either out of business or have been acquired So, it would be reasonable to believe that the database market has commoditized, and that on...

This might be a big year for CRM. I say might because I am not clairvoyant, and humility is on the resolutions list As I see it, CRM has gone through five 5-year cycles. All numbers are approximate, but they go like this:...

I had a delightful conversation last week with Thomas Wieberneit, Marshall Lager, and Ralf Korb on CRMKonvos. These CRM Gurus and I were talking about the future of CRM and some of my recent research when the topic of value pricing came up I didn't have a strong opinion about value pricing, in fact I haven't thought about it a lot. It's the idea th...

The front office is moving out the front door and into the world. Actually, it's exiting via the Internet, the windows, side doors -- and even the smokestack -- to form the basis of what will be the next normal, or whatever future historians want to call it. For a while, when we were just dabbling with mobility and social media, we could ignore all that -- but no more...

When a tech company gets big enough, you can predict that some of its brainy and talented members will form a rock band. They'll play at company events like user meetings, and these days, it is just a formality. A culture that moves fast and innovates to cause disruptive innovation is pure rock'n'roll To the best of my knowledge, Salesforce doesn't...

It is often said that only a poor workman blames his tools and only an inferior vendor blames the customer for their troubles with a product. But there's been a rolling mishap in CRM that I've been watching for 20 years. As someone who had another career selling and marketing technology products, I feel qualified to make some counterintuitive observations about CRM...

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. On hand to discuss the future of CRM were: ...

Throughout the early fall, analysts have been treated to a continuous stream of announcements from the CRM community, especially Salesforce and Oracle. New product availability belies the facts on the ground of an economy hobbled by a pandemic. It's a gusher of good technology intended for a market eager to snap it up. That said, I am not sure about the market and we might be looking at a technology glut...