Articles by Denis

Salesforce has a genius way of putting people at ease and opening their minds before any of the company's representatives say a word about product. People who study neuropsychology point to the importance of ensuring that the audience's prefrontal cortexes are wide open and ready to transact ideas. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain th...

Salesforce on Monday announced an all-stock deal to acquire analytics powerhouse Tableau Software. Under the deal Salesforce will pay 1.103 of its shares for one Tableau share. The deal is expected to finalize by the end of October, about a month before Dreamforce A number of questions arise from this deal. For instance, why do it at all? Why keep ...

Salesforce has used its Trailhead learning system to teach developers how to program on its Lightning platform for more than five years. The company last week completed its fourth highly successful TrailheaDX conference, which attracted 14,000 people to the Moscone Center in San Francisco There are plenty of good reasons for Salesforce to be in the...

The early news out of this week's Salesforce TrailheaDX conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center has focused on blockchain Many of us think of blockchain as the technology that prevents the counterfeiting of digital currencies like Bitcoin. However, so-called cryptocurrencies have hit the rocks recently, losing value or at least fluctuating wil...

For many years, one of the big concerns of the cloud software industry has been ensuring that the user experience was as good for enterprise software users as it was for consumers on big websites like Amazon. That has been a good motivator because today's apps on both desktops and mobile devices have seen major improvements That applies to today's ...

It's surprising that philanthropy as an industry has gotten by for so long without technology to improve its operations. That's changing, however. The cost of technology has dropped at the same time that philanthropic organizations have been discovering an acute need for it. Of the more than 1.5 million charitable organizations in the U.S., it's n...

It's not that Salesforce has introduced more artificial intelligence apps for its Einstein analytics tool set -- this time for financial services -- that's important. It's that the clear trend now emerging is that you can't really have an industry market solution-set without analytics tuned to the vertical There are at least two ways to do analytic...

Drop Tank is a small company in footprint -- it started with only 22 people -- but it has an outsized mission: to provide loyalty and discount programs to thousands of gasoline retailers. It has been decades since gas stations offered incentives to purchase their products. Last time, in the 1960s, retailers routinely would offer silverware, glassw...

CRM guru Esteban Kolsky and I did some primary research earlier this year, paid for by Zoho. We wanted to improve our understanding of what buyers of CRM systems were most interested in, and to discover their highest priorities. Our survey population was comprised of more than 200 highly qualified executives and managers (47 percent C-level) in co...

Kara Swisher gave a pretty good impression of a woman at her wits' end in The New York Times the other day over social media's part in recent killings, such as in Sri Lanka over the weekend and in New Zealand a few weeks ago Social media "has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check," she wrote. "These platforms give voice to eve...

There's a chicken-and-egg issue with digital disruption. Making decisions based on numbers instead of gut instinct is recognized to be a superior approach in many situations, but before you can get to decision making, people have to be able to use things like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Humans are not naturals when it comes to nu...

The other day Salesforce announced that it was integrating its philanthropic arm, the nonprofit Salesforce.org, into the larger organization, Salesforce.com. This makes a round trip for "the org" as it's sometimes called. At its founding, Salesforce built its 1-1-1 model of philanthropy -- donating 1 percent of its equity, product and employee time to communities around the world -- into its core business...

Customer relationship management keeps expanding, and some people might wonder why we never seem to get all the way to some mythical goal of perfection. One of the chief reasons is that the goal posts are moving away from us and always will be. This isn't some plot by the software companies to drive demand. From what I've seen, most companies simply try to keep up with demand with increasingly diverse products that meet real market needs...

A little over 10 years ago, we were toasting social media as the great innovation that would enable CRM to traverse the mythical last mile between vendors and customers. Every analyst had something positive to say about social and its future role in CRM. I wrote a paper in 2004 forecasting that social networking (there weren't yet products, really...

Mark Zuckerberg's most recent effort to change the conversation about Facebook seems like just another attempt at self-justification. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, he places the onus squarely on the shoulders of the government to do the right things by regulating how social media works "From what I've learned, I believe we need new regulation ...

You could not have picked a better place for a career in the last two decades than CRM. In one way or another it is the heart of the digital disruption (a term I have issues with), or the modernization of business. CRM was the first front office system to help organize significant staff doing important but far from routinized things for the busine...

CRM guru Samson Lee has a new idea about customer experience. I don't know that I agree with it, but Lee has a way of making you question your assumptions and possibly change your viewpoint. Lee describes extreme experience in his paper, "Replace Customer-Centricity with Extreme Experience," as the inevitable pain you have to go through to reach n...

Here we go again, right down the hype cycle and into new product land. In the last week, two major enterprise software companies, Oracle and Salesforce, announced customer data platform products. Oracle announced its product last week in Las Vegas at its Modern Customer Experience (MCX) event. This week, Salesforce announced that it is building a ...

Oracle held its Modern Customer Experience conference in Las Vegas this week, and it was eye-opening. This is the fourth MCX conference and an important milestone for a company that came to the cloud later than its competition. No doubt about it, Oracle has done much in a short time to develop and deploy its customer experience vision, so it is no...

Trying to do business without also having a modern CRM system is like walking around naked. You can do it, at least for a little while, but people will begin to think you're weird -- and the trouble is, those people are all potential customers. CRM is essential today because, despite our reverence for the free market, it's really more like free ma...