Articles by Denis Pombriant

This year we traded in terminologies going from big data and analytics to digital disruption as the market-moving meme. I am not sure either one hits the spot, but they give me something to write about. Other things happened in 2015 too, but I'm just going to focus here It seems to me we focus on the symptoms and not the root causes too often in th...

The end of the year brings out some interesting goodies from various workshops competing with Santa for big kids' attention. Some of it is pretty good stuff. Here's a sampling of the best end-of-year product announcements from the cloud community designed to put you in the post-holiday, already-back-at-work spirit....

Lost somewhere in the pile of a current research project is an article on customer loyalty reporting that more than half of customers who recently exhibited loyal behavior toward a vendor said they'd switch to another vendor in an instant The question prompting this answer is whether these customers would switch for a better deal. It was a trick qu...

Maybe you've already considered this, but it just popped into my head the other day as I was thinking once again about customer experience -- or CX, as some people shorten it. I've often said that customers experience moments of truth and that the experience should be focused on the things they care most about and that the business actually can do something about...

For once,Oracle OpenWorld went long on substance. That's hard to do when you have so many products to discuss and Larry Ellison pontificating, but he was both under control and substantive -- though he couldn't resist taking a few shots at competitors Oracle's team hardly ever sees SAP and IBM in deals these days, he announced, and he gave due prai...

Partner relationship management, or PRM, has seen its ups and downs over the first part of this century Running an indirect channel is vitally important to any vendor trying to extend its reach without incurring the high costs of building up a sales team and all that supports it. Many vendors figure it's more economical to pay partners for performa...

Salesforce last week said it would invest US$100 million in emerging sales force partners in Europe. The company previously announced a similar program for the Americas, and it hopes to discover valuable new companies and business solutions Paul Greenberg and the team atCRM Idol (of which I have been a part) have been doing the same thing -- trying...

I've had to do a lot of thinking about customer loyalty lately, both for my book and more recently for client engagements What's interesting is how chaotic this market is and how many people are writing about it with very little data. There isn't even strong agreement on the similarities and differences between rewards programs and loyalty. Are the...

eGain is touting a report from Forrester Consulting and my friend Ian Jacobs purporting to show that omnichannel customer service is stagnant or worse when it comes to delivering service that customers need and want Ian does good work and I am in agreement with him on this, but I have trouble with some conclusions, specifically the implication that...

I'm always looking for emerging trends at Dreamforce, the kinds of things that are hiding in plain sight. They might never amount to much, but it's more likely, given that it's Dreamforce, that many of them will bloom. A case in point is the emergence of vertical market CRM. Its time is now because application development tools have become so good...

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, the booths on the Dreamforce show floor were little more than outposts for widget-makers. Fast-forward to Dreamforce 2015, and one is struck by the number, variety, and size of the partner community.That's only part of the story, though. Often out of sight is the sizable display of talent that has consolidated around Salesforce from other industry sources...

I couldn't put my finger on it, but for a long time I have been uneasy about the selling discussion's direction as it relates to CRM and SFA. Something didn't relate. We talk a lot about accelerating the sales process and freeing up sales people's time so that they can spend more time selling, but it all made me wonder. Several things occurred to ...

We've watched as Salesforce emerged from the crowd in the dot-com era to become a massive company with a US$7 billion run rate. We also have changed perspectives several times on what to expect from Dreamforce. Not so long ago, we were (OK, I was) interested mostly in cool new technologies and business models, but as Salesforce has grown, it has a...

You might ask what the difference is between personalization and authenticity in CRM, and the answer is subtle. For a long time I have felt -- and said -- that we overemphasize personalization when what customers really want is authenticity. However, examples are hard to find, especially with our current culture's strong emphasis on personalization and the tendency to give authenticity quizzical looks. Perhaps you are feeling quizzical right now...

I recently talked with Bonnie Crater about changing her company's name, and something really struck home. Crater is CEO of Full Circle Insights, and I've known her since her days as an executive at Salesforce. I have followed her startup's progress almost since day one. If you don't know, Full Circle Insights previously was known as "Full Circle C...

Microsoft earlier this week announced that it has bought FantasySalesTeam, a sales gamification platform. The intent of the product is to boost sales productivity. The gaming part is designed after some aspects of fantasy sports leagues in which participants build a team from known professional athletes and try to beat other teams. The team aspect makes everyone more competitive, and the goal is to improve everyone's performance...

Spreadsheets suffered a body blow on Tuesday, when Salesforce announced new platform functionality. Soon all spreadsheets will be good for is financial analysis. This sounds funny, because the spreadsheet for several decades has been the unofficial IT prototyping tool. Actually, it was the end-users' prototyping tool -- the default thing they used...

I've been looking at process as the next big thing in CRM for a while. It only makes sense, for several reasons. First, as we move to conducting increasing amounts of business online, we lose the intimacy of personal contact between vendor personnel and customers. In its place we need accurate and authentic processes that treat customers in ways they appreciate...

Having meaningful work is one of the biggest challenges for many people at the bottom of the employment ladder. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell documented the multigenerational effect of meaningful work. The children of people who had meaningful work turned out to be more successful and advanced further in their careers than ch...

I've written many times about how conventional, premises-based ERP seems to be evaporating. CPQ -- configuration, pricing and quoting -- are business processes that illustrate the point. First, let's all agree that enterprise resource planning isn't going extinct as it evaporates -- it's too valuable -- but it is getting a haircut. Many of the fun...