Articles by Denis Pombriant

It occurred to me at Salesforce's Marketing Cloud event held last week in New York that CRM has come full circle in a fundamental way. I was never a fan of labels like "CRM 2.0" or "Social CRM" or whatever else came along, principally because those monikers didn't signify anything that was new in doing business. Certainly you could make a case tha...

If you read a lot, like me, you might notice almost daily there's a new study that contradicts some earlier research. Something causes cancer -- then it's good for you. You know the drill. What's going on here? Do we simply not know what our research is saying? Can nobody correctly interpret the data? None of this would mean much to CRM except tha...

Every innovation spawns its own set of issues. What happens when you have a lot of a good thing, like cloud computing? You might get a "Franken-cloud," as some vendors are calling it. Basically, a Franken-cloud is what happens when you have multiple cloud-based systems that need to share data and run processes in your business. As recently as a fe...

Zuora two weeks ago announced its first acquisition and a new product, Z-Insights. The acquired company, Frontleaf, will form the basis of Z-Insights. This marks an important moment for both Zuora and what it has called the "subscription economy." I've always been a fan of the subscription economy and feel that it has spawned a culture in which peo...

There is no better company to look at to get a sense of the future of technology in business and society than Zuora. This might surprise many people, because companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce might come to mind more readily. To one degree or another, those companies feature their products and services, which are very important, but Zuora talks about business models -- and today, that's even more important.

It is subtle, but in the spring conferences I see a pattern emerging around the importance of process. Admittedly, my analysis in this case is less than scientific, and I have no statistics to support my idea, but I my instinct says a trend toward process is beginning. Two conferences that support my contention include Xactly and Zuora, both of which are taking place this week in San Francisco...

Sage and Salesforce put on a lovefest on Tuesday to announce their partnership, in which Sage has developed Sage Life, a product to enable small companies to connect their customer, accounting, payroll and finance data into one system, accessible from any device, anywhere, according to the companies The wording leaves it unclear whether the custome...

The blogosphere lit up last week after it was disclosed on Bloomberg that Salesforce was working with unnamed bankers on a possible merger. Naturally, everyone automatically thought that Salesforce was in play, and my colleagues and I went into overdrive speculating about who the suitor might be, what the striking price would be, and whether it was a good idea to do the deal. The first two questions dominated the discussion...

Bill Clinton won the presidency with the mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," and I think CRM could borrow heavily from that pithy bit of logic. When in doubt, if you can check your preconceptions at the door and actually perceive the information in front of you, there's no telling what you can figure out Such is the case with the tired phrase "cust...

I recently praised Salesforce for having the smarts to not get into enterprise resource planning several years ago. It was a good decision, I thought, because there was no upside for them to invade such a well-established market -- better for them to focus on a blue ocean strategy in which they went after new applications. I think the market's evo...

Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified accounting system designed to limit a business' "losses" due to marketing...

You can tell when the economy is doing well, because instead of worrying about how you're going to make the next mortgage payment, you worry about the next disruption in business. It looks like the big worry on the horizon now is the digital disruption, a nice piece of alliteration designed to make you question your worth The "DD," as I'll call it,...

It came as a surprise when Keith Block, vice chairman of Salesforce, made an off-the-cuff remark about a Sage-Salesforce alliance at the Salesforce World Tour event held last week in Boston. Sage and Salesforce in February had announced they would work together, with Sage moving some of its undisclosed ERP applications to the Salesforce Cloud. However, the word didn't seem to spread, and it remained off my radar for nearly two months.

Oracle did some smart things at last week's Oracle Modern CX Conference and user meeting in Las Vegas. The company has been making strides in organizing its messaging and products around customer experience in the wake of its RightNow Technologies acquisition a few years ago. It's been taking on the CX mantra whole hog Today, Oracle CX spreads from...

It takes prodigious amounts of cash to launch a company these days and that's especially true when trying to insert a new idea into the collective consciousness. Salesforce spent well over US$100 million to convince us that SaaS CRM was real, Zuora has raised nearly twice that amount defining the subscription economy, and cloud ERP is following suit...

Self-service is generally considered a good thing, especially in CRM, where there has been significant investment in empowering people to take on more responsibility for provisioning service or making purchases. But it's not all great and there is some interesting blowback that is causing vendors to reconsider how their offerings work In sales, sel...

I was having dinner the other night with friends, telling them about some of the ideas in my book, Solve for the Customer. My friend, we'll call him Brian though it's a pseudonym, was interested in my emphasis on process and my belief that customer science has evolved from a general emphasis on process in business, especially in the back office Bri...

Transaction systems have all the fun but systems of record do all of the work; at least it seems that way. Maybe you've never thought of it this way but unless both kinds of systems are working well -- and working together -- your results will suffer Record systems can tell you what happened, but by themselves they don't bring in business. Transac...

Partner Relationship Management gives a lot of attention to the vendor and partner relationship, and it should. But it's worth remembering that as important as this relationship is, the one that really counts involves an end customer. So what does the end customer need from a channel partner that a PRM system can uniquely provide? Many of us think ...

Configure, price, quote software was once a barely thought about branch of CRM, falling under the heading of sales enablement. But lately, it's been getting a lot of attention from a familiar source, Salesforce.com. The question is, why?...