Articles by Denis Pombriant

I don't know how many old movies there are in which the good guys say, "You're surrounded, come out with your hands up!" Somehow being surrounded is a bad thing -- or at least it was -- until it became a hot trend in the back office. Let me explain Surrounding legacy systems, such as conventional ERP, is proving to be a good idea for a bunch of rea...

You might remember Garry Kasparov, the last chess grand master to beat a computer. That was about 20 years ago when he went up against Deep Blue, the IBM megaframe that is the direct ancestor of Jeopardy-winning Watson. A rematch between Deep Blue and Kasparov a year later did not go so well for the human -- and that was the end of an era. You mig...

Part of my new year routine has been ordering new business cards. In this electronic age, they are the only things I actually print, and I'm a writer! Well, actually, in a few weeks I'll publish a book, Solve for the Customer (SftC), in paperback, and the two are related. Printing cards requires a special diligence. The process is akin to carving ...

No, this is not an article about fracking -- drilling for gas and oil in shale. This is about "drilling down" into big data. We've been using the term for a long time and it provides a useful metaphor for data analysis. However, we've conditioned ourselves to think of drilling down only to a superficial degree, and that needs a rethink When data wa...

The continuing rollout of platform technology is bringing many applications together to support better, and in many cases new, business processes. Not long ago, it was nearly impossible for back-office people to know about what the front office was doing. In fact, it was hard for marketing and sales to know how they were affecting each other. With...

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds and business and finance columnist for The New Yorker, published an article in the magazine's Nov. 10, 2014, issue entitled, "Better All The Time." The piece connects the importance of culture-wide continuous incremental improvement using data and analytics -- what the Japanese call kaizen -- to business and employees...

CRM makes several promises to its users, including selling more or selling faster, resolving service issues faster or at least quickly, and generating more leads. If you do root cause analysis, however, you can quickly conclude that at least in some cases, you are looking through the wrong end of the telescope For instance, the best way to resolve ...

Several news stories have provided interesting insights into the Black Friday phenomenon and into customer behavior. The first story, from The New York Times, reports that sales slipped by 0.5 percent from the same period last year, despite sharp discounting and stores opening on Thanksgiving. Another story, also from the Times, shows how the Blac...

The idea of an omnipotent software platform and the evolution of customer science go hand in hand. Customer science is the upshot of my idea that we're in the process of converting from random acts of CRM in the front office to a more structured, efficient and predictable approach to conducting front-office business. Platforms make customer science possible...

Xactly continues its pioneering ways by analyzing anonymous data collected by its customers in compensation management. If you aren't familiar with the company or its groundbreaking market analysis, you might be in for a treat. Its approach is relatively simple but extremely powerful. With the permission of the data owners, Xactly strips out id...

Bluewolf, the consultancy that was founded to assist customers implementing and deploying Salesforce.com, has released its annual State of Salesforce report. The company started this practice a few years ago, using MIT Sloan School of Management personnel to interview Salesforce customers, and the methodology is tight So what's in the report? Jus...

Dreamforce has always been about many things happening at once -- a three-ring circus, in a good way. There are announcements about applications, platforms, philanthropy, entertainment and, importantly, parties. This year there was all of that and then some -- I was a guest with a ringside seat ...

If Oracle didn't build another product for a while, it would be OK. In fact, no one might notice. The company already has thousands, and if the recent OpenWorld 2014 is any indication, there are enough to go around. Since I attended OpenWorld and it's my job to critique, I'll make a few observations....

There was a lot to like at Salesforce ExactTarget's Connections 2014 user conference in Indianapolis last week. Now all that's needed is a shorter name. The words "marketing cloud" need to be fitted in there too, but I forget how. First, a quick shout-out to Indy, home of the big Memorial Day race. I don't get to spend a lot of time in the middl...

Sales forecasting never has been easy, and over time it has gotten a lot harder. This brings up a couple of points that every sales manager and CEO has to deal with: how to forecast deals and how to track them Forecasting has gone through several generations of approaches that have been tied directly to sales practices. Unfortunately, some of us h...

The wearables market heated up last week with Apple's introduction of its Watch and payment processing service, and the implications for CRM are interesting. First off, the announcement shows how very young the wearables marketplace is and how far it has to go. ...

I was disturbed by this week's story in The New York Times about Google's ongoing issues with European regulators. The lead is all you need to get a sense of things: "BRUSSELS -- A top German official called for Google to be broken up. A French minister pronounced the company a threat to his country's sovereignty. A European publishing executive likened it to a Wagnerian dragon." ...

I've been following the wearables space with great interest over the last year, from the first steps of products like Fitbit and Jawbone to the current wave of activity by a growing list of device makers and, importantly, app tool vendors. This has a great deal to do with CRM, both because of the customer-tracking angles -- and there are many -- ...

The CRM Evolution conference held last week in New York was interesting for multiple reasons. Most importantly, perhaps, is the perception that the market is moving into a higher gear, slipping past the restraints of a recession that would not quit. Good things are in store for the industry, I think, as buyers step up their games and vendors unleash a passel of new solutions...

Apttus and Adobe Echosign earlier this year conducted a survey of more than 100 Fortune 1000 sales leaders, focusing on perennial blind spots for sales managers Here's the big picture view of their just-released findings:...