While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." CRM failures are very similar -- the ones that work do so for the same reasons, but those that go awry manifest a collection of diverse symptoms. CRM fails for a lot of reasons -- many of them traceable to...

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." If you haven't heard that one multiple times, you aren't really in business. It's a truism -- and part of being a truism is that it's true, for the most part. When a new business strategy emerges, it can temporarily topple truisms -- but soon, they're ...

Service is becoming perhaps the most important leg of CRM. It's not just me saying it -- it's many others, including Paul Greenberg, who literally wrote the book on CRM. With the economy in the state it's in, that makes sense; keeping the customers you already have has never been more important. How...

There's an adage in the CRM industry that every successful CRM implementation is customized in some way. That may not be as much of an absolute as it once was. But, in order to gain a true competitive advantage from CRM, your business needs to find ways to use it differently than your competitors do...

Had a meteor hit the Dulles Westin outside of Washington, D.C., two weeks ago, it would have set social CRM back 10 years. That meteor, in addition to melting a lot of snow, would have vaporized in a trice the vast majority of the world's serious thinkers on the topic of social CRM. The journalists,...

Although service is gaining in importance as the economy is forcing customer retention to the fore, sales has long been the dominant leg of the CRM stool. Many CRM efforts were spearheaded by sales, and in many organizations, the SFA functions of CRM software remain the only features that actually g...

Businesses all over the world have made enormous investments in service -- both in people and in technology. The amount of thought dedicated to service is enormous, and the time spent trying to make service divisions more efficient is countless. Guess what? Most of this money, time and effort has be...

CRM systems are on a steep evolutionary slope, but marketing automation is evolving even more rapidly, spurred by a rash of innovative thinking and the SaaS delivery model. With the technology offering so much potential, integrating a crackerjack CRM system and an effective marketing automation solu...

As anyone familiar with CRM knows, adoption is the key to whether you live or die by your CRM solution. You can make detailed plans, do arduous research, negotiate great deals, execute a deployment plan flawlessly -- and then see it all go for naught when your users fail to use the system. The reaso...

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differen...

Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. How do you stay in front? If you come from a traditional software background, your default answer is likely to be "new fea...

Those of us immersed in CRM take it for granted that people understand what the acronym stands for and what it really means -- the technology, people and processes that go into building stronger relationships with customers. Quite naturally, the people who sell, support and comment on CRM understand...

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious...

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.