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Customer events have replaced trade shows as the big-spend item in many software vendors' and analyst and advisory firms' marketing budgets. Implicit in this shift of spending is the precision possible for targeting CEOs and CIOs with relevant content. The challenge however is getting these senior ...

Spending the last week traveling through Australia, visiting a manufacturer, giving presentations and talking with several other companies after my presentations has been fascinating. What's so refreshing about Australian manufacturers' approach to using enterprise software for selling, serving and...

Google AdWords is the most commonly used lead generation tool in many small and medium businesses. Layer in small and medium vendors of CRM's many varieties of applications, and the dependency on precise targeting for lead generation becomes even more important, due to the highly targeted messaging...

The world's best manufacturing companies have found that through the integration of product development, sales and marketing, including channel forecasting, procurement and production, synchronization results that can strengthen sales, channel and marketing operations. Taking this a step further, i...

They are everywhere -- value propositions that claim much and deliver little. The fact that so many value propositions these days are of the "boil the ocean" variety makes some thoughtful people wonder if their view of the world is overly simplistic or if they are missing something. Sure, a list...

Now is the time for all good dads to come to the aid of their Girl Scout daughters and sell, sell, sell cookies. What is reminiscent of the sentence used by many typing teachers to teach that skill has become the battle cry throughout the suburbs of America. What has quickly replaced the length of...

The growing adoption of service-oriented architectures including SAP's NetWeaver platform and its related applications are having a significant impact on the politics of integration between manufacturers and distributors. The balance of power has already shifted in a few industries to the channel o...

The fact that instant messaging, e-mail and chat are rising much faster as a combined approach to communicating supports the scenario of communication hubs redefining customer relationships in the next three to five years. Yahoo claims that 10 percent of all instant messaging sessions end with a te...

While sitting through technically complex webinars and presentations this week, I felt like raising my hand and saying, "May I be excused? My brain is full." Seriously, the level of technology and adroitness of world-class demo jockeys is both impressive and intimidating. Compound this with bondin...

My Web survey of SAP users is producing some interesting results. More than any other factor, customer references influenced buyers to choose SAP, quelling their concerns about the potential risks involved in taking that step. In fact, at this point in the survey, 80 percent of respondents said they...

The mantra of selling solutions has taken enterprise software by storm and nowhere is this more prevalent than CRM. Honestly, it seems like the more challenging and difficult it is to sell into specific sectors of CRM, the more "solution-selling" is being invoked. This newfound religion is truly t...

The vast majority of SAP applications get sold because there is an ERP instance somewhere in the organization to tie back to. Rarely, if ever, in the years of doing primary research on SAP's customer base, would I find a reference to one that had just come on board for its channel management applic...

Many sales forces seem to be stuck in a time warp. Selling with a transaction focus to customers who require a consultative or even enterprise approach is driving the cost of supporting these misaligned sales forces to the point of being unaffordable. Conversely, there are companies out there that ...

Throughout the last few months of 2005 there was a pronounced ramp-up in activity around Web Services to enable integration of marketing, sales and CRM databases so that more precise selling strategies could be created. The holy grail of CRM -- achieving a single view of the customer -- is within re...

It seems so many companies are finding it easier than ever to automate, speed up, and turbocharge their way into mediocre performance with customers all because they don't stop to re-define the essence of their strategies for attracting, selling to, and serving customers in the first place. What's n...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It's going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent thems...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. A seismic shift is happening in CRM today. Foremost of these is the shift from transactions to trust -- and if your pipeline has been ...

A silent stealth war is going on between best-of-breed vendors for position in the Google AdWords column of searches on keyword searches, and a strategy on the part of larger best-of-breed vendors of completing dominating their smaller best-of-breed counterparts in AdWord spending alone. This war fo...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within ...

A truly humbling experience is to give your first Webinar as an analyst. I remember it well; my voice projected the "deer in the headlights" image that we all try to hide but the world sees anyway. Giving a good Webinar is a natural talent for some, but for the rest of us it takes work and concent...