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Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the...

The idea of the customer ecosystem is a strong one, and I believe we'll be hearing about it for the foreseeable future. The customer ecosystem is only one half of the story, in my opinion. The other half is something I call the "sales web," and the two fit together rather neatly if you know how to...

A wireless expert I met on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago told me that more than 58 percent of people don't even know the brand of cell phone they use, and it made me wonder what else we don't know about wireless. More important, is that a good or a bad thing? I usually loath splitting ...

After a long period in which there seemed to be little to report, PRM or partner relationship management, appears to be enjoying an upswing. PRM was an unfortunate fellow traveler with all the other 'RM' permutations that came about in the dot-com bubble. There was also eCRM, which was a distincti...

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Righ...

Two things hit the wires this week relative to CRM that I think are interesting events, and in some ways they go beyond the on-demand space. Salesforce.com announced its partner relationship management solution, and NetSuite said it will sell its product in a retail configuration. At first NetSuit...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the...

Last week I mentioned a white paper I wrote a couple of years ago that addresses some of the changes we can expect to come from the on demand development and deployment paradigm and I thought it would be interesting to examine some of the main points here. The title of the piece is "The New Garage" ...

Some weeks there's just more to write about than other weeks. It's like the weather -- sometimes there just seems to be more of it than other times. Take last week, for example. Just north of Boston some communities received as much as 19 inches of rain. The last few days in CRM have had the sam...

Remember demand? It was always seen with supply and it was used to make markets until some wise guys told us that the two could go their separate ways. If you keep all things constant except for supply you can run the table, or so they said. It reminds me of the old joke about the poet, the engin...

For decades Sage Software has focused on the mid-market and SMB space, selling a variety of accounting back office and CRM oriented front office applications around the world, but the company has always been something of an odd duck in the business software market. For starters, Sage has been throu...

I am a bit of an economics junkie. My interest in the dismal science carries over from my interest in evolution and can be summarized as, why things are the way they are and how they got that way. I am currently finishing up a book that gets me where I live, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinc...

I wish every software marketing statement -- especially in CRM -- was as good as what they used for toothpaste when I was a kid. Thanks to Madison Avenue and having only three networks on broadcast TV, I can almost repeat verbatim the tag line about Crest from memory. "Crest has been shown to be a...

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling. Ahh, the 90s, lots of people in sales tell me you didn't make sales calls in the 90s, it was more like making appointments to take orders. Gurus of selling like Jim Dickie of CSO Insights, reported...

Have you noticed the "dial 'O' for a human" movement gathering steam? One related manifestation is the clever set of ads put out by Citibank for its credit cards. You may have seen the ads showing a man calling for service and navigating through the tragedy that is the automated call response syst...

Salesforce.com announced its purchase of Sendia on Tuesday in a well publicized affair that included a luncheon/press conference complete with presentation, demo and panel discussion. Some of the buzz around the announcement was a mild debate about the importance of the whole affair. After all, it...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service, market. In no particular order the company announced its version 11.0 release, informed the world that this release is fully AJAX infused, introduced a scripti...

I don't do endorsements -- that's for ball players. For me to endorse a product would be the end of my credibility. All I look for is what works and, if it does, I'll point it out. If something doesn't live up to the hype, I follow my mother's advice and say nothing. That's why I was surprised wh...

I was doing research for a white paper not long ago and it gave me reason to speak with people who operate call centers. The call center operators I spoke with had one thing in common; they used on-demand call center services. If you are not familiar with on-demand call center services, it's much ...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest...