Search

We've now completed our study of the call center. We did it because we wanted to learn about the trend that has executives looking to generate revenue from this part of the business that has traditionally been focused on servicing customers. I believe several long-term trends are currently at work...

I really wanted to write about something other than Siebel this week. No such luck. There's so much news swirling around the CRM leader that you can do pretty well as a columnist just analyzing the analysis that has come forward so far. In case you've been time traveling or stuck in another dimens...

Last week Siebel Systems kicked off its annual EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) user group meeting in Barcelona with the introduction of George Shaheen, the company's new CEO. After a tumultuous prior week in which the abrupt change of leadership was announced, the company and its customers got...

It seems like all the interesting news breaks when I am out of the country. I was in Paris, attending a venture capital conference for emerging IT companies, when I got the news that Siebel Systems had missed its revised revenue forecast and sacked its CEO. The trip had been planned around my atte...

Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, once said that the technology life-cycle goes through three phases -- do it, do it right, and do it fast. Maybe that was true of mini-computers, but today I would amend it to something like, do it, lower the cost, and make it small. If you look at...

When is a sales representative not a sales representative? That sounds like one of those brain teasers we learned as kids. Back when we had all the time in the world we could spend hours puzzling about the seeming contradictions in a simple question like, "What walks on four legs when young, two whe...

Last week a small piece of our world changed. Did you catch it? It happened Thursday, when NetSuite, with its NetFlex announcement, became the second company to offer development and customization capabilities. The week before, in New York, Salesforce.com announced Multiforce, an ambitious additio...

Sales systems are a regular feature of the CRM suite, and if you didn't know better you might think that garden-variety sales force automation (SFA) is about the only thing you need. That might have been true a few years ago, but we're seeing that changes in markets and economies can have a great e...

The indirect sales channel has emerged as a sales environment distinctly different from conventional business-to-business or business-to-consumer selling. This shifting focus is long overdue, especially in industries such as technology, where a high percentage of products are sold through distributo...

Back when I sold software for a living -- this would be during the last ice age -- a witty software developer in my company stuck a floppy disk to his filing cabinet with a refrigerator magnet. Scrawled on the disk's label were our flagship product's name and the words "source code." A magnet applie...

It's not often that I get much of a response to a column, but my recent piece about spyware prompted several letters -- and not just the "let-me-tell-you-about-my-experience" kind. Meet Ben Edelman. Ben is every mother's dream, provided the mother in question wanted a doctor or a lawyer in the famil...

Daniel H. Pink has written an interesting book that has important implications for the future of CRM. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, to be published next month, is excerpted in the February issue of Wired magazine. The book deals with the differences betwee...

A while ago I wrote about the problems caused by various forms of malicious software that download to your computer while you are surfing the Internet. Spyware is probably the most dangerous. Like the flu, it comes in several forms. Some are used to steal personal information and therefore play an...

Professional courtesy, that's what I call it. It's the punch line to the question, "Why don't sharks eat lawyers?" It's also my reason for not criticizing other analysts in public. Besides, there's too much to write about to bother picking a public fight. If someone wants to promote a flat-earth t...

Quite a few companies are offering solutions that provide automated customer service in one way or another. There is a lot to be said about this trend, and much of it is good. The days of long waits on hold or frustrating attempts to navigate a series of phone menus are winding down, and in many ca...

Over the last few weeks, I have been busy putting the finishing touches on a new report scheduled for delivery to market later this month. My premise was that there might be a lot of enterprising companies in CRM or closely associated markets that are either new or that have new ideas that we should...

I got an interesting press release the other day. Headlined "SalesForce Loses CRM Lead," the release said that a new hosted CRM company, FreeCRM.com, claims 13,500 customers to Salesforce.com's 12,500. Hence the leadership change. As you might expect from the name, this company has amassed its con...

At its best the selling life can be great fun, full of action and accomplishment. At its worst it can make pushing on a string look like the essence of productivity. As a practitioner, the thing you either love or hate about selling is change. As a market emerges and matures, the techniques that on...

Time to go out on a limb, put everything on the table, and make some prognostications about what the big stories will be in and around CRM in 2005. This is all based on the best available research and written with the confidence of knowing that no one will remember any of it by next December. Here...

Earlier this fall an MBA student from MIT's Sloan School gave me a call. He wanted to invite me to be a panelist at the Seventh Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. The conference was run by students and is part of something called MIT Innovation Week. This is a big deal in the Boston venture capi...