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There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action. China is emerging as the world's manufacturing center and a sourcing magn...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and...

The recently released results of the Corporate Executive Board's 2005 Benchmarking Survey shows just how involved marketing departments from B2B, high tech, B2C -- indirect channels to B2C -- and direct channels are in managing a significant part of their company's total spending on competitor, indu...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacture...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the inno...

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's C...

Manufacturers are increasingly turning to hosted CRM applications including those from Salesforce.com and others to have their sales, service, and sales operations departments capture competitive intelligence from the field. The competitive intelligence generated from the many interactions with rese...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

It's good to question assumptions about your customer base from time to time and test them just to make sure they are still accurate. One of the strongest lessons learned from the Internet is just how much many manufacturers don't know about our own channels, customers, pricing, and products. The I...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they d...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

The lack of trust in the accuracy, frequency and depth of financial reporting processes in companies has spawned a sizeable industry that has trust at its cornerstone. Sarbanes-Oxley's pain is the outsourcer's gain, and in this strengthening reciprocal relationship between the need for U.S. publicly...

In a town renowned for big bets and high rollers, Harrah's laid down the biggest bet of all on June 13th when it concluded its merger with Caesars Entertainment. Harrah's paid US$1.87 billion in cash and $3.27 billion in stock, also assuming $3.86 billion in Caesar's debt. With the merger, Harrah'...

Partnerships are increasingly under attack as less than credible in enterprise software, no more so than in CRM. Starting with classic logo and press release swaps between vendors desperate to fuel each other's sales pipelines, partnerships are met with increasing scrutiny in the world of enterpris...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law. Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubl...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation....

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on...