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The CRM vendor community seems to be trying to welcome us back to normalcy by priming the selling pump with new marketing tools. It makes sense. Marketing is the beginning of the pipeline that brings in revenue, so why not? ...

My analyst life has an interesting ebb and flow to it, as do most professional lives, I believe. My most productive times are when I work heads down on a project drilling into sometimes arcane aspects of the market. From that comes unique information that I share with clients first, then more generally later. Other times I'm swimming in the general pool of CRM explaining my research and learning from others...

For some reason, McKinsey & Company publishes a newsletter-report on weekends that I dutifully read when I should be watching sports or otherwise recreating. Call it a busman's holiday. They call it "The Week in Charts" with the nerdy subtitle, "All the Week's Data That's Fit to Visualize." I love it ...

A long time ago, before CRM and very early in my sales career, someone pointed out to me that customers are the bottom of the food chain. It was not a profound idea, we just kind of chuckled and moved on, but obviously it has stuck with me ...

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though ...

We're at an inflection point that affects almost all of us. Should we return to the office en mass? Continue working at home? Further develop a hybrid approach to working from anywhere? ...

When you consider a sphere, it's well understood in math and physics that surface area increases by the square of the radius while the volume increases by the cube. In other words, what's inside expands faster than what you see on the surface by a considerable amount ...

Last time we examined at a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that looked into the Great Retirement ...

CRM has become big enough to generate a significant shadow. When an idea like putting customers in the center of our universe takes hold, we see ripple effects everywhere in the culture. Nobody wants to be in favor of something else ...

Salesforce held its Dreamforce NYC on schedule in early December, which you might have missed because of other news like Omicron and the looming chaos of the holidays ...

It's okay to give ourselves kudos for CRM's resiliency over the course of the pandemic. We did a heck of a job keeping most of the balls in the air ...

For most of my professional life before I became an analyst, I was a sales rep, and my forte was software. Back in the mini-computer era nothing was easier, and then harder, than selling software ...

For those born after the mini-computer era (co-terminus with the original Star Trek), dilithium is the fuel used to power a warp core propulsion system needed for interstellar travel ...

I've been on and off trying to get a handle on Zoho for a long time, feeling that calling it an SMB solution didn't do it justice, but I was stumped. The company provides roughly 50 apps and more services and widgets in a product set that culminates in Zoho One -- which Zoho bills as "The Operating System for Business." ...

This is not good ...

Let's start a new meme/hashtag/acronym: Global Information Network, or GIN. I know there's double entendre here, but we're entitled to have a modicum of fun in life, no? ...

I was doing research when I found a suitable definition of levels of abstraction. Honestly, it's a topic most of us know intuitively without ever fully defining it, like rain. Rain is water droplets that fall from the sky but few of us think about how and why clouds form and weather fronts move. We just know rain, also snow, and when pressed we bother tracking weather movements to see if a planned outdoor activity makes sense. But I wouldn't say that's understanding rain...

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that in some ways defies description ...

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company ...

I try not to write too much about earnings because I'm an analyst more focused on how things work -- or don't -- than I am on how much money a company makes. That's largely because I got into the CRM space before companies made money on it. In later market stages, products work, and the interest is in how predictable the company's earnings are ...