Search Results

When Marc Benioff asked me in New York what I thought of last week's Salesforce.com briefing and demonstration of CustomForce, I had to tell him the truth. I was impressed but not surprised -- after all, I have been writing about this approach to new application development and integration for over a year and the demo confirmed my predictions. But I was not and am still not trying to brag about it. Truth be told, I thought it would take years to get to this point -- it happened a lot faster than I had expected...

There has been so much to write about lately that I might have to break my own rule and file two pieces this week. I write this and other columns for fun, not profit, and I need to discipline myself to both tend to the for-profit knitting, and keep from overexposing myself. If I wanted to publish more frequently, I'd look into political punditry, and then where would the country be?...

The seasons of CRM are hard to describe but nevertheless interesting; they follow no conventional calendar and things tend to bunch up in a short time window in the spring and fall, preceded and followed by long periods of relative equilibrium. Last year I wrote about what I called the silly season, a time in the late spring and early summer when the major analyst firms reveal their CRM market share numbers for the previous calendar year...

Several macro trends are working their way through the CRM industry right now and having a direct impact on how CRM is sold. These trends include application hosting, tailoring horizontal CRM applications to fit the specific needs of vertical markets, and increasing reliance by software vendors on reseller channels to better meet the demands of specialized markets...

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 in call centers and they are adding up to significant shifts in what this part of the business does and how it is viewed by others in the enterprise...

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 ...

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 back to business as it rolled out a typical --for Siebel -- cornucopia of new and improved technology offerings and gave some important hints about the future...

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 attendance at Siebel's User Week conference to be held in Barcelona beginning today (April 18). Talk about timing!...

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 the software market that's certainly where a lot of vendors and solutions are going. Take CRM, for example...

When is a sales representative not a sales representative? ...

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 ...

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 effect on what we sell and how we sell it. Consequently, the software we use to sell must evolve as well...

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 distributor and reseller networks that require different approaches to selling and management...

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." ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Professional courtesy, that's what I call it ...

"What happens in a large law firm is you're always looking to sell yourservices," Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research and a CRM Buyer columnist, said "Large law firms get a lot of work from big corporations. Big corporationsbuy services from people they know...

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 ...