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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 ...

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 goes: ...

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 MITVenture Capital Conference. The conference was run by students and ispart of something called MIT Innovation Week ...

The end of the year is always a good time for top ten lists andforecasts of things to come. It's a way for analysts and pundits to showhow smart we are and that we "knew it all along" -- or at least toexhibit our 20/20 hindsight ...

Sales methodologies and sales force automation (SFA) are a combination that should be a natural fit. In practice, however, method support is poor in most current forms of SFA. Sales managers want their representatives to follow the company's defined methodology, but often salespeople veer off course, wasting time and resources. Most importantly, when salespeople go off on a tangent, their data trails leave little hint of what they have accomplished, making it harder to coach them later...

Like millions of other Americans, I sometimes struggle with pop-up ads and spyware. Given an opening, these small programs can bring even the fastest new computer to its knees. Luckily there is a cottage industry growing up around this problem, and there is also a lot of free software available to help cleanse our computers from the worst effects of this class of software. But although this is a growth industry, it is not one that advances the productivity of the average worker or enhances the gross domestic product...

For several years now CRM vendors have been touting their customer satisfaction scores as a way to claim an advantage over their competitors. But for just as long we have watched as a trend emerged showing company after company changing their CRM brand. Changing CRM vendors is not a trivial process. It involves a good deal of work, not to mention a write-off of the previous CRM investment, although a great deal of the learning from the first experience goes into helping make the second implementation a success...

Luck plays a role in life. I don't pretend to understand it, and I believe we make our own luck, but occasionally we also inherit some from the cosmos. How else do you explain the timing of Salesforce.com's announcements last week at DreamForce, its annual user group meeting in San Francisco? ...

Analyzing the industry analysts has become a popular indoor sport in CRM and beyond. Ever since the scandals involving a few financial analysts kiting stocks for their investment bank employers, there has been an attempt to upgrade the standards by which financial analysts are judged and to apply those standards to industry analysts as well ...

Forgive me, but amid all the excitement of the baseball post-season, it's hard to believe there are other important things going on in the world ...

Last week the numbers moved. No, not the election, but something equally important. Let me explain ...

The annual meeting of the North American Siebel user group is a big deal, and last week's convocation in Los Angeles played true to form. In addition to the usual swarm of product announcements, education sessions, and the partner pavilion, it was new CEO Mike Lawrie's first opportunity to address the group and meet with customers, press and analysts on a grand scale...

In a sign of the times, last week Salesforce.com introduced a new call and contact center service called Supportforce.com. It appears to be a slick package that includes the hardware and software any company needs to initiate or enhance call center activities right down to voice over IP. Salesforce now joins the ranks of companies such as RightNow Technologies and Siebel Systems in offering on-demand call and contact center applications...

They're at it again -- Oracle and (reluctantly) PeopleSoft -- like siblings in the back seat on the ride to grandma's house. Now that a federal court has said that Oracle's pursuit of its rival is OK on anti-trust grounds, Oracle is trying to clear the remaining hurdles, such as the European Commission's potential objections, while PeopleSoft's executives are spending valuable cycles inventing poison pills...

This week I'm trying something different ...

Much heat, and little light, is emanating from this season's political debate about the offshoring of American jobs ...

"Pressing on by Oracle will be the business equivalent of invading Iraq," Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, told the E-Commerce Times Benefits of the Acquisition?...

Technology cooperation networks, which allow firms to share valuable knowledge and expertise in the research and development of product lines. The point that stuck with was that enterprise software is already roughly aligned with the five types of networks Castells describes. Bringing Networks Together Most interestingly, the first three network types -- supplier, producer and customer -- correspond well with the most prominent kinds of enterprise software: supply chain, ERP and CRM. The top three can also be considered "old style" in that their actions are based on transactions, while the last two network types have an aura of Buck Rogers and the twenty-first century about them. Large pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine seem to come together in technology cooperation networks to cure disease or discover a new drug. Such networks also increasingly bring together competitors to develop technologies like the new cross-service fighter jet being developed by Lockheed and Boeing. Central Role for CRM But what really takes your breath away is the potential importance of CRM to the mix. In a highly networked world where everyone is a vendor and everyone is a customer, CRM occupies a unique place in bringing the various networks together. That's why integration has to be at the forefront of any CRM company's thinking today. And by integration, I mean process integration, not simply integrating data. Data integration has been a powerful tool in integrating any single network type, but process integration is required to integrate across networks. While it might be relatively easy to vertically integrate data up and down the processes of a single network type, it is far more difficult to integrate horizontally, across networks. For example, while a modern CRM system can capture a complete view of the customer's needs, it is far more difficult to translate this information into product specifications that participants in either a supplier network or a producer network (or both) can use to design, build and deliver the right product at the right time. Challenge of Integration Similarly, technology cooperation networks performing high-value research -- such as new drug discovery or deep market studies -- depend on deep understanding of different aspects of the customer to perform their functions. All this and more argues for inter-process integration. Because there are so many disparate processes and systems that manage each of these kinds of networks, it is virtually impossible to consider developing and maintaining traditional point-to-point interfaces between all of them. It is also highly doubtful that any single vendor can provide the best applications for all aspects of a trans-network business process. All of this leads us to the importance of integration strategies that are just coming to market. In this space I have discussed the virtues of Web Services, XML, SOAP and more ambitious approaches such as Siebel's Universal Application Network and SAP's NetWeaver. I've also discussed the need for deep support articulated by Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy. The challenge of building better products that are more useful and less expensive resides in integrating the numerous networks that support the different phases of product analysis, development, delivery and support. This can be done only by continuously improving inter-process integration. Denis Pombriant is former vice president and managing director of Aberdeen Group's CRM practice and founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group. In 2003, CRM Magazine named Pombriant one of the most influential executives in the CRM industry. ...

Because the publisher will have a relatively captive customer base (similar to your phone or electric company) the publisher will have an instant sales channel for new products and will be able to sell through the channel at a far lower cost than today's software companies encounter. Many people have noted the seeming lack of some "new, new thing" to propel the tech industry. Some have advocated taking care of the unfinished business of making everything that we already have work. But making everything work doesn't mean hanging on to the status quo. The new, new thing is a new business model based on an architecture that really can promote interoperability. That's a worthwhile challenge and one that will employ quite a few of us over the next decade. Denis Pombriant is former vice president and managing director of Aberdeen Group's CRM practice and founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group. In 2003, CRM Magazine named Pombriant one of the most influential executives in the CRM industry. ...

One of the hardest things about observing evolution -- even business evolution -- is that the pace is so slow that the turning points are not apparent except in retrospect. Does anyone remember when Digital Equipment Corporation or Wang Laboratories became irrelevant? They are gone today and have been for many years but at one point they ruled an important swath of the computer industry. Yet they fell into insignificance and disappeared...