Vendors

Knowing which software works better than other solutions can give business leaders a leg up on growing their company's efficiency and bottom line. To that end, venture capital firm Bowery Capital published in its annual Startup Sales Stack Report.

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. What was so interesting was how un-CRM-like it was.

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. Oracle, Salesforce, and many other CRM vendors continued innovating for the pandemic, but they also began innovating systems for what happens afterward...

The new scalable CRM bundle helps startups personalize marketing to generate pipelines, deliver omnichannel service, and grow faster at a price point that is easy to deploy and manage.

A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities.

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

When a complex need arises, customers expect to be connected to a well-prepared agent who can quickly resolve the situation. That fix must be applied in a way that leaves both the customer and agent feeling great about the outcome. Fortunately, the technologies now exist that allow contact centers t...

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that in some ways defies description. For the CRM rank and file there were plenty of announcements and enhancements -- and for others some tantalizing views of what may be coming in future releases.

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. Truth be told, the transition has been ongoing...

If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...

First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at least those of us in the knowledge economy -- but there's a...

There may be two Salesforce seasons in a year -- the one we're finishing and one that happens just before Dreamforce. Roughly speaking, these seasons happen when the company disgorges a raft of new technologies both to update existing products and to bring forth new ones. This season covers a lot of...