CRM

Before the arrival of sales force automation and marketing campaign software, there were productivity applications. CRM, as we all know, rose from that fundamental platform of email, calendaring, mailing list management and task management. A lot of CRM vendors include productivity in their CRM apps...

Zuora, the on-demand billing service for on-demand companies, is turning 1 year old. Last week, the company announced 100 product improvements with its 2.0 version and said that it had attracted 100 customers in its first year. Why all the attention to this startup? I think what's cool about Zuora...

With an attractive force akin to the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy, online social networks have pulled into their orbits scores of new startups searching for profits. The target: eyeballs. Last January, Facebook totaled 68 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views, and MySp...

PRM has an intriguing business case: It applies the concepts and tools of customer relationship management to the business relationships that also affect a company's customer base. The problem with PRM is that it hasn't caught on -- for myriad reasons, starting with its expense and difficulty in imp...

When poet John Donne wrote, "No man is an island," he suggested that that all human beings are bound by the experiences of others. This timeless notion can also be applied to the business world: "No marketing channel is an island." When online information is examined on a larger scale across several...

I have been remiss in not paying enough attention to social media monitoring software. I suppose it's understandable given that social media is at the margin of CRM -- moving to the center, but still in the outer shell -- and monitoring software is somewhere beyond that orbit in the software equiva...

Nobody, not even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, has yet successfully produced a proven, sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks -- Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The reason for this could be rooted in ...

Around the time when Software as a Service was pre-empting the on-premise vendors, SugarCRM burst onto the CRM scene with its own disruptive business mode: open source for CRM. The build-it-yourself model wasn't for everybody, of course -- or so many thought at the time. As SugarCRM continues to ref...

One of the selling points for moving software into the cloud is that it is supposedly hassle-free: no hardware, no software and presumably no huge staff of IT employees. The latter is certainly true -- but that is not to say companies can stop investing in their IT human resources just because they ...

The purpose of a strategic plan is to guide an organization intelligently into the future -- but what happened to the last strategic plan you put together? It likely sits in a binder collecting dust on your office shelf, without ever fulfilling its intended purpose. With so much time, money and reso...

The Business Intelligence space has been on a mission for several years. The goal: to simplify the way these applications work for the end-user. Several years ago, one practically needed a Ph.D. to be able to eke out usable data. Today, most line of business users can get the same results. Noetix is...

For some companies, the decision to move to the cloud is a no-brainer -- especially if they limit their planning to pure number crunching. Without a doubt, the savings for such a leap, both explicit and implicit, can be huge. Still, though, there are technical issues to consider, not the least of wh...

I almost couldn't have imagined it. I give myself a little leeway, but after years of writing and talking about "new, new things" it didn't really dawn on me that at some point we'd be talking about a new, new economy -- but we are. I was speaking with Brian Zanghi, CEO of Kadient, the other day, a...

As with any new technology, there are special considerations that must be taken into account when deciding how or whether to implement a cloud-based application. These are early days for cloud computing, which means the planning process must move off auto-pilot. Here are some of the things companies...

The traditional sales pressures of lengthening sales cycles and low quota achievement have only been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn. Many businesses have been forced to cut costs, eliminate waste and often freeze spending. The few organizations that might be looking to spend are increas...