CRM

Unlike in previous years, the big attraction for holiday shoppers in 2006 was neither advertising nor special offers, according to KPMG's newly released annual National Shopping Behavior survey. Rather, 81 percent of consumers surveyed said they shopped at stores that carried the items they were loo...

Whenever I think of New Year's resolutions, one of Mark Twain's best quotes comes to mind: "A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time." Resolving to change is really what customer relationships and serving customers is all about. How many times has ...

The coming year is going to reorder entire industries due to customer churn. With this reordering will be an entirely new set of selling dynamics, as existing ones prove marginally successful into 2007. The old "bundle three" rule for higher customer retention will prove no longer as effective as i...

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people wil...

Like many industry analysts and alumni, I find analytical concepts sexy. Add in creating strategies for serving customers more efficiently while being profitable at it, and the conditions are perfect for the creation of an Accidental Analyst. The analytical side of CRM experienced explosive growth ...

M2M Holdings has signed an agreement to acquire CRM provider KNOVA Software, in an all cash transaction valued at approximately US$47 million. The deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter of 2007, subject to approval by KNOVA shareholders. KNOVA provides a niche CRM application call...

Selling products and services through multiple channels offers a number of "touch points" where information can be gathered from customers or potential customers. Most people in marketing clearly understand the importance of using this information to personalize communications with customers and per...

Technological development is fueling the transformation of economies and production processes around the world. Just-in-time manufacturing -- an industry-shaking innovation when Japanese manufacturers applied the methodology on a wholesale basis back in the early 1980s -- is now a best practice acro...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo, the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year. This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as t...

If you asked each member of your sales team what problem your company solves, what value you provide, and how you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, would their answers be clear, consistent and compelling? Most likely, you would receive a range of inconsistent responses. Today's salespe...

Sage Software this week purchased financial services compliance and document tracking technology from VerticalFalls, in order to expand Sage's ACT product family. This is the second vertical market that ACT has targeted; earlier this year, the company released ACT for Real Estate. The new acquisitio...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...

Sales executives have long embraced the vision of leveraging incentive compensation to drive performance within their sales teams. In this vision commissions are the reward, the proverbial carrot used to motivate reps to achieve and exceed specific revenue and performance metrics. However, the gap b...

Demographic information is the most common type of information gathered from your customers, and today ranges from basic information such as name and address to age, education, profession, hobbies, pets, and virtually any type of factual attribute. The more you know about your customers' profiles, t...