CRM

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a ven...

Salesforce.com is acquiring GoInstant, reportedly paying $70 million for the startup. The news generally fits the "another day, another Salesforce.com acquisition" story line. The CRM cloud vendor has been on an acquisition binge -- it bought at least six companies in 2011 alone. It is on track to m...

Financial site Adaptu serves people in all stages of life, from young people just establishing themselves, getting married and buying a home, to more mature investors planning for their children's educations or their own retirement dreams. "Some of these people are open to talking about their finan...

The List, a provider of lead generation software for media buyers and marketers, is adding CRM functionality to its line of services. This new feature set joins other new functions the company is building into its core product, such as integration with Moat.com, and a global media content database.

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great stories from my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "my experience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith in humanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're o...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. There has been anecdotal evidence over the last five-plus years about social's efficacy as a business tool, and there ha...

Putting points on the board, "scoring" sales and posting results to beat the competition -- sales teams are the key offensive players at every organization. And not unlike star forwards on the basketball court, they require sufficient tools and training to be successful in this role. Unfortunately, ...

Marketing automation provider Act-On Software has added a unique feature to its product lineup that allows users to track, compare, and then take action on what is being said online and in social media about their company or executives. Act-On Insight lets users benchmark and track these mentions, a...

Avaya has added new products and enhanced existing ones in its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. The overarching goal of the changes was to allow users to reach out to customers via any channel the customers chose -- for example, mobile application, social media or phone. Such ac...

About a year ago, I heard a great story on NPR's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. While fans marvel at the enormous contracts paid to star players, there are thousands of younger players who toil away in the mi...

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's...

Several months ago Constant Contact became aware that much of its customer base was intrigued by the daily deal model. However, it also noticed that once those companies actually tried out the model, their enthusiasm for it diminished considerably. "Daily deals just don't work for a lot of companies...

Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of recent articles that point in a different though not opposite direction. "Oracle Is Sta...

By now, it has been drilled into most marketers' heads: Social media is all about conversation -- a two-way conversation. Oftentimes, the conversation entails responding to customers' comments, requests or complaints. From the customer's perspective, it almost certainly means offers of discounts and...

Microsoft is in discussions to acquire Yammer, a social media and communication platform for businesses, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cited two anonymous sources. Microsoft is prepared to acquire the company for a $1 billion purchase price, the report said, and the deal could be reached...