Enterprise Apps

You should check out The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT. It's a thoughtful analysis of the technology progression handed to us by Moore's Law and its effect on every aspect of our lives. Their thesis is pretty simple but also powerful. Early in the computer age, we...

Clari is bursting onto the CRM stage with a mobile sales productivity platform that is coming out of stealth mode, thanks to a $6 million infusion of funds from Sequoia Capital. The product, says CEO Andy Byrne, marries "a beautiful design," with data analytics and mobile technology to create a syst...

The era of inbound marketing is upon us, but a great many businesses are fearful of it. Having worked as a magazine editor and a content marketer, I find the conversations very familiar: People who haven't written or who hate to write find many reasons not to, including some that make very little se...

After many years, I think I can boil down CRM to this: Vendors prepare for transactions but customers expect process. Of course, this demands elaboration and neither of these ideas is stationary. The desire for better processes evolves as customers and markets do, and transactions become more sophis...

Inbound marketing is an essential part of an online brand promotion strategy. It lets you target your audience directly and draw them in. Inbound marketing is the process of getting customers to come to your store before you try to sell them anything. Inbound marketing for e-commerce is no different...

Everyone in business claims to want to listen to the voice of the customer. It's a noncontroversial issue, but the approaches are all over the map. There is little consistency -- and truthfully, many vendors do a poor job of it. Capturing customer feedback always has been a challenge for conventiona...

CRM is sometimes described as the place where all your customer data resides. That's a nice image -- all that helpful data, chilling in its own hangout. That data works for you, though -- if you're just storing it, it isn't helpful. We talk a lot about what we want to do with data: We want to give s...

The connected car may be zooming into the mainstream: Apple has officially entered the market. The debut of CarPlay comes nearly a year after Apple first previewed iOS in the car, tweaking the platform to move Siri, Maps and other services to the dashboard. Apple showed off CarPlay and announced new...

I was at a dinner at a working cattle ranch outside of Denver not long ago, but it was a ranch with a difference. Rather than raising cattle for the table, the business raised breeding stock and sent animals and other products, like embryos, all over the world. Every animal on the ranch had its gene...

Apple has bumped up the discounts offered in a loyalty program available to customers who spend at least $5,000 on its products over 12 months. It reportedly added unlocked iPhones and Apple TVs to the program as well. Two weeks ago, Apple improved its iOS management tools, and speculation is that t...

Salesfusion has released a new version of its marketing automation platform enhanced with the lead-scoring capabilities it acquired earlier this year with its purchase of LoopFuse. The end result of this newly integrated product is a marketing automation application that has predictive lead scoring ...

OK people, it is 2014. Email marketing has been an important marketing tactic for a good 15 to 20 years. Email marketing for mobile devices is a newer variation of this tried-and-true channel, but it still isn't rocket science. So why, I ask you, do so many marketers still refuse to learn the most b...

Subscription companies face many of the same challenges that more conventional companies face, but the nature of these businesses puts an entirely different spin on the challenges. All companies have to acquire new customers, make products and price them attractively without leaving money on the tab...

Pegasystems has rolled out Next-Best-Action Marketing 7.1. Built on Pega 7, it aims to provide marketing executives with the best customer service strategy -- the next best action -- for any given scenario, based on customer data captured by the system, along with rules configured by the user. The d...

CRM has always purported to be about relationships, but it's often used primarily for sales. That's kind of a good news, bad news situation. The bad news first: CRM got a bad rap when it didn't become a sales panacea (mostly for adoption issues). The good news: It exposed a void in the mix that mark...