Enterprise Apps

PRODUCT PROFILE

Aprimo Shows Reps More Cross-Sell, Upsell Possibilities

Aprimo has released its second app for Salesforce.com's AppExchange, called "Aprimo Service to Sales." It is an inbound marketing app with real-time interactive features. The first Aprimo app destined for the AppExchange was released in 2010. The newer app, however, is written on a different code b...

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference ready to kick off next week, there is little doubt the company has several new products ready to debut. Just in case, though, CEO Marc Benioff made sure the CRM world would be primed for the news. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch founder M...

INDUSTRY AWARDS

The Return of WizKids

I made a decision this week that pleased me and will drive some of my thinking about the CRM business well into next year. I opened up a contest called the WizKids Award. That might not seem like much and it might seem self-serving for me to write about it but maybe there's more. WizKids is an infor...

Sage North America has rolled out Sage Act 2013, a new iteration of its flagship application that has been enhanced with mobile, social and email marketing capabilities, as well as new smart task automation functionality. The focus is on contemporary trends of interest to SMBs, said Brandon Balsley,...

INSIGHTS

Marketing's New Golden Age

Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed. In that vein, what could be seen as the first golden age o...

Increasingly, CRM vendors -- and their customers -- are recognizing the value of applying mobile technologies to the self-service piece of a CRM operations. In response, more and more vendors are rolling out new applications for companies that wish to target this emerging, but rapidly growing, deman...

Blackbaud has enhanced its CRM app for nonprofits with completely redesigned prospect and research capabilities. It is the company's second major release this year, said Tiffany Crumpton, senior marketing manager for CRM solutions. However, neither release -- the previous 2.93 or this newest iterati...

INSIGHTS

Transmutation in the C Suite

My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes, I assume, drilling down into more o...

Buried in a recent J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study -- which showed consumers' satisfaction with credit cards was at a six-year high -- was this very telling factoid: Only 7 percent of credit card customers use their mobile phones to complete transactions, up from 4...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Kana Goes Modular With New Express Application

Kana Software is pushing into the mid-market space with a new offering called "Kana Express." It is a multi-channel Web customer service application divided into four modules, all of which can be deployed separately or used as a whole suite. Scaled-down versions of more robust customer service appl...

If Winston Churchill had been a CRM pundit, he may have penned the immortal turn of phrase, "never in the course of human events have so many paid so much to have so few use an application." That would have made him a pretty awful CRM writer. But give fictional Winston a break -- it is difficult to...

INSIGHTS

Sage Charts Its Course

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names,...

VerticalResponse recently launched its social platform with two new features: Coupons and Clipper. Coupons lets businesses generate custom coupons that can be published as a Facebook tab on their Facebook page or as a standalone Web page. Clipper is a browser button that lets users save interesting ...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Zoho Digs Deeper With Marketing Campaigns

Zoho has been speedily turning out applications to complement its core platform. Earlier this spring, for instance, it introduced Zoho CRM. Now, it is rolling out Zoho Marketing Campaigns to buttress the marketing functionality it introduced in the CRM app. "We had marketing and campaign features in...

EXPERT ADVICE

The Remarketing Trap

There's a great chase scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, having been identified as a future murderer, is making his escape through a futuristic mall. He's trying to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, the advertising billboards start crying out to him, vying for his attention and blowing his c...

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