Enterprise Apps

You invest in a state of the art CRM platform. You spend months tailoring it to the needs of your organization. Weeks of data mapping and migration tests ensue. You plan, build and deliver rigorous user education. Sales leaders are excited. Salespeople ... don't use it. Or at least, they use it to t...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Mzinga Applies 'Design for Change' to Social CRM

With its social software platform Mzinga OmniSocial, Mzinga's goal is to deliver a role-based application with CRM capability that a company can then repurpose to collect information from its customers. Rather than concentrating on traditional CRM, Mzinga focuses on the enterprise network side to he...

INSIGHTS

The Marketing Renaissance

Marketing has become the new hot spot in CRM. During the recession and even before, there was a great flurry of interest in customer service and related things. Consequently, we have seen a lot of attention being paid to customer experience, and much of the social-media-oriented growth in that per...

Computer software requires an enormous amount of support. That fact has enriched companies such as Oracle and SAP, which levy annual support fees of about 20 percent of the sale prices of their applications. That's one of the things that just sticks in the craw of Clint Oram, chief technology office...

The Lithium Social Customer Suite is designed to help companies identify and manage a group of dedicated customers using social media channels. Referring to these types of social customers as "superfans," Lithium helps companies turn them into advocates for their products and services. With the adve...

CDC Software has upgraded its sales module, Pivotal Sales Force Automation, with enhancements that the company developed by borrowing from the best practices it observed in its clients, said Ehab Samy, director of product management for CRM applications. In addition, it rolled out these upgrades th...

INSIGHTS

Microsoft Convergence

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, ...

EXPERT ADVICE

Product Videos Get Customers in a Buying Mood

The more we invest in something, the more committed we are to a successful outcome. Obvious enough, but what this investment of time and effort means is that we are now more motivated to follow through on our initial interest in the form of action. Enticing your shoppers to stay on your site and e...

INSIGHTS

Zuora and Salesforce.com: A Good Deal

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer car...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of o...

ANALYSIS

The Sales Team's Automated Backbone

Configure/Price/Quote tools provide companies technology-enabled processes by which selling organizations manage their opportunity-to-order methodology with automated tools that impact the speed and accuracy of developing quotes, proposals, contracts and products. As sales organizations endeavor to ...

The online shopping cart has become as much of a wish list as anything, giving consumers a place to store, compare, consider and dream about potential purchases. E-tailers, however, would like to see those potential purchases become actual ones, and they're coming up with increasingly sophisticated ...

Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other onli...

INSIGHTS

Marketing and IT: Two Ships Passing

Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recentl...

Gulf Cooperation Council banks have begun to feel the heat of competitive pressure from foreign banks that are trying to exploit the potential investment prospects in this market by riding on their vast experience and proven consumer-friendly services. In such a scenario, the banks have nothing to ...

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