Enterprise Apps

Sales force automation -- nimble, lightweight and usually mobile -- seems to have little in common with its staid parent, enterprise resource planning. Until you consider this: After years of widespread adoption, SFA has also become mature. Yet the space is not remaining static. There have been chan...

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them. There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it, and I don't want to leave anythin...

For decades, organizations have been dealing with the challenges of driving better, more effective customer service. Traditional CRM solutions have focused on presenting consolidated customer information, but they still rely heavily on employees to resolve customer issues. This means that the custom...

Marketers can no longer afford to make decisions or measure results based on gut feel. For CMOs, this leads to one undeniable truism: Job security is directly correlated with data-driven marketing.

The economic stimulus assistance injected into major industrial countries to counter the effects of a global recession shone a spotlight on the need to rebuild their infrastructures. The need to manage such public works investments efficiently has generated a huge potential market for project manage...

Online measurement has become increasingly focused on the integration of online behavior with customer marketing touch-points. Taking a complete view of the customer acquisition life cycle will often generate numerous potential integration points that can be profitably exploited. The goal of every...

The announcement that Adobe was acquiring Web analytics firm Omniture took many in the marketing industry off guard last month. However, it's less surprising in view of trends that have recently been gaining traction: integration of social media technologies to mainstream platforms; mergers and acqu...

Many small businesses fail to fully utilize automated time-reporting tools or shy away from them altogether. However, once a business starts to reach about 30 staff members, time reporting helps them understand costs, improve efficiency, and focus on the right areas, said Journyx CEO Curt Finch. It ...

Some think of it as just an offshoot of CRM. Others view PRM, or partner relationship management, as interchangeable with sales force automation. The reality is PRM is coming of age in its own right, as manufacturers and technology companies struggle to manage their highly complex -- and constantly ...

Mzinga, a player in the evolving community platform space, has relaunched its flagship offering with a product that integrates many of its internally developed features with acquired technologies. The new platform, called "OmniSocial," provides external and internal communication and collaboration t...

Mobile marketing has at last emerged as an important part of the marketing mix. Through a confluence of technologies and standards related to mobile devices, including 3G networks and data packages, the mobile channel can now enable large-scale marketing activities capable of engaging consumers in u...

As the systems that run the way we work and live become smarter, the workplace as we know it is undergoing dramatic and dynamic change. The challenge organizations face is embracing the rapid shifts in today's world for their own advantage rather than resisting them. In the face of this challenge, ...

Small projects, though often overlooked, can make up the bulk of the portfolio and are crucial to a company's success. They might not involve large sums of money, but the fact is that if managed improperly, these small projects can add up to some major costs in the long run. The good news is that ...

Remember the bad old days of customer self-service? Automated systems would present you with five or more different options -- any one of which could lead to five or more other options. With touchtone systems, accidentally pressing the wrong number at a prompt could result in instant death by discon...

With a variety of options available for training their revenue-seeking professionals, today's sales leaders need to carefully select the methodology that will most directly impact their bottom line. Ongoing Aberdeen research of over 500 companies surveyed in July and August of 2009, which will be pu...