Spotlight Features

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Righ...

In buying a U.S. company, liabilities do not cease once a seller has completed a deal. The allocation of liabilities is usually determined in the acquisition agreement. Acquisition agreements are described in the previous article in this series. The role of indemnifications in mergers and acquisi...

Business intelligence applications have always delighted company executives -- at least as they watched simulated exercises on a sales rep's laptop. Real-world execution, though? Until recently, that has left much to be desired. To be sure, it is not entirely the fault of the vendor. Earlier generat...

For many manufacturers, indirect channels provide the majority of their revenue yet carry only a small percentage of their most profitable products. Instead, indirect channel partners opt to move literally tons of low-margin items, competing in the marketplace on price and availability alone. The el...

Walk into a typical command center and what do you see? A wall or desktop filled with multiple screens reporting statistics from a number of disparate systems. Details from a leading-edge workforce management solution are prominently displayed on one screen, stats from the ACD are on another monitor...

Earlier this month, Aprimo released Marketing 7.5, a milestone for the company in many respects. It is the first release that incorporates Ensemble, a product acquired from DoubleClick, and it provides business-to-consumer campaign management capability for the first time. Marketing 7.5 is also the ...

Implementing a Web Analytics Solution for your site can be fraught with all kinds of peril, but knowing what you're in for goes a long way toward avoiding the biggest headaches, as Part 1 of this two-part series points out. Part 2 continues the discussion of effective ways to deal with potential pro...

By definition Search Engine Marketing refers to both paid search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The former is based on a pay-per-click advertising model as companies bid on specific search terms or in the case of Google, AdWords, to get a more visible placement within search engine results.

Implementing a tag-based Web analytics solution is rarely the slam-dunk that vendors imply. Depending on how your site is structured and how dynamic your content is, tagging can range from fairly straightforward to fiendishly complex. How can you tell which experience you're likely to be in for? Thi...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the...

Too often, a company chooses a customer relationship management/sales force automation solution that just does not fit. Each company has unique sales and marketing needs, so a "One-Size-Fits-All" CRM solution is not the best approach. An expensive Armani suit is worthless if it is not tailored to fi...

In many companies, marketing is experiencing a resurgence and new relevance, a rejuvenation if you will towards aligning closer to customers than ever before. What's most encouraging about this is the fact that strategies based on dated cause-and-effect relationships with clients are, through the u...

Last week I mentioned a white paper I wrote a couple of years ago that addresses some of the changes we can expect to come from the on demand development and deployment paradigm and I thought it would be interesting to examine some of the main points here. The title of the piece is "The New Garage" ...

Apple Computer announced internally on May 29 that it is pulling back from plans to establish a customer support facility in Bangalore, India. The news regarding Apple's Indian subsidiary Apple Services India was released publicly on Saturday. Apple has not announced plans to downscale its outsourc...

Acquisition agreements are the most important legally binding documents in the acquisition process, but their role is frequently misunderstood. They structure the deal and allocate liabilities and responsibilities among buyers and sellers. The commercial terms of an acquisition agreement are usuall...