Spotlight Features

Few events are likely to have a more devastating effect on a company -- or even the industry it represents -- than being exposed for deliberately misleading customers about the safety of its products. The sunscreen industry may be forced to crawl out of a ditch due to this sort of deception. Last mo...

Indian call centers are being purchased by U.S. and Canadian companies seeking to quickly gain access to call center services offshore, particularly outbound services. Although media attention focuses more on the sale of U.S. assets to Asian and Middle Eastern firms, this trend in the other directi...

Spending the last week traveling through Australia, visiting a manufacturer, giving presentations and talking with several other companies after my presentations has been fascinating. What's so refreshing about Australian manufacturers' approach to using enterprise software for selling, serving and...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service, market. In no particular order the company announced its version 11.0 release, informed the world that this release is fully AJAX infused, introduced a scripti...

The relationship between CRM vendor and its channel ecosystem has slowly been changing over the last two years, driven by a number of industry trends. Once seen almost as a commodity, a vendor's ecosystem -- its resellers, independent software vendors, systems integrators with certifications for the...

It's opening day in many Major League Baseball stadiums today, and in addition to wondering who's throwing out the first pitch, how much the beer will cost, and whether that rookie shortstop can hit the curveball, competitive and committed fans of this great sport are grappling with another burning ...

Google AdWords is the most commonly used lead generation tool in many small and medium businesses. Layer in small and medium vendors of CRM's many varieties of applications, and the dependency on precise targeting for lead generation becomes even more important, due to the highly targeted messaging...

Customers experience a major difference in doing business with companies with strategies in place for synchronizing demand. Many studies are available of the top-performing companies that have achieved high levels of performance in this area.

They are everywhere -- value propositions that claim much and deliver little. The fact that so many value propositions these days are of the "boil the ocean" variety makes some thoughtful people wonder if their view of the world is overly simplistic or if they are missing something. Sure, a list...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest...

Now is the time for all good dads to come to the aid of their Girl Scout daughters and sell, sell, sell cookies. What is reminiscent of the sentence used by many typing teachers to teach that skill has become the battle cry throughout the suburbs of America. What has quickly replaced the length of...

The market has declared CRM dead any number of times over the years. The most recent pronouncement came when iconic Siebel was purchased by Oracle. If the market maker couldn't stay afloat, then what hope did other vendors have? To be sure, there is something to that doleful reasoning: Few expect th...

The growing adoption of service-oriented architectures including SAP's NetWeaver platform and its related applications are having a significant impact on the politics of integration between manufacturers and distributors. The balance of power has already shifted in a few industries to the channel o...

I spoke with a group of investors last week about the importance of the emerging field of platform technology. They were interested in investing in a company that was looking for additional late round funding and they wanted to know a few things. What is the market for this new technology? Who wi...

Both Oracle and Siebel have developed a reputation for maintaining a hard line on pricing. Now that they are merging, buyers of CRM and related software are apprehensive about how the consolidation will affect pricing. In one bleak scenario, Oracle becomes even more rigid, causing CRM pricing to spi...