Spotlight Features

My Web survey of SAP users is producing some interesting results. More than any other factor, customer references influenced buyers to choose SAP, quelling their concerns about the potential risks involved in taking that step. In fact, at this point in the survey, 80 percent of respondents said they...

The mantra of selling solutions has taken enterprise software by storm and nowhere is this more prevalent than CRM. Honestly, it seems like the more challenging and difficult it is to sell into specific sectors of CRM, the more "solution-selling" is being invoked. This newfound religion is truly t...

Many sales forces seem to be stuck in a time warp. Selling with a transaction focus to customers who require a consultative or even enterprise approach is driving the cost of supporting these misaligned sales forces to the point of being unaffordable. Conversely, there are companies out there that ...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It's going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent thems...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. A seismic shift is happening in CRM today. Foremost of these is the shift from transactions to trust -- and if your pipeline has been ...

A silent stealth war is going on between best-of-breed vendors for position in the Google AdWords column of searches on keyword searches, and a strategy on the part of larger best-of-breed vendors of completing dominating their smaller best-of-breed counterparts in AdWord spending alone. This war fo...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within ...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action. China is emerging as the world's manufacturing center and a sourcing magn...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the inno...