It has been fun watching the rapid improvement of the marketing function over the last decade. The advance was in no small part due to the advances in marketing automation, and the marketing revolution is not over by a long shot. However, I think we're bumping up against a ceiling, and the improvements we can expect that make marketing faster will plateau. Our next steps should involve refining marketing quality, and many businesses have already embarked on this effort...
Nearly every generation sees the birth of what, for it, will define modern life going forward. As uncertain as the twenty-teens have been, in retrospect economists may point to this decade as being as important as the tipping points of the 1870s and 1920s. If so, there may be no better event to symb...
Whether you call it "industry CRM," "vertical CRM" or something else, the concept is gaining altitude. Not that it's new or ever been gone, but today's vertical CRM is different -- a constellation of quantitatively and qualitatively different and better CRM solutions than we've ever seen. Vendors li...
Last year, uber-analyst Esteban Kolsky and I did a research project to better understand cloud computing's uptake and related issues, and last week Financial Force, our sponsor, made the results public. The findings are interesting to me because they reveal a more or less typical adoption cycle for ...
I spent part of last week listening to presentations about the customer of the future, and of course it made me think. As usual, I didn't think in a straight line. As you've heard from me before, customers are still the human beings that walked out of the ice age 10,000 years ago or even the Cro-Mag...
I've been trying to analyze modern rewards programs and customer loyalty recently for a project. It's a complex issue and so it is tricky to tease apart -- nothing like trying to defuse a bomb, but intellectually challenging for sure. At the heart of the issue is a body of research that says rewards...
This year we traded in terminologies going from big data and analytics to digital disruption as the market-moving meme. I am not sure either one hits the spot, but they give me something to write about. Other things happened in 2015 too, but I'm just going to focus here. It seems to me we focus on t...
The end of the year brings out some interesting goodies from various workshops competing with Santa for big kids' attention. Some of it is pretty good stuff. Here's a sampling of the best end-of-year product announcements from the cloud community designed to put you in the post-holiday, already-back...
Customers always do what they're supposed to do. If it's not what vendors want them to do, then it's likely because vendors haven't figured out how to ask the right question
Maybe you've already considered this, but it just popped into my head the other day as I was thinking once again about customer experience -- or CX, as some people shorten it. I've often said that customers experience moments of truth and that the experience should be focused on the things they care...
For once, Oracle OpenWorld went long on substance. That's hard to do when you have so many products to discuss and Larry Ellison pontificating, but he was both under control and substantive -- though he couldn't resist taking a few shots at competitors. Oracle's team hardly ever sees SAP and IBM in ...
Partner relationship management has seen its ups and downs over the first part of this century. Running an indirect channel is vitally important to any vendor trying to extend its reach without incurring the high costs of building up a sales team and all that supports it. Many vendors figure it's mo...
Salesforce last week said it would invest $100 million in emerging sales force partners in Europe. The company previously announced a similar program for the Americas, and it hopes to discover valuable new companies and business solutions. Paul Greenberg and the team at CRM Idol have been doing the ...
I've had to do a lot of thinking about customer loyalty lately, both for my book and more recently for client engagements. What's interesting is how chaotic this market is and how many people are writing about it with very little data. There isn't even strong agreement on the similarities and differ...
eGain is touting a report from Forrester Consulting and my friend Ian Jacobs purporting to show that omnichannel customer service is stagnant or worse when it comes to delivering service that customers need and want. Ian does good work and I am in agreement with him on this, but I have trouble with ...
Yes, communities and infrastructure can't keep up
Some projects are moving too fast
No, expansion is needed to meet demand
The pace seems about right
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AI Is Forcing Companies to Rethink Employee Experience
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How AI Is Changing Sales Teams Without Replacing Reps
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Workbooks Takes On CRM Giants With Plain-English AI
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