If you've been in this business any length of time, you've become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what's...
A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog j...
At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss?...
I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing with it effectively. They've been content to watch and wait, hoping that ...
What struck me most last week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- beyond Oracle OpenWorld -- came out of meetings I had with CEOs of software companies situated south of Oracle on Route 101. The companies are all SaaS-based, and I promised not to spill the beans, so there will be no names -- yet...
Oracle is a big company, and that point gets driven home when you start to go in-depth on their products. At a show like OpenWorld, which is dedicated more or less to touching on every aspect of the business, you can quickly get out of your depth. Since the opening keynote on Sunday, the talk has b...
Last week's doings at HP exposed a lot that few of us ever think about. The basic story is that board member Meg Whitman replaced recently minted CEO Leo Apotheker. The company's stock price has been floundering for a long time, and many people on and off the board had little confidence in the job...
Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...
The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That's not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last 10 years that rival this year's Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference, that was also ...
It's worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce -- the products announced -- as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist, and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters. Many people might look at the news coming out of Sa...
People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or...
The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and it...
Maybe I'll take some heat for this, but I am trying to live by Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' ideas, especially concerning transparency. Let me digress already. Tapscott and Williams wrote a very good book called Wikinomics and followed it up with a better one, Macrowikinomics. As the titles...
Someone recently commented on my post about curation. In part, the comment read, "Do you mean that it is the end result of the analytics phase, where relevant information on a specific topic is collected and acted upon?" The answer is yes and no, and I thought it would make a worthy topic to occupy...
On Sunday, July 10, Time Magazine posted a book review of sorts by Rana Foroohar. "Driven Off the Road by M.B.A.s" is really a riff on Bob Lutz's new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. Lutz should know something about his topic since he spent a 47-year c...
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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Enterprises Are Trading ‘Press One’ for CRM-Native AI Agents
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Overcoming GenAI Roadblocks: TaskUs Helps Retailers Compete
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The End of ‘Spray and Pray’ Email Marketing
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Adobe Positions Itself as the AI Control Layer for CX
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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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