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The Salesperson's New Toolbox May 23, 2012 Last week was like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. You know how at the end they fire off a huge flourish of explosives, and if you live in Boston for some reason the Boston Pops play "The 1812 Overture?" It was like that minus the Pops. SAP, NetSuite and Xactly, just to name a few, all had conferences.

The Joy of IP Address-Mapping May 22, 2012 Personalization sits at the very heart of marketing performance improvement in B2B as well as in B2C companies. The latter camp has made enormous strides in recent years in being able to present customers and prospects with relevant content, offers, recommendations, and other types of messages via online channels, including the company website, in an automated and systematic fashion.

Sapphire Now: It's a Mobile, Social, Cloudy, Collaborative World May 15, 2012 The Sapphire Now conference kicked off Monday in Orlando, Fla., with 60,000 customers, partners and employees of SAP participating, either at the conference facility or watching it online. The first day of the event offered the usual lineup of celebrity speakers -- corporate and otherwise -- with Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong featured in the morning and SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott in the afternoon.

CRM Conference to Showcase the Retail Experience May 14, 2012 CRM Conference is being held May 29 to 31 at the Chicago Hyatt Regency. This annual event offers a unique agenda for retailers, said Devon Wylie, CEO of CRMC. "It's specifically focused on case studies from topnotch multinational retailers. With this approach, attendees can get actionable learnings they can take home with them."

Insidesales.com Aims to Keep Leads on the Front Burner May 04, 2012 Imagine walking into a department store on a Wednesday morning and spotting a pair of shoes you feel that you must acquire, or life will have no meaning. You excitedly ask the sales rep if you can try on a pair in your size and she says, "Sure, why don't you come back on Friday?" That deflating experience occurs all the time on the Web, said Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com.

Reading Into IBM's Tealeaf Buy May 03, 2012 IBM is building out its digital marketing functionality in its Smarter Commerce portfolio with the acquisition of Tealeaf Technology, a provider of customer experience analytics. Tealeaf software records and analyzes customer interactions on a company's website and any mobile channels it offers. It allows the company to catch any mistakes or glitches in the system that may be hindering the customer experience.

Match the Big Data Job to the Big Data Solution April 27, 2012 In the rush to play in the Big Data game, it's easy to forget the fundamentals. The fear of being left behind can cause enterprise IT teams to move directly into pilot projects with a choice of products and technologies that may not be best designed to solve the identified business problem.

Harnessing Big Data Through Customer Intelligence April 24, 2012 Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 customer interaction throughout the customer life cycle.

Taking Digital Analytics to the Limit April 17, 2012 Managers must overcome several complex issues to build successful digital analytics teams that can deliver on the high expectations placed on them by upper management. For one, there is currently a significant supply/demand imbalance in the digital analytics talent pool. Also, a wide range of skills are necessary in the end-to-end process of online analytics and optimization.

How Outside Experts Can Refine the Customer Experience April 17, 2012 When it comes to technologies that provide the foundation for customer experience management, there is no shortage of options. The marketplace today is deluged with platforms, including self-service solutions that offer multimodal and open response survey vehicles for soliciting customer feedback across multiple channels, including in-store, email, website and call center.

Look Who's Going to the Big Data Party April 13, 2012 The exponential growth of data from a widening array of sources is making the term "Big Data" a hot topic among corporate executives from businesses of all sizes across nearly every industry. The Big Data phenomenon is being fueled by new social networks, mobile devices and increasingly powerful applications that can apture every keystroke and convert it into valuable information.

Oracle Trumpets Analytics Bona Fides April 06, 2012 Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent news, such as its update of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management.

Why CRM Works April 04, 2012 I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing, or how we perceive issues based on what other information surrounds them.

Customer Relationship Metrics Takes On the Unstructured Data Challenge April 02, 2012 Customer Relationship Metrics has launched Text BI, its latest offering in its suite of managed analytics solutions. Text BI enables companies to take unstructured text-based data from surveys, emails, social media, CRM systems and other applications, and organize it into a format that makes it easier to analyze.

Google Gives Users a Gander at the Trails They Leave March 29, 2012 Google has launched a new tool called "Account Activity," designed to give users a detailed glimpse into their Web usage across all Google sites and services. Account Activity is a personalized, detailed monthly report on Web activity with Google search, Gmail accounts, YouTube and social network Google+.

FTC to Congress: Shorten Data Brokers' Leash March 28, 2012 The Federal Trade Commission this week urged Congress to impose new regulations on companies that collect consumer data related to Internet browsing habits. Under the policy the FTC suggests, data brokers, or the holders of personal consumer information, must allow consumers access to that information.

Customers, Big Data, and the Internet of Things March 22, 2012 The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their juxtaposition on the list. First was the issue of "big data."

Partnership to Align Phone System Data With CRM March 19, 2012 M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. The solution will help customers manage data from their business phone system and other applications in one interface, and to visualize trends in voice and data to understand the "why" of spikes and valleys in activity.

The Curious Case of Big Data February 25, 2012 Daily, we create with every keystroke 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks. Monthly, we express ourselves through 1 billion tweets and 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook. Geeks call this "big data," but astute businesspeople realize that this is a unique market opportunity. This curious case of big data has created new technologies, jobs and challenges.

Microsoft Dynamics Puts Analytics on Steroids February 24, 2012 When Microsoft's next service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM is released in Q2 2012, users who rely on its business intelligence functionality will be in for a pleasant surprise. Microsoft has ratcheted up the BI functionality significantly, providing more options on how to view, present and interact with the data, said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.