Customer Data

Chinese Army Ends 3-Month Hacking Hiatus
May 20, 2013

After a three-month lull, China's People's Liberation Army has resumed hack attacks against United States companies and government agencies. Despite a ballyhooed February report from private security firm Mandiant, and despite public complaints from the Pentagon, Unit 61398, the PLA group made famous by the report, is again back to its hacking ways.

InsideView Provides New Insights Into Sales Leads
May 17, 2013

InsideView earlier this month debuted a new marketing offering housed on its InsideView CRM Intelligence Platform. This first iteration of InsideView for Marketing focuses on automated lead enrichment capabilities, said Marc Perramond, VP of product. It was built with an eye to enhancing a company's lead records with social, media and financial information.

Bloomberg Caught With Hands in the Customer Data Jar
May 16, 2013

Bloomberg has been embroiled in scandal since news broke last week that its reporters were using the company's corporate terminals to monitor its customers' activities. The story began to unravel when news surfaced that Goldman Sachs had confronted Bloomberg over the possibility that reporters were accessing its account data.

CRM's Stairway to Stardom
May 14, 2013

Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses they patronize. As a result, when I say I write about CRM, I'm often asked to explain what it is. That leads me to think a lot about a practical definition of "CRM."

From BI to KPIs to Benchmark Success in the Cloud
May 10, 2013

Organizations of all sizes across an assortment of industries are using a growing set of cloud analytics solutions to address their Big Data, business intelligence and data integration challenges. Escalating competitive pressures and customer expectations are forcing organizations to find new ways to tap internal and external data sources to achieve their business goals.

Tap CRM to Give Your Customers a Pleasant Surprise
May 07, 2013

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is good. It's the way you realize the value from your CRM investment.

PowerMap Lets Users Visualize the Lay of the CRM Land
April 29, 2013

PowerObjects has released PowerMap, a new add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "It is a way to create a visualization of geolocation in the database," said PowerObjects CEO Dean Jones. At its core, PowerMap does what the name suggests -- allows users to plot addresses of a group of entities on a map within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Pegasystems App Susses Out Customers' Soft Spots
April 23, 2013

Pegasystems has rolled out the newest iteration of its marketing application. New or enhanced features include improved ability to perform real time event-triggered actions and new B2B recommendation functionality. The key to understanding this app is its name, "Next-Best-Action," said Steve Kraus, senior director of product marketing. "That is the concept behind our approach to marketing.

The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 2
April 19, 2013

Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged. They range from running afoul of still-developing regulations to security concerns, to consumers misinterpreting content. As people connect with the Internet through multiple access points, keeping a marketing message consistent is becoming more essential.

Google Takes Another Step Toward Omniscience
April 16, 2013

Google has engaged the Behavio team in a "hiring exercise." The startup uses mobile sensors to collect data and predict behavior. Its technology recognizes data such as location, contacts, nearby destinations, recent phone activity, daily movement, and surrounding physical information. Data can be analyzed to let consumers know anything from whether their morning coffee stop is unusually crowded to which traffic routes are clear.

The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 1
April 12, 2013

As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that apply to ads in newspapers, radio and television apply to mobile devices -- and social media too, for that matter.

Subscriptions, Social and CRM
March 13, 2013

"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.

Hackers: The Flies in Social Media Marketing Ointment
February 25, 2013

Did you hear? McDonald's has just acquired Burger King! Also, someone at the company apparently has a potty mouth. Another unusual and unexpected corporate trade also happened last week -- Cadillac acquired Jeep. These events, of course, didn't really happen. In both instances, hackers gained control of the brands' Twitter accounts and began sending out false and sometimes very offensive tweets.

Secrets for Speeding CRM Time to Value
February 21, 2013

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership and the concept of return on investment. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value." The T2V test is simple.

3 Bad Habits to Unlearn for SCRM Success
February 14, 2013

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said that sales of software for SCRM topped $1 billion in 2012.

Big Data for Marketing
February 13, 2013

The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. Sales and service evolved organically, making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available.

Cross-Domain Semantics and the End of 'Solution Sales'
February 08, 2013

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should very seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world, it's the vendor who can answer "yes" who will win the business.

Context: Customer Data's Secret Sauce
January 31, 2013

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales organization in my company.

Bronto Remarketing Engine Slices and Dices Retail Customer Preferences
January 24, 2013

Bronto Software this week released a significant update to its Bronto Marketing Platform: a remarketing engine that helps retailers link online and in-store purchases in order to create targeted email messages that speak to the individual user. New features allow marketers to collect data such as purchase history and then use that information to segment customers and create email campaigns.

Machine Learning, TDA and the Future of Invention
January 23, 2013

Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new way to analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very large indeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" and hearing about it has the feel of hearing about relativity for the first time and learning that space is curved.