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Earlier this month SugarCRM announced that it had secured US$20 million in a new financing round, bringing its total funding so far to $46 million -- a significant accomplishment for several reasons ...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz ...

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times ...

It was a man-bites-dog story in the summer of 1999. An interesting headline at Red Herring on July 30 read: "Head Count: Salesforce.com gets Larry's blessing." Marc Benioff was leaving Oracle to start Salesforce.com, and Larry Ellison was not only giving his blessing, he was going to pony up some capital to get the company running. In exchange, Ellison got a board seat and a bit of controversy when Oracle launched a competing product. However, that's not the focus of this story...

I was speaking with a CRM vendor the other day about positioning and messaging for sales force automation. The vendor was telling me that the company wanted a back-to-basics message that would focus on the importance of SFA (sales force automation) in helping salespeople recover some of the time they invest in unproductive activities ...

The lower prices deliver many ancillary benefits. With the introduction of lower-cost-per-port speech engines and new competitively priced servers, the price of providing CRM applications goes down -- sometimes quite dramatically. "With VoIP, companies can justify installing CRM systems for smaller workgroups and in more remote locations," said Denis Pombriant, a principal with Beagle Research...

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, once began a conference in San Francisco with a surprise keynote address by a George W. Bush impersonator, so when I was invited to this week's "Tour de Force" announcement I had inklings that we might see a facsimile of the New French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, or possibly get a glimpse of his new 40-year-old, ex-supermodel, tire-heiress girlfriend, Carla Bruni...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just musings on how it went down ...

Denis Pombriant: You and your writing partner James Gilmore have been responsible for introducing some important ideas into the business world, like mass customization and the experience economy. How do you come up with ideas like that? Joe Pine:...

In a new report by Beagle Research,Managing Principal Denis Pombriant outlines the unintended benefits -- or the applications' intangible strengths -- that SaaS is bringing to customers. The report is based on conversations with CEOs at top SaaS vendors including Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite; RightNow's Greg Gianforte; Mike Braun, CEO of IntAcct; Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM at Oracle; Brian Zanghi, CEO of Kadient; Michael Torto, CEO of Centive; David Thompson, head of Genius.com; Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com; Mike Bauer of Intacct; and Brian Halpin, vice president and general manager of SageCRM...

There is a huge CRM lesson embedded in the results of the Iowa caucuses, and it has almost nothing to do with which on-demand CRM application a candidate used to track everything ...

There is a big difference between a forecast and a resolution, and the former is easier to make than the latter ...

Every year I write two columns that are a little different. The first, which is this one, is my attempt at quality control and I use it as much for sport as to assess how I did a year ago in predicting the events of the year now ending. You might think I would learn from this, but the second column goes ahead and makes the same mistakes I made a year earlier -- trying to predict the year ahead. Here it goes...

Sales 2.0 is a big deal both because it is causing us all to take a new look at selling -- along with all of the social networking ideas and technology that is changing our work habits -- as well as for what it says about marketing ...

Maybe GRC is the new ROI, maybe not, but you can't deny that ROI is getting old. ROI is simply a metric that measures the excess profit (or return) made by implementing (or investing in) a solution, minus the cost of the solution, when compared to not having implemented the same solution. GRC is governance, risk and compliance, three things people outside of the executive suite are not likely to care a lot about...

They pulled out all the stops at Oracle Open World last week to unveil a whole lot of advanced and interesting business technology. It was the 30th anniversary show, but the emphasis was clearly about the future -- not the past ...

I was looking forward to writing more on Sales 2.0 this week. Selling is something that I am keenly interested in, but it will have to wait for another time. A call from a client set me off in another direction ...

OK, I get it. I went to the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week and there was a lot to like about it ...

My natural inclination right now is to say something like, "I want to buy a vowel," but really, I want more ...

I have been anticipating the Sales 2.0 conference coming up in San Francisco for many reasons. As a certified, bag-carrying sales guy for a number of years, selling is part of me and though I am an old dog, I do enjoy at least hearing about new tricks ...