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Many sales forces seem to be stuck in a time warp. Selling with a transaction focus to customers who require a consultative or even enterprise approach is driving the cost of supporting these misaligned sales forces to the point of being unaffordable. Conversely, there are companies out there that have tried a consultative selling strategy when all that was needed was transaction support...

Throughout the last few months of 2005 there was a pronounced ramp-up in activity around Web Services to enable integration of marketing, sales and CRM databases so that more precise selling strategies could be created. ...

My garage looks like a weight loss contraption museum. There's virtually every piece of workout equipment sold on the shopping channels and then some. One child asked if we were going to donate the older ones to the Smithsonian as she'd just learned about that museum in school. With enough hardware out there to start a small gym, one can't help but reflect on the disconnect between intentions and actions...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally ...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. I didn't do any predictions at the close of 2004 which would have been 50 percent right if I was lucky, but my predictions for 2006 are coming next week ...

In watching the continual battling of best-of-breed vendors for top position on CRM-related searches on Google, I decided to sign up for an AdWords account and see how this works. First, I am not a search engine optimization expert, not an AdWords expert, but having tracked many small companies I saw popping up in AdWords seemingly battling their competitors for space along the right side of Google search screens, I was curious...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within larger ERP companies of senior managers and directors considering making a run at their own companies...

It's only a matter of time until Google unleashes a free low-end hosted CRM suite. The heart of the business model for free CRM will be the potential for driving up advertising revenue while at the same time up-selling advanced CRM features. With Google Analytics launched and delivering a depth of features other free analytics packages can't touch, the progression of Google's product strategy is starting to take shape. Here are the mile markers showing CRM is on Google's roadmap:...

A truly humbling experience is to give your first Webinar as an analyst. I remember it well; my voice projected the "deer in the headlights" image that we all try to hide but the world sees anyway. Giving a good Webinar is a natural talent for some, but for the rest of us it takes work and concentration ...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a marketing department that has a passion to execute and deliver results...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipelines ...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action ...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and having a platform to constantly bring value to them...

The recently released results of the Corporate Executive Board's 2005 Benchmarking Survey shows just how involved marketing departments from B2B, high tech, B2C -- indirect channels to B2C -- and direct channels are in managing a significant part of their company's total spending on competitor, industry and market intelligence ...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacturers. Web-based product introductions are the strategy of choice for many manufacturers trying to control the two most critical variables in the marketing mix: products and price...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing expectations your prospects and customers have. Many companies can easily list off these expectations of their customers in a rapid-fire litany yet, have no idea how these expectations are prioritized, and worse yet, if they are fulfilling secondary needs instead of primary ones...

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the innovation, therefore, entirely new markets get created as a result. What follows is market dominance, and just look at 3M, IBM, Microsoft and other global leaders, my students pointed out. Throw in the Apple iPod and case closed...

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's CRM business and the Boston Red Sox are just too strong to ignore. Add in the fact the Red Sox are the World Champions, in part due to acquiring talent, but more by making the team dynamic work, and the allegory is complete. With Oracle's big news this week, the rivalry between Oracle and SAP in CRM now compares to one of sport's all-time best rivalries, the New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox...

Manufacturers are increasingly turning to hosted CRM applications including those from Salesforce.com and others to have their sales, service, and sales operations departments capture competitive intelligence from the field. The competitive intelligence generated from the many interactions with resellers, dealers, distributors and direct customers gets captured by channel managers for use by sales, marketing and senior management in the creation of per-deal and per-market competitive strategies. Manufacturers are using separate Salesforce.com and other hosted CRM application accounts specifically for this purpose...

It's time to start giving your customers a seat at the development table. Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs are delivering results today, which is exemplified in the best practices of some the leaders in this concept ...