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Paul Greenberg, CRM luminary and author of the best-selling book "CRM at the Speed of Light, 3rd edition," spoke to this problem this week when he and his business partner Bruce Culbert at BPT Partners (see below) spoke to me about the failure of most companies to actually find out what the expectations and demands of their customers are...

I started a blog last week and while that might make me sound like some cutting edge guru, I am anything but. My friend Paul Greenberg, whose blog inspired me because he has let me post a few entries, informed me that there are already more than 14 million of these things, and a new one is forming about every pico-second. In the hierarchy of small, a nano-anything is a billionth, e.g. 10E-9, but there are smaller smalls, for example, pico-something is a trillionth e.g.10E-12, and femto- is the impossibly tiny quadrillionth or 10E-15. (You get to digress like this on a blog. Who cares?) The point is that blogs are forming very fast and for good reasons...

I am in California this week attending Salesforce.com's latest announcement and bash and looking for clues about what happens next in this marketplace. My bet is that the books mentioned here and several more all point to a future that will be richer and more exciting than anything we've seen yet. It seems to me, and I have said this before, the age of the customer is dawning and it will have little to do with the transaction oriented CRM that we have seen so far. Paul Greenberg sees much the same things percolating when he talks about the customer experience. We'll see. Combining Pink's vision and the inevitable turns of the market that Friedman and Christensen talk about tells me that CRM is going to look different and be a lot more fun shortly...

Last week a small piece of our world changed. Did you catch it? It happened Thursday, when NetSuite, with its NetFlex announcement, became the second company to offer development and customization capabilities ...

Sales systems are a regular feature of the CRM suite, and if you didn't know better you might think that garden-variety sales force automation (SFA) is about the only thing you need. That might have been true a few years ago, but we're seeing that changes in markets and economies can have a great effect on what we sell and how we sell it. Consequently, the software we use to sell must evolve as well...

The indirect sales channel has emerged as a sales environment distinctly different from conventional business-to-business or business-to-consumer selling. This shifting focus is long overdue, especially in industries such as technology, where a high percentage of products are sold through distributor and reseller networks that require different approaches to selling and management...

Back when I sold software for a living -- this would be during the last ice age -- a witty software developer in my company stuck a floppy disk to his filing cabinet with a refrigerator magnet. Scrawled on the disk's label were our flagship product's name and the words "source code." ...

It's not often that I get much of a response to a column, but my recent piece about spyware prompted several letters -- and not just the "let-me-tell-you-about-my-experience" kind ...

Daniel H. Pink has written an interesting book that has important implications for the future of CRM. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, to be published next month, is excerpted in the February issue of Wired magazine ...

A while ago I wrote about the problems caused by various forms of malicious software that download to your computer while you are surfing the Internet ...

Professional courtesy, that's what I call it ...

Quite a few companies are offering solutions that provide automated customer service in one way or another. There is a lot to be said about this trend, and much of it is good ...

Over the last few weeks, I have been busy putting the finishing touches on a new report scheduled for delivery to market later this month. My premise was that there might be a lot of enterprising companies in CRM or closely associated markets that are either new or that have new ideas that we should pay attention to ...

I got an interesting press release the other day. Headlined "SalesForce Loses CRM Lead," the release said that a new hosted CRM company, FreeCRM.com, claims 13,500 customers to Salesforce.com's 12,500. Hence the leadership change. As you might expect from the name, this company has amassed its considerable hosted CRM community by giving away its product...

At its best the selling life can be great fun, full of action and accomplishment. At its worst it can make pushing on a string look like the essence of productivity ...

However, Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, told CRM Buyer that he didn't think that Siebel or hosted CRM companies needed to worry just yet. For her part, Liz Roche, vice president of technology research services at Meta Group,...

Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group and author of best selling CRM at the Speed of Light, agreed. According to him, the reason for the deal is SAP's NetWeaver platform, the highly efficient architecture that underlies every facet of mySAP "It's one of the better platform...

While acknowledging that privacy is an issue, Paul Greenberg, president of The56 Group and author of "CRM at the Speed of Light," said he feels hopeful aboutthe increased use of CRM by government agencies. "If the government is moreresponsive, that encourages citizens to believe in it, and that helps erasethe cynicism dominating our view of government since Watergate," he said...

Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, told CRM Buyer in an interview that the churn rate for carriers this year is expected to be 77 million customers, largely because of a new U.S. law that lets customers keep their existing phone numbers when they switch carriers. There is no way carriers can prevent all 77 million turnovers, Greenberg said, but it is worthwhile to use Siebel 7.7 Communications or a similar package to identify the high-value customers that are worth saving...

Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, agreed that SAP is entering a tougher market than usual because mid-market processes are not as well establishedas at large enterprises, nor are best practices as easily available as they are at Fortune 3500 companies. "SAP may be on bit of a slippery path here, but if anyone can figure it out, they can," he said in an interview with CRM Buyer...