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This story was originally published on June 14, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence of events that can end very badly ...

Before they call or have a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, smart salespeople check the CRM system to see what the customer record says about that person or that business. That's what CRM is there for, from a sales perspective: to give sales the background information it needs to have the best chance at closing a sale. ...

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. ...

Last year, I polled a group of respected CRM resellers to create a list spotlighting "forgotten features" -- tools and settings in CRM that many users overlook, even when they could bring great value to their businesses ...

Some things in life are fleeting -- the lifespan on the mayfly, the appearance of a rainbow, the pure white of the first snow of winter. Some things in your CRM system are fleeting too -- namely, the quality of your data. ...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. ...

Building a customer relationship -- the kind that lasts a long time -- is a not an easy thing. There are lots of occasions where things can go awry, touch points where signals can get crossed and communications that can unwittingly turn a customer off ...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. ...

I've worked as a journalist covering CRM, and I've worked with vendors trying to explain and educate potential customers about CRM. In both roles, I've seen one troubling trend that very few vendors seem able to buck ...

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs from their CRM application. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of workflows that introduce social media data or specific sales and marketing behaviors unique to the business...

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 that market to them and those they patronize ...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it so you can use it. That raises a question: How are you using it? ...

If you're a dedicated skeptic like I am, you probably know the way a psychic's cold read works. Start by asking a broad question that fits almost anyone -- like, "Have you lost someone you love?" Allow the mark to fill in the blanks, and then ask further leading questions based on information fed to you until the mark thinks you're actually communicating with a dead relative...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope ...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRMfailure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percentof implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were notcoming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample wasimpossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction businesses had withthat generation of CRM...

The devil is in the details, the saying goes. When it comes to B2B selling, the dollars are also in the details ...

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 ...

"People buy your story." ...

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball springtraining, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, aboutMoneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago ...