Last month, the eminently readable and undeniably talented Ginger Conlon wrote a post about buzzwords on the 1to1 Media Blog (which is one of the first things I read each day, and you should too, because it quite nicely puts things in a customer-centric frame of reference). She asked about buzzwords people hated, and she got a barrage of vitriol about verbiage people were tired of.
Frank Eliason took the time to respond to last Wednesday’s post about Comcast’s somewhat dubious idea of having customers hook up digital converter boxes themselves, which was indeed nice of him. However, some parts of Frank’s response were not particularly mollifying. Frank pointed out that…
By Guest Blogger Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Forrester Research
I’ve had a number of interesting debates on who should lead the customer social media interaction in the last few weeks. In part, this question comes up because a great deal of social media was initiated in the Marketing department via listening or brand sentiment programs. What we do know is that all departments benefit- marketing, sales, service, product dev, engineering from the voice of the customer information that results from deploying social media.
Tomorrow, I’m moderating a webinar with a couple of great guests – Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Businesses, and Bill Golder, the executive vice president of business development at Miller-Heimann.
We wrote about Echosign last year, and the company is not standing still. It might seem as if the idea of signing contracts on line was simple and left little room for new features, but CEO Jason Lemkin says that’s just not so.
“We were strong in B2B, but not as strong in the B2C space and financial services,” he says. “We did not sufficiently mimic the paper experience – I think we nailed that on this release.”
By Chris Bucholtz
There’s been a push recently – especially in marketing automation – toward making systems easier to use. First came things like campaign management, so the ordinary marketer could use the system without the need for a trained “expert” to translate ideas into actions. Lately, we’ve been seeing approaches that help make process creation easier, so that things like lead routing can be defined easily and quickly and allow managers to react in real time to changing conditions.
News came today of the wind-down in operations of LucidEra, which offered an SaaS business intelligence product that we discussed with CEO Ken Rudin. The first indication I received of this was an email on Friday from Ken telling of a change in email addresses from his corporate to his personal address, never a good sign for a chief executive.
By Chris Bucholtz
When we talk about mobile CRM, the concept is generally understood to mean the projection of CRM into the field on the handheld device s of the people who use CRM data – initially, sales reps, but increasingly, other people, especially field service staff.
There’s one thing we’re missing, however: CRM in this day and age is no longer a one-way operation. There should be an aspect of mobile CRM that affects the customer, at least beyond informing the sales pitch or the service information he receives from someone else.
By Chris Bucholtz
We had a concept internally we liked to call the “CRM-isphere.” The idea here is that your business is like a cell; what you emphasize determines what system forms the nucleus around which the rest of your enterprise is oriented. For example, if the emphasis was on manufacturing, then ERP might be the nucleus, and other functions would revolve around serving ERP. Some tech companies seem to be centered around marketing, so you might expect them to revolve around marketing technology.