An Open Letter to CRM and Social Media People
Over the past few months (and perhaps more so over the past few weeks) I’ve noticed a growing tension between the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the social media folks. In some instances this has led to direct name calling in public mediums - which is rather unfortunate. The advent or evolution of CRM into [...]
How I Understand Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Keep in mind when reading this that my background IS NOT in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), however as someone who is very involved with Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) it’s crucial to understand traditional CRM. My background has always been in social and in marketing. First let’s start off with the obligatory wikipedia definition: C [...]
There’s PR. And there’s Dumb PR. And there’s Even Dumber PR. And No CRM System Can Save Them.
The best CRM system can’t help you if your sales / marketing team is clueless. Here’s a ridiculous email I’ve just received. Name removed to protect the (not-so) innocent X. Y. kindly requests a meeting Hi Zoli, In celebrating our 40th anniversary, I’ve been given the privilege to manage the relationship between your organization and [...]
How Much of a Relationship Do Your Customers Actually Want?
On the Harvard Business Review, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff wrote a piece that caught my eye, Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You. Consumers increasingly prefer self-service, and the authors speculate: Maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be [...]
How CRM and Social Media Evolved to Social CRM
I just arrived at the CRM Evolution conference and last night I attended a pre-show meetup where I had a great conversation with Brian Vellmure. Among one of the interesting things we talked about is how he and I (and others) got involved with Social CRM. We are both very involved with and interested in [...]
Rapportive Shows Social CRM Space Is Heating Up
Increasingly, we are seeing trends that point out to Social CRM becoming the next hot thing in the application world. Unlike the traditional CRM apps, social CRM mines the data in your social network to offer more relevant information regarding your contact or potential customer. Even though the traditional CRM vendors are slowly waking up [...]
SugarCRM Releases Sugar 6 And Ties Up With Cloud Vendors
SugarCRM, the open source CRM company founded in 2004, has announced the release of their latest version, Sugar 6. With this release, SugarCRM is trying to focus on making it easier and flexible for users to use CRM systems. In fact, many users are completely lost when it comes to using CRM. The complexity and [...]
Is SaaS Dead?
There is a meme going on in the tech world about whether SaaS has lost its charm and it is on the way to extinction. This is based on Gartner’s recently published report on the need to re-evaluate the rationale for SaaS. SaaS may not have delivered on its early grand promises – of the [...]
CRM or Social CRM, What’s the Difference?
This is going to be the first post in a series of posts that designed to help you visually break down and understand SCRM. This first post breaks down the difference between CRM and SCRM so that people can get an understanding of what we’re talking about conceptually. The images and the concepts here are [...]
PBWorks Bets on a World Where CRM Meets the Actual Customers
PBWorks is launching a new version of their product today (see previous coverage of PBWorks here) that is aimed at solving the problem of traditional CRMs being siloed and closed to external customers. In the process they’ve invented yet another three letter acronym – Customer Relationship Collaboration or CRC. While I’m not enamored with the [...]
Micro-chunking Software: Tibco and Zoho CEOs Sing the Same Song (Just from Different Notes)
This should probably be a Tweet, but I am not smart enough to squeeze it into 140 characters – perhaps Tumblr or Posterous notes? Anyway, I am in a rambling mood – but I’ll keep it short, just pointing to stuff I read. After all, there’s a reason why my personal blog has the tagline [...]
FUD in the House of SaaS – More on Suites
Recently I wrote about the evergreen Best-of-breed vs. Integrated All-in-One Suite debate again, arguing: Call me “old school”, but I also believe in the value of having one tightly integrated system for most business needs, and I believe it’s true not only for large corporations but much smaller businesses. I don’t have CIO’s to back [...]
Are Suites Really Sour? The Best of Breed vs. Integrated Suite Debate.
The evergreen Best-of-breed vs. Integrated All-in-One Suite debate is back again. This will be a somewhat long post, so let’s sit back and start with some entertainment first. Episode 2, “Suites Are Sour” is from the mini-series SuiteMates, which I admit I find hilariously entertaining, albeit rather pointless. Why? It’s run by supply chain solution [...]
Pearl and Rapportive – Helping Email Become the Killer App (Again)
A couple of weeks ago when I posted about the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, I mentioned Appirio’s “PS Connect” offering that embedded contextual data from Appirio, within Gmail. At the time it was an interesting offering, but didn’t garner much attention given the noise that was building around the Marketplace itself. The other [...]
Google Launches Apps Marketplace
I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners. The new Marketplace [...]
