MindTouch Delivers Knowledge Base for Salesforce Customers
MindTouch is one of the early leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space –their CEO, Aaron Fulkerson was a regular attendee on the conference circuit. Over the last couple of years however, MindTouch has gone pretty silent as market conditions and heightened competition caused them to disappear from view. I bumped into Fulkerson in San Diego [...]
Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies
One of the key pieces of advice for SaaS startups (actually all startups really but in this case of particular relevance to SaaS0 is to measure everything. Over the last few years a number of different solutions have been developed which allow companies to measure different parts of their business
Dataloader.io Provides Easy Salesforce Migration
One of the great untold barriers to actually moving to the cloud is the not insignificant pain that organizations feel when migrating their data from an existing system of record to a cloud solution. This is especially the case when the solution is both an integral part of the organization’s
FinancialForce 2012 Release–Delivering a Loosely Coupled Set of Solutions
Nicely timed to coincide with next week’s DreamForce conference comes the summer 2012 release from FinancialForce, the cloud accounting company that is both part owned by Salesforce, and built upon the force.com platform. While product announcements tend to be a little ho-hum, this one is interesting since it comes from
Brightpearl Delivers in a Multi Channel World
Nearly three years ago in a fit of frustration I wrote a post detailing what I considered to be a relatively obvious set of requirements for a small manufacturing business I am a shareholder in. To recap – we currently use a bunch of disconnected systems because there is no
iComplete–The World’s Simplest CRM?
There’s been a lot of talk among a new breed of CRM providers recently about finding the right balance of functionality and complexity to meet the needs of very small businesses. While salesforce has cleaned up in the enterprise cloud CRM space, there’s no denying it’s product offering is both priced a little too high, [...]
Totango Powers SaaS Vendor Insights
Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of advisory work with SaaS startups that are just taking their first tentative steps to market. I’ve sat in meetings at length trying to drill into sales cycles and pricing strategies and it often seems that organizations are flying a little blind without
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
Sorry Gartner, Here’s the Real Magic Quadrant for SCRM
To understand what Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) is, we have to start with a clear definition. The definition must be clearly articulated and easily understood by individuals in the industry. In the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, Gartner writes, “Social CRM applications need to be far more customer-centric than more-traditional CRM applications. Without benefits [...]
Simon Cowell Left American Idol to Launch CRM Idol. But He Did Not Make the Final Cut.
Paul Greenberg did. Simon is off doing X-Factor instead Joke apart, if you are in the CRM business, or interested in CRM, or even just social software, chances are you’ve heard of Paul Greenberg. Simply said, he is the Godfather of CRM. And Godfathers get to make decisions. If you follow Paul’s annual CRM Watchlist [...]
The Social CRM Magic Quadrant
I missed the Social CRM Summit today – twice. Not only did I not physically attend, but I was occupied with work and only found time in my lunch break to quickly scan a few tweets. Now it’s after dinner, there are 700 tweets, and I am ready to analyse away. Of course I use [...]
The Social CRM Oxymoron
The temptation was great of course, a few years back, to invent Social CRM. There was a lot of buzz about Social, social people, social companies, social employees and social customers. It wasn’t a great step from that last one to Social Customer Relationship Management. Last year I piled all that up on the Social [...]
Facebook: The Greatest CRM Platform in the World?
Ok, so it’s not exactly a fully fledged CRM system (yet) but when you compare the information you have on a client or lead in Salesforce with the information that Facebook has on the same person the difference and quality of information is mind-boggling. Not only that but Facebook permeates across the online world like [...]
Business Problems that Social CRM Helps Organizations Solve
(White to move and Mate in 2, can you figure out the answer?) There’s been a lot of talk about what SCRM is (social customer relationship management) and how it should be defined. There has also been a lot of conversation around Social CRM from a technology standpoint in terms of vendor offerings. I’ll admit [...]
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 [...]
