Inside Microsoft CRM

Defining - and not re-defining - socialprise

2008-09-04T12:53:01Z

By Chris Bucholtz It may be a dangerous thing to coin a word too early, lest others get a hold of it and water down the meaning to the point where it no longer can be defined and thus loses its power. I suspect few are quite as aware of this as Rand Schulman, the CMO at InsideView, who finds himself now nuturing and guarding the new word “socialprise” (which was coined by InsideView’s Director of Product Management Marc Perramond, just to give credit where it’s due). Socialprise is a great word ...(read more)

Changes afoot at Inside CRM - you just can’t see them yet

2008-09-02T16:16:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz If you notice that not much is changing on our home page, don’t worry. We’re getting ready to unveils some major changes here at Inside CRM, and the engineering guys say that adding a bunch of new content now would be sort of like jamming pieces into a game of Jenga – the whole effort could come toppling down. That’s cool – we have plenty of stuff to talk about, and the positive impact of this effort will be immensely apparent in about two weeks. Stay tuned....(read more)

New on Inside CRM: Tools to Help Choose the Right CRM Vendor

2008-08-29T11:22:00Z

If we have one goal here at Inside CRM, it’s to be useful to CRM buyers as they negotiate the rocky shoals and confusing currents of buying a CRM system. It’s not easy to figure out what solution is best for your company. To help clear away some of the confusion, we’ve added a couple of tools that can help make things a little more objective: our CRM Vendor Evaluation Matrix and our CRM Consulting Services RFP Template . These tools can help you get started evaluating your needs and mapping different...(read more)

Lawson’s CEO: Head in the SaaS Sand

2008-08-27T18:33:00Z

Jim Berkowitz’s blog today makes mention of a rather amazing interview with Harry Debes , CEO of Lawson Software, in which Debes predicts that the SaaS “industry will collapse,” starting with Salesforce.com, in two years. I presume that to save space, the editors of ZDNet Asia omitted the stuff about Debes also predicting that those newfangled cell phone gadgets will never catch on. Like it or not, SaaS is now well established as a delivery model. However, you gotta be pretty out...(read more)

Forecast: 100 percent chance of CRM failure

2008-08-26T15:30:03Z

By Chris Bucholtz I’ve written at length about CRM failure as an effect of misplaced expectations – the technology does what it was designed to do, but the humans who use it sometimes fail to grasp its true purpose and its limitations. I was apparently prattling on about this concept to a friend of mine – let’s call him “Andy” – who’s a big-time open source programmer-type and even has a couple of O’Reilly titles under his belt. The company Andy works for has grown a lot lately, both through success...(read more)

RightNow shoots the contact center generation gap

2008-08-25T12:49:00Z

By Chris Bucholtz It’s not enough for CRM companies to introduce new features to their solutions – they have to introduce new features that people will actually use. RightNow put out its August 08 Release today, and I think it has a couple of items that its users will find ways to put to use fairly quickly. One of the more interesting is the idea of co-browsing. Essentially, it’s the idea that a customer service representative can ask to “take control” of a caller’s desktop to accomplish something...(read more)

365 days of free CRM: Concursive’s appeal to SMBs

2008-08-20T16:19:00Z

By Chris Bucholtz The idea of free CRM has been around for a while ( DataForce CRM , OctopusCity and Free CRM for example). The object is to use CRM as a loss leader and to sell services, add-ons and other things to make the CRM solution more useful. Yesterday, Concursive announced an offer that goes one step farther – a free year for 100 seats of CRM. This offer’s different because Concursive has sufficient confidence in its solution, ConcourseSuite 5.0, to believe that this extended test drive...(read more)

Xactly makes “rewards” actually rewarding

2008-08-19T18:23:00Z

By Chris Bucholtz The fine folks at Xactly rolled out a neat program this week at the DestinationCRM show in New York. As you may know, Xactly planted its initial stake in the ground with its compensation management tools, then started building from there, branching into analytics, performance management, territory management and setting its sights on other untapped or underserved sales processes. If you’re unfamiliar with them, read up about them here in this blog post from earlier in 2008. Its...(read more)

Maximizer hitches its wagon to mobile CRM

2008-08-18T10:59:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz A while back (I can’t pinpoint the date, but it was a while ago) I said that any CRM provider that did not include a truly effective mobile component would eventually become a casualty of consolidation. (Smarter people than me said it a lot earlier, I admit.) Independently reaching a similar view was Maximizer Software. That point was driven home today when Maximizer announced its new brand, Maximizer Mobile CRM. A name change may not seem like much, but it shows a lot of things...(read more)

CRM, riding the (tiny) rails

2008-08-14T12:08:05Z

One of the new trends in building relationships with customers is the idea of giving something away – not like a slice of summer sausage from the Hickory Farms mall store (by the way: yech!), but some nugget of useful information. This can be really effective, especially when that information has value for the customer, and is actually part of what the company sells. It’s really crazy where this idea manifests itself. A nice example of this landed in my mailbox not long ago in the form of the catalog...(read more)

Call center myths, and how VoIP and at-home agents smash them

2008-08-13T14:26:05Z

I had an interesting conversation with Greg Sherry, the director of marketing for Witness Actionable Solutions at Verint Systems, Inc. about the rapidly-evolving nature of the call center, especially as it evolves from a fixed environment on a corporate campus to a virtual call center, with agents spread literally all over the country. As we were talking, Greg explained that a series of seemingly unrelated events – better technology, higher gas prices, the difficulty of retaining good agents, the...(read more)

Building freeways between CRM systems…

2008-08-11T16:53:03Z

Last week, SnapLogic introduced a new solution pack for Salesforce.com, which will allow users to integrate it with their existing applications. That may not be immense news by itself - Salesforce has several other integration companies in its AppExchange program - but it is interesting because SnapLogic is developing these solution packs for other CRM solutions, too (their first CRM solution pack was for SugarCRM ). Chris Marino, SnapLogic’s CEO, pointed out the idea that these solutions would...(read more)

How the concept of ‘mindshare’ is anti-CRM

2008-08-04T16:44:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz I was reading the business news today and I ran across a word that sets me on edge, especially when it’s not used correctly: mindshare. Essentially, the way this word is used in most cases today runs contrary to the very essence of CRM and to the idea of putting the customer at the basis of any interaction. Allow me to explain: Mindshare started out as a concept in advertising and promotion to define putting a brand out there so effectively that it becomes synonymous with the product...(read more)

Webinars for the social customer-conscious

2008-07-31T12:16:00Z

By Chris Bucholtz We do our own fair share of webinars , but it never hurts to hear more of ‘em. Toward that end, I’m happy to recommend a series called “New World CRM – Enterprise 2.0 and the Era of the Social Customer.” This trio of webinars, which wrapped up yesterday by can be accessed here featured two of my favorites – Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, which sponsors the series, and Paul Greenberg, who is probably at this moment hunched over his computer, furiously...(read more)

Landslide picks a target, and hits it

2008-07-30T12:34:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz We talk a lot about “CRM failure,” which I’ve written is not usually an IT failure or a problem with technology of any sort, but with expectations – the system is brought in with the expectation that it will do something it can’t do, and then is blamed when it can’t do it. It’s not really fair to the CRM solution, but it’s a lot easier for a company executive to blame the CRM solution than to admit an almost total lack of understanding of how his or her organization actually works...(read more)

Today’s post brought to you by the letters C, R and M

2008-07-25T14:18:02Z

By Chris Bucholtz I’m always looking for good examples of CRM people can understand. The concept is encased in a layer of jargon that works against it with neophytes, and since CRM is usually accompanied by a technology component, the very sound of the acronymn triggers the tune-out reflex in about 85 percent of the population. So I hunt for an example of good CRM that most people can relate to. I think I’ve found it: Mr. Hooper . You know – the shopkeeper of Hooper’s Store on Sesame Street, played...(read more)

Why arguing about open source is an academic effort

2008-07-24T11:04:04Z

By Chris Bucholtz Almost a decade ago, as I recall, the esteemable Vance McCarthy, a past editor of mine at another publication, called me into his office and ordered up a speech-club-style debate over open source software. Because he still had lots of questions (if not doubts) about how open source would shake out both technically and economically, took the con side, and I took the pro side. Vance was smart enough to realize that he didn’t yet know everything (which is an admirable trait – a lot...(read more)

CRM failure, by the numbers

2008-07-22T13:10:02Z

By Chris Bucholtz I really like numbers – especially when they quantify concepts around CRM that otherwise might seem unsubstantiated. For example, most of us know that the cause of the perception of CRM failure is most often a failure to set realistic goals at the beginning of a project. “Perception,” I think, is an important word; most times, the technology works well, but it doesn’t do what the people using it wanted it to do because there was no coherent vision of what that was at...(read more)

The experts have spoken - and continue to speak

2008-07-21T16:10:02Z

By Chris Bucholtz A lot of you (and I mean A LOT) have already become part of the Inside CRM Expert Group on LinkedIn, and you probably received an email that asked this question: Google has been actively partnering with Salesforce.com recently. Knowing that no one interfaces with more customers online than Google, what do you think is their long-term strategy in the CRM market Actually, if you want to see it in its original form on our “Ask the Experts” forum – or if you want to give your own answer...(read more)

Election 2008: CRM-ocracy

2008-07-18T10:04:03Z

Brent Leary has done stuff with us in the past – most notably this webinar – and he’ll be doing stuff with us in the future (stay tuned for details, listeners!). But his advocacy and examination of CRM and social media – and how one is becoming indispensable to the other – is non-stop. One of the most prominent examples of what Brent’s talking about is the campaign of Barack Obama, which has tackled the political process as a CRM issue: how do you know your constituents, respond to their input, and...(read more)

Which would you prefer: an interface, or an experience?

2008-07-16T12:56:01Z

By Chris Bucholtz Not to sound superficial, but there’s a lot to be said for how something looks. Like airplanes – one of the rules of thumb for designers is, if it looks right, it is right. I think the same holds true for CRM solutions, to a degree. The look of the interface ought to reflect the needs of the company – and it should be a pleasant thing to interact with, too. Those two important things need to be achieved easily, especially when the target audience is the SMB market. Entellium on...(read more)

Revolutionary concept: sales and marketing working together

2008-07-14T13:48:03Z

By Chris Bucholtz Two fairly unimportant facts about Marketo’s CEO, Phil Fernandez: one, in phone interviews, he sounds ever-so-vaguely like actor John C. Reilly, and two, he is fairly unafraid of using his sense of humor to get across his ideas, something that more chief executives ought to learn to do. The latest example of this came last week, as Fernandez hollered, “viva la revolution!” during a call about Marketo’s new Lead Insight for Sales product, which is being touted as a contributor to...(read more)

Can Microsoft make a CRM attitude adjustment?

2008-07-09T13:39:03Z

By Chris Bucholtz Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online has been given generally positive reviews, and you’d think that, with the mighty wind of the Microsoft empire behind it, it would be sailing full speed ahead. That “mighty wind” terminology is not a reference to Steve Ballmer, by the way. However, Microsoft’s CRM efforts are being embraced more slowly than one might expect, and the company took steps today to reach out to more customers. At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston (oooooh! Houston...(read more)

The Marketing Market

2008-07-08T16:55:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz I had a nice conversation today with Landon Ray, CEO of OfficeAutopilot . This is a company trying to elbow into a leading spot in the increasingly crowded marketing automation space, but they’re targeting small businesses (up to 200 employees), and they have some really cool ideas about providing some services to go with their technology. There’ll be more about them in the near future when one of their new initiatives reaches full availability. Anyway, Landon asked my opinion of...(read more)

Customers vs. Customer Service

2008-07-07T16:36:01Z

By Chris Bucholtz We have all had experiences with customer service people that were bad. A lot of times, it’s because management has given them poor processes, denied them the power to fix things when they went wrong, or hired people who were incapable of actually working with customers. However, sometimes the customer service representative – in a call center, in a retail store, wherever – may just be a victim of his customers. I think back to my college jobs working with the public, and the customers...(read more)