One of my formative experiences was visiting Nissan’s assembly operation in Sunderland back in the 90’s. The car plant was the most productive in Europe at the time and the thing that really struck me was how the company had applied the principal of Kaizen – never ending improvement – Continue Reading

How can your B2B CRM system do more for you in 2013? Here’s the fourth (and final!) installment of ideas: 76. Consider the customer journey – analysing how a customer interacts with the range of touch-points in your organization, and looking at how that that experience can be improved, may Continue Reading

In summary: Infusionsoft secures $54 million and makes an acquisition, Microsoft’s bad year continues, more SAP HANA announcements, and Rimini Street sets a record… Infusionsoft caught the eye in January. The Gilbert, Arizona based developer of an all-in-one CRM, email marketing, e-commerce, marketing automation application for small businesses, secured $54 Continue Reading

How can your B2B CRM system do more for you in 2013? Here’s the third installment of ideas (the previous two can be found here and here): 51. Customer portals – the CRM system doesn’t have to be just for your own staff. Providing access through a portal to customers Continue Reading

Following on from the first installment earlier in the week, the next 25 ideas that may help you get more from your CRM system in 2013: 26. Go mobile – there’s an ever increasing range of client options for smart phones and tablet devices. These can give staff better access Continue Reading

How can your B2B CRM system do more for you in 2013? Here (in four parts) are ninety-nine things that you might not be doing now that might make a difference: Integrate with your finance system – providing easy access to customer financial data, such as invoice history, can help your Continue Reading

In summary: Oracle’s purchase of Eloqua throws the cat amongst the pigeons, Salesforce.com helps elect the president, and will gamification take root in CRM? That marketing automation firm Eloqua should be acquired was no great surprise. What was a shock was that Oracle was the purchaser and not Salesforce.com. Ever Continue Reading

2012 in summary: social acquisition frenzy, Salesforce.com v Oracle, Microsoft’s missing year, and SaaS’s final victory… Acquisitions were a big feature of 2012, as the larger CRM software vendors looked to build out their functionality, particularly in respect of social capabilities, and the enterprise players looked to fluff up their Continue Reading

The main point from my last post was that most CRM software is implemented by CRM implementation partners, rather than the company that develops the software, and while good CRM implementation partners are pretty much essential for success, particularly if there’s any complexity in what you’re doing, they’re surprisingly hard Continue Reading

There have been reams written over the years about the reasons for CRM project failures. But one aspect seems to get very little attention – poor implementation partner selection. A lot of effort gets focused on CRM technology selection, but for some reason the partner side of things is often Continue Reading