With Microsoft recently announcing that social listening will be a key component of its spring 2014 release, following last year’s acquisition of Netbreeze, and Salesforce.com’s Radian6 already a well-established part of their marketing cloud, social listening capabilities are set to become an increasingly important part of the CRM portfolio. But Continue Reading

So you’ve invested in new CRM software and successfully overcome the challenge of user adoption. What now? Here are sixteen things you want in place if you are to maintain and grow the value of your investment: Administration – someone needs to manage the day to day running of the Continue Reading

One feature of CRM technology that I don’t think users make enough of is the ability to create, store, and manage mail-merge templates within the system.  These templates allow commonly used documents and emails to be quickly generated automatically, inserting relevant data held in the system, such as name and Continue Reading

A lot of businesses have some form of telephone-based sales and marketing function, and most will make use of CRM technology to support their activities. In this post I wanted to highlight a number of ways that companies can potentially use their CRM systems, beyond the basics of logging conversations Continue Reading

In case you missed them, here’s my 60 second bullet point round-up of the main CRM software stories last quarter: December Oracle announces it will buy Responsys for $1.5 billion to fill out Oracle Marketing Cloud January Microsoft acquires Parature for $100 million to extend its Dynamics CRM customer service Continue Reading

One of the big shifts we’ve seen in the CRM market in recent years is the progress that generic CRM software such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, or SugarCRM has made in markets that were once dominated by vertical specific CRM solutions. As I touched on in my last post, generic Continue Reading

In my last post I wrote about the dangers of recommendations when selecting CRM software, and I just wanted to add a few points that I didn’t cover last time out. Firstly, the post was very much in the context of the dangers of recommendations from other users of CRM, Continue Reading

While recommendations from people we know is probably the biggest influence on our purchase decisions for goods and services, I’ve never been too convinced as to how well this works when choosing CRM software. As a case in point, I had a conversation this week with a business owner who Continue Reading

Given how important influencers, (academics, industry analysts, journalists, bloggers, professional advisors etc.) have become, as their ability to make themselves heard has increased, and the ability of marketers to influence more directly has declined, I’m surprised how little use organisations make of their CRM platforms to support influencer marketing. For Continue Reading

Point 57 in the ’99 ways to get more out your CRM software’ was: 57. Develop a usage manual – does everyone understand how they should be using the system? Often different people will use it in different ways, and that impacts key outputs such as reports. Creating a usage manual will Continue Reading