Cloud 9 User Meeting

Forecasting and pipeline management don’t get nearly the attention they deserve and that doesn’t make sense.  Of all the parts of CRM, the forecast is one of the few things many companies still leave to manual systems, i.e. spreadsheets.  Even sales compensation has a higher place in heaven as companies like Xactly have blazed a [...]

Modeling in the Business Process

Modeling is a big idea and one that I started noodling on many years ago.  In the last couple of weeks I’ve looked at the cloud computing model, or what it ought to be.  Today I am looking at a broader paradigm.  One of the great things about new paradigms is that there is no [...]

Thought Leader — Phil Fernandez, CEO, Marketo

Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, is our latest thought leader interview subject on the Beagle website (http://beagleresearch.com).  Phil’s career started in the analytics boom of the 1980s and he’s been successfully bringing analytics closer to the customer with every iteration of a career that includes companies like e.piphany and several others.  Lately analytics has taken [...]

Transportation is your new challenge

The cost of business travel is going up and up and up and, oh yeah, Happy New Year. Forget all the CRM prognostications you’ve been reading over the holidays, the only one of significance to your business and to CRM is what you’ll be paying to get in front of customers.  Last week a former [...]

Next year is a strategic opportunity

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception.  On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well.  After bottoming in the middle of the summer the software companies especially seem to be rebounding.  Microsoft, [...]

Social, Analytics and Mobility Will Drive CRM Rewrite

“Call rewrite!”  That’s what they said in the olden days on movie sets when the script needed doctoring.  It’s also what the technology industry metaphorically does about every ten years.  We rewrite much of what we’ve been relying on for information processing because the accumulation of new technologies over the previous decade has made our [...]

The Economics of Cloud 2: Will It Drive Prosperity in 2011?

There are three relatively new technologies converging to make Cloud 2.  All three technologies have been available for many years, though in less robust forms and with less powerful integration.  The convergence is driven by their ubiquity, low cost and ease of use.  They are social media, mobility and analytics.  Together these technologies offer a [...]

Analytics Is the Social CRM Secret Sauce

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put new spin on Social CRM.  While we’ve all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable. Last week Harvard Business Review released [...]

Cloud9 and Jim Dickey entertain sales enthusiasts in Boston

I was a guest in the audience yesterday when Cloud9 Analytics came to Boston to meet with customers and talk about the releases that will be part of their offerings later this year.  The presentation lasted a bit over an hour and included presentation of new sales management data by Jim Dickey of CSO Insights [...]

SAS announces Social Media Analytics

SAS introduced its Social Media analytics product today and, given that SAS is SAS, it will serve to give some new legitimacy to the field.  Social Media analytics has been around for a long time, probably as long as the Web minus a day or two.  But that doesn’t mean that SAS can’t add to [...]