Sustainability and CRM

Using emerging technologies to foster more sustainable front office business processes. Sustainability might be the next big thing in CRM.  I’m betting it is and Beagle Research is initiating an award for sustainability in CRM.  Today.  Now. Everywhere we look we see not just an industry but also a civilization straining under the demands of [...]

Sant and Kadient in merger

Sant Corporation of Cincinnati, OH and Kadient of Lowell, MA announced a merger today.  The two companies appear to have complementary offerings and I think the merger will be a good one for both parties and for the customer base. Over the last couple of years, Kadient has been on a difficult quest made harder [...]

Don’t forget B2B CRM

While we’re on the subject of the customer relationship it’s important, even vital, that we do a better job of teasing apart customer types.  It seems to me that the vast conversation about social CRM and the social customer has focused on the end consumer — the business-to-consumer (B2C) relationship — not the business-to-business (B2B) [...]

Intellectual property in the front office

One of the fun things about being an analyst in a market where there is as much innovation as you can find in CRM is that it’s all so unpredictable and surprising.  As I was researching social media in the context of Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud recently, it struck me that something very [...]

IP, an unintended consequence of Cloud Computing

I was talking to Jason Lemkin, CEO of EchoSign the other day when something he said gave me an idea.  EchoSign is a cool bit of SaaSware that manages the document signing process across the Web eliminating the need for sending copies of contracts overnight to complete deals. There is a niche for this because [...]

Necessity and change

There is opportunity in adversity, I have been told, and I happen to believe it.  Since adversity is unpleasant it is sometimes hard to look close enough to find the silver lining, but if we can get over the unpleasantness we might be able to prosper.  I have been reading and writing about the economic [...]