Expert Advice

The field of CRM bloggers is like the start of a marathon: There may be thousands of entrants, but there are only a few elite runners. Identifying them from the rest of the pack is not always easy -- especially as their enthusiasm for blogging waxes and wanes, or as they move into other formats, lik...

Ever built a house of cards? It's critical to start with a sound foundation to support your later efforts. No matter how sturdy your start is, however, a wrong move anywhere along the way can bring down the house and cause all your work to be for naught. Delivering good customer experiences is lik...

CRM has been around for a long time now -- more than 25 years. Amazingly, many businesses, including large businesses with revenue in excess of US$100 million, still operate without it. That's amazing, because to many business leaders, CRM has become table stakes when it comes to creating a software...

Mobile advertising is booming. Revenues increased by 92 percent to $19.3 billion in 2013 over 2012, based on global figures IAB, IAB Europe and IHS Technology released this summer. More and more marketers are eager to engage with consumers on the devices they use for just about everything these days...

There are lots of scary things out there -- killer viruses, Earth-smashing meteors, the possibility of yet another Real Housewives show. But those are easy to dismiss and push to the farthest corner of the back of your mind. What's really distressing? Numbers. Numbers are really scary -- specificall...

It's no secret that online shopping is becoming an increasingly lucrative avenue for retailers. More shoppers are turning to websites as a way to connect with brands and make purchases, and companies are investing heavily in their online presence to ensure that they are delivering a top-notch experi...

Don't get me wrong -- I think very highly of CRM. I've been making a living writing about it for almost a decade, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who asks about it. Still, covering CRM is a little bit like writing an honest biography of a complex person. Yes, there were moments when your...

There aren't many areas in business where processes used to save money and maximize deal sizes also result in a better customer experience. The exact opposite is usually the case -- the drive to save money by making an internal process more productive or to increase the amount being sold to the cust...

Perhaps the most important thing you can do before buying business software is to understand what you really want. Software is different from buying a car -- a physical thing you can inspect and whose operation you understand. It's different from buying a commodity, whose characteristics are already...

While app developers generally aim to make money off their creations, this goal is often relegated to second-tier status by programmers who but the product first and foremost, as they should. Therefore, in order to minimize the time needed to devote to a monetization strategy, developers generally c...