The second-annual Aberdeen Group CMO Summit is next week (Sept 9 & 10) in San Francisco. In preparation for my opening remarks, I thought that it would be interesting to review my notes from last year’s event – one year and (in marketing/dog years) a lifetime ago.  Below are some of my observations and key [...]

I participated in a good LinkedIn Q&A last week with 1to1’s Elizabeth Glagowski that resulted in this article on keeping sales people engaged during hard times.  Her original question was: How do you keep salespeople motivated in this economy, when clients are increasingly saying no?

Pete, author of Share Tactics, sent me an article from the NYT suggesting that “The Magic is in the Tweaking” when it comes to developing new products and services. The premise of the article is that “companies reach success by discovering different uses for their original technology, changing their sales philosophy or repositioning a [...]

Although we’ve discussed it here before, Pete over at Share Tactics has stumbled on one of the littler known aspects of customer satisfaction; that is, employee satisfaction. As the as the eyes, ears and (for better or worse) the voice of your organization, your employees are one of the single biggest factors contributing [...]

It might be easy for some people to dismiss social networking, blogging and other web 2.0 technologies as slightly tired buzzwords. It may also be tempting to think of this “2.0″ stuff as innately technological in nature. That is certainly one way to look at it, particularly if you view the customer landscape through the [...]

With more and more discussion about customer co-creation, product development 2.0 and the inclusion of collaborative technologies into the CRM stack (CRM 2.0), it is important to understand how the adoption of these methods impacts the established business processes and the overall culture of the organization. Customer information flows through an organization on [...]

Skype thinks I speak Spanish (below). A mistake perhaps, but it does raise an interesting discussion point about the future of the marketing profession in an increasingly global market. In their 2007 predictions, IDC suggests that we will see a rise in local/regional software vendors onto the global scene (p.8). Although I [...]

There’s something definitely happening here… Tuesday’s WSJ cites an IDC report suggesting that world-wide shipments of dumb terminals will increase by 21.5% through 2010 (to six million units). As more and more software goes web-based and software-as-a-service, there is less and less need to keep data on the desktop. The benefits are [...]

A funny thing happened to me last week…. my health insurance company called me on my cell phone to conduct a customer satisfaction survey with my two month old daughter. Now, first of all, they KNOW that my daughter is only 9 weeks old! After several calls to get the faulty billing and account [...]

I was recently asked about how you would go about developing a process for determining and commercializing parallel uses of technology. That is, as a technology vendor you know that there are other uses for your products and technologies, but how do you commercially explore and exploit these alternative uses in a systematic way? [...]