From CRM Buyer (With Alex Jefferies)
01/29/09 4:00 AM PT
Organizations considering contact management or customer relationship management solutions must evaluate the sales model of their organization and implement the solution that aligns best with their business needs. It all depends on who talks to whom, write Aberdeen’s Andrew Boyd and Alex Jefferies.
The budget cuts and spending [...]

Salesforce.com is running a contest to help name its new small business edition.  Perhaps they should just go ahead and call it the “Small And Growing Enterprise” Edition…

Siebel, Onyx, Knova, Epiphany, FrontRange, ACCPAC CRM, Pivotal are all CRM vendors that have changed hands over the past few years.  Although I have blogged about this topic before, CDC’s announcement that they had acquired Saratoga Systems last week is further evidence that this consolidation trend is continuing unabated. With only 350 customers in play, [...]

OK, now I’m impressed. Earlier this week, I reviewed 37 Signal’s new contact manager Highrise. I still think it is feature light compared to some other stuff out there, but just 36 hours after launch, 37 Signals has made (not announced… made) significant changes to the product and pricing based on early user [...]

After a long wait, 37 Signals (makers of the venerable project management/collaboration tool — Basecamp) recently launched a new contact manager called Highrise. Although, I think there is room for a lightweight software-as-a-service (SaaS) contact manager, I am not quite convinced on this one yet. Although it offers basic contact tracking, [...]

On Monday, Karl Long over at Experience Curve talked about “2.0 Ideas Executed with a 1.0 Mindset“. As an example, he cited the new Nike/Apple appliance that converts your iPod into an accelerometer. In a nutshell, he thought that the ‘black-boxing’ of the application was a lost opportunity for both companies. Rather than [...]

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 [...]

Although we were discussing the CRM 2.0 definition project, Pete over at Share Tactic raises some really good points about providing the appropriate level of customer interaction (PPM4):
I do like the notion of all my interactions with Company X being defined by me; does it follow then that Company X will need to query my [...]

In a recent post on his venerable Web 2.0 blog, Dion Hinchcliffe analyzes an emerging user-centric product development model (dubbed “Product Development 2.0″). Already adopted by an number of notable start-ups and a few forward-thinking traditional companies, Product Development 2.0 (PD2.0) is “a concept that embodies the use of Web 2.0 concepts such [...]